Conflict Reporting in Ethiopian Print Media: The Case of Burayu’s Crisis as Reported By Addis Zemen and Reporter Newspapers
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Date
2021-04
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AAU
Abstract
Media have a vested interest in conflict aiming at resolution or only in conflict. The practice of
conflict reporting is a bi-facet challenging task to the media practitioners due to the quest of
access to information and impact of a story. The general objective of the study is to examine
conflict reporting in Ethiopian print media in focus of coverage of the Burayu crisis in
September 2018, in Addis Zemen and Reporter newspapers. To achieve this objective, the
researcher tried to address three basic research questions: To what extent the Burayu crisis was
reported? How the newspapers framed the Burayu crisis? And how newspapers treat the crisis
towards escalating or de-escalating? To address these questions the researcher used political
context model and framing theory as a theoretical framework of the study. The study designed a
case study research and followed qualitative research method. The news stories and the
editorials were subject to the content analysis that is done with the adopted checklist. In this
procedure, the researcher found out that the newspapers gave coverage during and after the
outbreak of the conflict; the coverage lacks source pluralism in the selection of source of
information and the ideas incorporated across the stories. They apparently tried to de-escalate
the crisis through the strategy that the government puts a direction on how newspapers behave
to handle the issue. In general, the newspapers tried to play their roles as mouthpiece of the
government by ignoring their objectivity. Based on these findings, the researcher concluded that
the Ethiopian media, both the private and state owned, are not in a position to reveal the truth
about conflict and they are serving as an additional wing of the government to restore peace to
the spot. Thus, it is recommended that both of the media practitioners should not limit themselves
in the spheres of the government structure to access information and they have to think out of the
box whereas, the government should try to make them free to investigate the case from the scene
that potentially help the government to make the right decision
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Keywords
Conflict Reporting, Burayu, Ethiopian print media