Framing Approaches of Ethiopian Herald and the Reporter Newspapers: Ethiopian Foreign Relations News in Focus
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Date
2020-06
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AAU
Abstract
Millions of activities are engaged in day to day activities of sates foreign relations among other
states and other organs including influential individuals. Those activities might be vast and
significant since they have to cover the social, economic and political activities and interests of
countries. Due to their most significances and national interests of countries; the foreign relations
issue has been one of the most focused agendas of all media kinds including newspapers;
because the media and politics are two sides of the same coin. The purpose of this study was to
assess the framing approaches of local news papers from the government and private ownership
sides in Ethiopia; i.e. the Ethiopian Herald from the government ownership and the Reporter
English version from the private side from Aril 2, 2018 to July 7, 2018. The scope of the time
was fixed depending on the wide activities of Ethiopian foreign relations businesses regarding
the coming of the new Prime Minister (Dr. Abiy Ahmed) to power. During the scope of the
study, the new prime minister visited neighboring countries of Ethiopia, the Arab countries,
Europe, Asia and the far east states and these got wider media coverage by the focused local
newspapers and other media outlets. In this thesis, a comparison of Ethiopian public and private
newspapers framing has been focused to examine concerning their news coverage of Ethiopian
foreign relations by using media framing and agenda setting media theories. The qualitative
research method was mostly used with a little of quantitative method in collecting data for this
study, depending on the nature of the topic of the study. The Ethiopian Herald and Reporter
(English version) were purposefully selected for the study and content analysis was the major
research method used in the study and hence 120 articles were analyzed. In collecting data both
qualitative and quantitative methods were used. In addition to this, so as to make the data deeprooted
and tangible, in-depth interviews were conducted with the editors and journalists of the
newspapers and other two concerned individuals. The result of the study shows that from the
analyzed articles the most dominant frames utilized by these focused newspapers were
economic, contingency and prognostic respectively. Both papers used the economic frame at the
highest level, but in comparisons, the Reporter used this type of news frame slightly more than
the Herald. While the Reporter gave attention for Ethiopian foreign relations hard news and
analysis, the Herald had focused in covering the issues only with hard news.
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Keywords
foreign relations issue has been one of the most focused agendas of all media kinds including newspapers