From a Western Media Perspective: Structural Gaps

According to W. Lance  Bennett in News: The Politics of Illusion, the negative portrayal of Africa by the American and European media is a deliberate and systematic process that is created and sustained by the bias in the way they select foreign news stories.

Structural media biases:

1. The Personalization Bias 

The personalization bias is the media‘s focus on human-interest stories and the tendency to identify emotionally with these stories rather than present the larger social, economic, or political issues involved. This focus on emotion hinders analysis of the event and its implications in the political, economic and social arenas.  

2. The Dramatization Bias 

The dramatization bias is evidenced in what is called “crisis” news.  The media is predicated on a narrative storytelling format.  Narratives require drama or more accurately plot. The plot of many news stories is either personal identification or ―melodrama.  If it is possible to combine both, this is also done.  However, the media is self-defeating in employing this approach because by focusing primarily on crisis, it normalizes crises. The images of crisis become stand-ins for explanations of events and processes.  Thus, TV news, in particular, as well as still images ―construct a particular way of looking at the world.

3. The Fragmentation Bias 

The fragmentation bias is the isolation of stories from each other and from their larger context so that information in the news becomes fragmented and hard to assemble into a big picture. The fragmentation of information begins by emphasizing individual actors over the political contexts in which they operate and is a significant problem in the reporting of African news because it makes crises seem like events rather than processes. Furthermore, the actors involved are usually limited to a few government spokespersons.  Sweeping generalizations are often made in an attempt to explain an issue.  Catch words and phrases such as “corruption” are used as stand-ins for an analysis of the historical factors and persisting concerns.

4. The Authority-Disorder Bias

 The authority-disorder bias concerns the media‘s intense concern for order and their reliance on authority and official sources. The Western media is often held to be a watchdog.  Its critical tone often covers a lack of actual investigation and in foreign news studies have shown that the media primarily reports the official stance of the government. Second, the media focuses on issues of order and disorder to the extent that it seems that order is valued above other concerns such as fairness.  This is particularly prominent in foreign news where disagreement is seen as threatening and the primary goal is to maintain stability rather than resolve the issues. 

One of the primary reasons for the overgeneralized coverage of Africa that reveals how little the Western media understands Africa is the safari tradition of the media in Africa. This refers to the tendency of the media to plunge into African issues when they become a hot news item and then leave a few weeks (or days) later.  This is particularly a problem for the U.S. media.  The European news agencies tend to dedicate more journalists to representing Africa and stationing them there.  The U.S. journalists, however, feel that Africa may be a place to start a career or break a great story, but it isn‘t worthy of the dedication of a lifetime.  Therefore, these journalists who present news from Africa do not have the time (or often the inclination) to investigate the context for the events.  The result is reports focusing mainly on what is happening and not why. It is then easier to close the story by focusing on the emotional aspects.