Marginalized, negative or trivial? Coverage of Africa in the UK press

Abstract

Despite a general decline in circulation, newspapers are considered by many to have an important role to play in informing and or influencing citizens. Whether newspaper influence is discussed in relation to voting behaviour (Norris, 1999), reinforcing existing political preferences (Newton and Brynin, 2003) or in setting the political agenda, the content of UK newspapers is seen to matter. Why is it then, that the role of newspapers in influencing citizens' perceptions of the wider world has remained so under-researched? The last academic research into general coverage of Africa in the UK press was conducted in 1990 (see Brookes, 1995). This article seeks to fill this research gap and to draw attention to the important but largely unacknowledged role that the UK press plays in informing citizens about Africa.What makes this research gap even more conspicuous is that recent evidence appears to substantiate the crucial role that the press plays in informing citizens about Africa and the developing world in general. In a recent public attitudes survey, Lader (2007: 3) reported that 47 percent of UK citizens use newspapers as a source of information about the lives of poor people in Africa. In their analysis of US media coverage and charitable giving after the 2004 tsunami, Brown and Minty found that 'an additional 700-word story in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal raises donations by 18.2% of the daily average' (2006: 1). Similarly, Olsen et al. (2003) 'find a high correlation between the total number of relevant articles in western newspapers and the total amount of humanitarian assistance allocated to victims of the flooding in Mozambique in 2000 and the cyclone in eastern India in 1999' (cited in Brown and Minty, 2006: 2). The results from Darnton's recent Public Perceptions of Poverty (PPP) study showed that while tabloid readers were

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