Afro-Pessimist or Africa Rising? US Newspaper Coverage of Africa, 1994–2018

ABSTRACT

Is media coverage of Africa systematically negative or increasingly positive? Several scholars have argued that too little empirical evidence exists to address the debate between “Afro-pessimist” and “Africa Rising” perspectives. We contribute to this discussion by analyzing 139,012 articles drawn from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today over the 25-year period between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 2018. We find modest support for the Afro-pessimist viewpoint: Articles mentioning Africa are negative on average, are even more negative during peak periods of coverage, and have not become more positive over time. In addition, we examine the thematic coverage most strongly associated with negativity and positivity. Stories that reference conflict, government, and specific African countries account for a significant portion of the negativity in our corpus. Conversely, stories related to culture and education constitute a subset of positive articles. Overall, our analysis not only sheds light on an ongoing debate about the tone of coverage of Africa, it also provides a better understanding of prevalent negative and positive thematic coverage in four major US newspapers.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• big data analysis
• computer-assisted coding
• media
• newspapers
• United States

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Serwornoo (2019) finds this is true not only of Western reporting, but also of coverage in Ghanaian newspapers.

2 Following 2010, US foreign aid was flat through 2012 and then declined modestly through 2018. US foreign investment in Africa increased between 2010 and 2014 and then declined through 2018. Data on aid from USAID (https://explorer.usaid.gov/aid-trends.html, accessed 25 March 2020). Data on foreign investment from Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/188594/united-states-direct-investments-in-africa-since-2000/, accessed March 25, 2020).

3 Trade slowly declined after 2008 before flattening out at approximately 2003–04 levels from 2015 through 2019. Data on trade from US Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0013.html, accessed April 3, 2020).

4 We download New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post articles from the LexisNexis database. Wall Street Journal articles are not available on LexisNexis; we therefore use the ProQuest database to assemble these articles. Our search terms were “Africa,” “African,” or “Africans;” we excluded articles that only contained references to African Americans, the US-based African Methodist Episcopal Church, or any individual African country without mentioning Africa or Africans as a whole.

5 See the appendix for more detailed information.

6 We do not attempt to analyze themes like “Otherness,” which cannot be captured through discrete sets of identifiable terms.

7 We recognize that some of these categories overlap. For example, tribal and ethnic conflict, war, genocide, or terrorism may be viewed as political problems, and coups involve conflict. We categorize these as we do because the former always involve conflict but are not always aimed at the government, whereas coups at their core are political problems for the government in power.

8 We use the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm as implemented in the scikit-learn package in python, and iterate between 20 and 40 topics to pinpoint the number of topics with maximum coherence. A full list of topics is available in the appendix.

9 Not all individual countries appeared in our topic modeling analysis. See the appendix for full results.

10 Data on foreign investment from Statista (https://www.statista.com/statistics/188594/united-states-direct-investments-in-africa-since-2000/, accessed March 25, 2020). Data on aid from USAID (https://explorer.usaid.gov/aid-trends.html, accessed March 25, 2020). Data on trade from US Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0013.html, accessed April 3, 2020).

11 As articles can contain words associated with more than one theme, the sum of the percentages exceeds 100%.