Speaking of Africa: Sociology and the Study of Media in Majority World countries

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the coverage of the global south by journalism fields in the global north. Contemporary research has taken a step further by examining how non-Western journalism fields construct their own images. While these approaches are critical, a holistic framework that explores the realities of journalism fields in Majority World Countries remains inadequate. We illustrate the benefits of employing sociology of knowledge, field, and postcolonial theories to understand how journalists in the global south perceive newsroom roles, select news sources, and frame news content. Utilizing these three theoretical frameworks challenges the established Western norms branded as “global” and articulates sedimented knowledge by organizations working to construct knowledge of events. The proposed approach grapples with colonization by understanding the realities in which postcolonial journalism fields operate.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology
• journalism
• postcolonial theory
• field theory
• roles
• framing
• sources

Disclosure Statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Majority World Countries’ and “Minority World Countries” are used to represent regions using populations. The former are Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East while the latter is North America, Europe and Australasia (Cheruiyot and Ferrer-Conill 2020). The term has widely been used to disregard the usage of “negative connotations that reinforce the stereotypes” of postcolonial states (Alam 2008, 89). The reference to the population as categories allows us to disengage the often usage of derogatory terms such as “third world” or “developing countries” while also avoiding geographically bounded terms like global North and global South.

2 Our use the hyphenated “post-colony” here rather than “postcolony” is informed by Quayson’s (2000) elucidation on what the difference between the two is. The hyphenated version of the word denotes “the period after colonialism” while its unhyphenated version is less “chronologically inflected” and more about a mode of thought and analysis (Banda 2008, 81).

3 Wahutu (2022) has referred to these organizations as belonging to a “cosmopolitan subfield.”