"Much has been written about the media coverage of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. However, with few exceptions, much of this work has often focused on how the journalism fields from the global North framed the genocide, with little work on how African fields covered it. This article eschews th ... e global North and investigates how African fields covered the genocide as it unfolded. We analyze 96 news articles from Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria, along with 21 transcripts of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) coverage during the first month of the genocide. We find similar narratives about the violence between RTLM broadcasts and the 3 fields we focus on. For example, we find that in the period of intense violence, African journalists primarily framed Rwanda as a civil war and ethnic conflict and rarely used the genocide frame. This is counterintuitive when considering how many fields from the global North have been critiqued for not calling Rwanda a genocide early on. Our findings and conclusions hold implications for comparative media analysis and the normalization of hateful rhetoric." (Abstract) more

"This ethnic conflict frame performs three functions when used by African journalists. The first is that it works to domesticate the conflict [in Darfur] by relying on already sedimented knowledge among African audiences about identity formation … The second function of this frame is based on know ... ing that the national media subfields in the three countries [i.e., Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa] have a nuanced understanding of ethnic identities. When asked about the role of ethnicity in Darfur, a Nigerian journalist responded, "It's a factor, religion is a factor as well. Religion shapes ethnicity" (interview with a journalist, Nigeria 2015).This approach alerts us that, as far as African journalists are concerned, ethnicity does not always have a path-deterministic relationship with violence, as some journalists in the Global North have sometimes suggested (Wahutu 2017b, 16-17). The third point is that this ethnic conflict frame works to create a sense of shared affinity between the victims and the audience in Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda while othering those framed as Arab/Muslim as being radically different. This explanation is one that was more present during my interviews with journalists. In both Kenya and South Africa, journalists often viewed as Sudan as not "real Africa." (Page 246) more