Ideological Positioning of Africa in Print Media: An Exploration of the Daily Graphic’s Inside Africa Stories
- May 16, 2022
- Posted by: rsispostadmin
- Categories: IJRISS, Social Science
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue IV, April 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186
1Lawrence Ewusi-Mensah and 2Stephen Bani-Kwakye
1Holy Child College of Education and 2Accra Technical University
Abstract: Research into ideological positioning and media discourse has gained momentum over the past decade in the humanities and the social sciences. Print media, one of the leading voices of the mainstream media, has been a tool for determining the political and social ideologies of institutions and societies. This paper adopts van Langenhove & Harre’s (1999) Positioning model as a framework to explore how ideology is constructed through discourse and how such discourse influences text and talk. The ideological construction of the African experience in the print media occupied the centre stage of this analysis. The study used a descriptive research approach for a qualitative analysis of the data. Twenty-four stories from the December 2020 Edition of the Daily Graphic’s Inside Africa column were purposively selected as data for the study. The study revealed that foreign media organisations such as the BBC, AFP, Aljazeera and France24 ideologically position Africa in prominently stereotyped and negative perspective, and this creates a very gloomy and murky identity for her. The negative identity created impacts on the cultural, political and socio-economic life of the people of Africa. The study concludes that foreign media organisations are stereotypical in their coverage of the African experience, hence a call for circumspection in their reportage on Africa. The study has implications for further studies on ideological positioning and identity construction of the African experience in the media on one hand, and the strive for positive representation of Africa in the western media on the other.
Keywords; Ideological positioning, Print media, Daily Graphic, Inside Africa, identity construction.
I. INTRODUCTION
Language is not simply the ability to use words; it refers to the complex array of interlocking, which forms the basis of communication and social interaction (Thompson, 2003). This statement is supported by Montgomery’s (1995) assertion that language informs the way we think, the way we experience, and the way we interact with each other. This means that language is the vehicle by which discourse is initiated and ideology instantiated. It is, thus, a vital instrument that aids the communicative ability of the members of any given society or geographical territory (Odebode & Dabi, 2015, p.17). Humans worldwide use both verbal and non-verbal means to accomplish everyday social life, including the enactment of identity and ideology. Wodak (1999) points out that language is not an isolated phenomenon; it is deeply social, interwoven with social structures and interactions.
