Ethnographic support to the analysis of (inter)national news discourse on Kenya’s crisis

Abstract

This paper studies from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective the construction of possibly ideological meanings and journalistic choice-making in the contexts of local and foreign news reporting. In particular, it examines the discourse of hard news reports about Kenya’s post-election crisis in the national newspapers Daily Nation and The Standard as compared to thematically-related reports from The Independent and The Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. By means of a combined methodology, comprising a quantitative content analysis, a qualitative discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, two frames of meaning are identified: a tribal and a socio-political frame. American and British newspapers primarily ethnicized the events, while they tended to be politicized in the Kenyan press. The differences in language use can be partly explained by contextual (political, social and pragmatic) factors. Thus the interpretive discourse-analytical results can be supported, refined or nuanced by information from ethnographic fieldwork, which also allows to take journalistic voices into account.

status: published