How Journalists approach stories and reinforce stereotypes

Having worked as a journalist for 33 years and having taught journalism and analysed the processes and performance of journalism for the last five, it is very revealing watching and analysing the development of major stories.  There have been two dominant ones in the news about Africa over the past couple of weeks - the Mali conflict and the Pistorius-Steenkamp murder hearings.  Each in their way tell us things about the way journalists work, in general, and in relation to Africa, in particular.

One of the basic ways of looking at how news is reported, about how journalists select and represent events, personalities, countries, regions and continents, is through the idea of 'framing'.  Few journalists think actively as they are doing it - they may think about the angle to pursue, which actors/participants to stress, how much prominence to give certain issues, but they rarely sit back and think about what the frame is and how they are representing people, countries or events within it.