Okoye, John-Bell S.2025-01-152025-01-152024-10Okoye, J. B. S. (2024). The Rhetoric of ‘Othering’? Constructing The Image of Africa in Covid-19 Discourses in The New York Times Newspaper. Daystar University, School of Communicationhttps://repository.daystar.ac.ke/handle/123456789/5879Doctor of Philosophy in Communication StudiesThe study investigated the image of Africa that emerged from The New York Times’ discursive constructions of the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent, from March 2020 to December 2022. Prior to the zenith of the health crisis Africa was already “condemned” by pockets of vocal voices from the West and some influential global media as a continent that would be worst hit by the virus if it made its way into the continent. Such rhetoric mirrored lack of faith in the ability of African governments to manage the pandemic or other health emergencies. I consider this rhetoric problematic because of its colonial undertone of a “dark continent” and as such has the potential of representing the continent in a negative light even before attempting to confront the pandemic. To realise the purpose of the study, the dissertation was guided by four research questions. The research questions were interested in finding out the COVID19 discourses that dominated the coverage, the most reported African nations in the pandemic news depiction, the sourcing practice utilised in the news framing, and the metaphoricity that informed the discursive constructions of the coronavirus crisis in Africa. Given the conceptualisation of the study and the phenomena investigated, the study used a critical discourse analytic approach situated within the constructivist research philosophy. The critical framing theory provided a suitable theoretical framework to guide the trajectory of the study. This theoretical framework adequately blended with the critical discoursal perspective of the research. In doing so, the design of the research accomplished a methodological, philosophical, and theoretical mesh. Supported by and consistent with literature on critical discourse studies, the study sampled and analysed 50 news articles using a stratified sampling technique. The sampling method was suitable because of its sensitivity in balancing the sampling process according to the key discourse moments in The New York Times’ COVID-19 corpus. The findings revealed that the images of Africa were constructed mainly via the epistemic lens of coloniality. The emphasis on the colonial conditions – with its othering dimensions – was evident in the 6 discourses of the COVID-19 crisis on the continent, the sourcing practice skewed in favour of elite voices and the fear mongering metaphors that underpinned the discursive framings. Based on these findings – as elaborately discussed in the dissertation (see chapter 5 for details) – Africa was projected and mirrored as a beacon of hope, a humanitarian concern, a ‘sick’ region, and a begging continent at the apogee of the COVID-19 crisis. My conclusion, therefore, is that Africa is still a marginalised and underreported region in The New York Times coverages and remains a contested discourse in global communication. And whenever the continent makes it into the news – particularly in the context of conflict/crisis reporting – the language of depiction, wittingly or not, tends to re-echo the mantra of a “dark continent” or a region waiting to be rescued by the ‘messianic’ West. To this end, I recommended as follows. First, The New York Times should rethink and improve its sourcing practice with a blend of different voices to adequately report the nuanced experiences of the public during health emergencies. Second, the language of news rhetoric should be sensitive to the issue, the people, and their culture to mitigate fear mongering and the tendency to othering the people or their region. Furthermore, in reporting Africa, The New York Times should diversify its reach by using a rotational approach of correspondents within the subregions of the continent. Meanwhile, to sell the African narratives to the world, African governments should adopt what I call a counteracting media ecology approach that somewhat mirrors the Al Jazeera approach.enCOVID-19 pandemicNew York Times’ discursive constructionsThesis