Mediated culture and the well-informed global citizen : images of Africa in the global north
Original version
Orgeret, K.S. (2010). Mediated culture and the well-informed global citizen : images of Africa in the global north. Nordicom Review, 31 (2), 47-61 http://www.nordicom.gu.se/common/publ_pdf/325_orgeret.pdfAbstract
During recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the negative portrayal of the
African continent in the media of the so-called ‘global North’. Significantly less focus has
been put on how to actually represent Africa in the news as more than the site of catastrophes
or in other ways than through sunshine stories of the ‘struggling but smiling African’.
The present article argues that the lack of a wide range of different genres in the North’s
mediated representations of Africa is problematic, because the ‘hard news’ we receive is
deficient in information about the background and context of news event. The article looks
into different cultural expressions such as film, television entertainment and literature to
explore how they can play a role in illustrating the concept of ‘Africa’ as both diverse and
multifaceted. It argues that opening the northern mediascape to more content from the south
would serve as an important backdrop and help in understanding a variety of messages
from the African continent.