The Geopolitics of Representation in Foreign News: Explaining Darfur

This inductive study investigates the curricula of ten different news organizations from seven different countries that produced news in four languages on the Darfur uprising in Western Sudan: the New York Times, the Washington Post, France’s Le Monde, the UK’s Guardian, BBC.co.uk, Egypt’s Al-Ahram, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian Online, English.AlJazeera.Net, and China’s People’s Daily and China Daily.
Mody and her collaborators show how news organizations uniquely and strategically constructed a foreign event for a particular intended audience based on national historical solidarity with global North or South power blocs, current national interest in the country, ownership of the news organization, and the political-linguistic constituency of the intended audience. While previous research on the role of national interest and ownership are supported in this study, the influence of the intended audience (namely, foreign or domestic) on the design of news is a new contribution to the field. Conceptualizing foreign news as perhaps the only means of cross-national, continuing education, Mody uses comprehensiveness as an evaluative measure of news. The Geopolitics of Representation in Foreign News provides unique insights that will be of particular interest to those researchers working in the field of international journalism.