African newspapers reportage of sanctions: analysis of framing and agenda setting

International organizations and numerous countries worldwide have implemented punitive measures, often in the form of sanctions, to express disapproval of certain events within a country or to compel change. A significant body of scholarly work has focused on these sanctions, particularly when imposed on countries outside of Africa, and how the media frames these actions. In various crisis situations, news framing and agenda-setting by the media have shown enormous effect on consumers’ view of the crisis. This study investigates how media in Africa frames sanctions imposed on African countries, specifically examining printed media in Zimbabwe, Mali, and Niger Republic regarding political and economic sanctions imposed on these countries. Employing the framing and agenda setting theories, the study analysed 204 sanction-related headlines (Zimbabwe - 104, Mali - 70 and Niger - 30) from five media outlets with online presence in each country. A multi-stage sampling technique was employed. In the initial stage, purposive sampling technique was utilized to choose print newspapers with online presence. In the second stage, the researcher utilized the search functionality on the newspapers' websites to identify headlines using the keywords “sanction” and “sanctions”. Quantitative content analysis was employed to analyse the data. Findings showed that a generic framing approach is widely used in the three countries. Further analysis reveals that the responsibility and conflict frames consistently dominate in all three countries. The study also finds a positive agenda-setting tone to be dominant in Zimbabwe. Conversely, both Mali and Niger Republic exhibit a dominant negative agenda-setting tone.