The marginalised voice of the poor: Perspectives and framing of poverty by the Ethiopian print media

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to shed light on how Ethiopian print media organizations communicate poverty. Specifically, it aims to address the framing of poverty in the two English language newspapers (Ethiopian Herald and The Reporter) in Ethiopia. Using framing theory and quantitative content analysis, the researcher analysed articles focussing on poverty from September 1/2015 to August 30/2017. Several articles (95) about poverty were found to have been published in both the Ethiopian Herald and The Reporter newspapers from the sample 384 articles collected for the study. Government officials are the dominant sources (61.1%) used by these newspaper articles. No newspaper article used the poor, the opposition party leaders and the wider community as a source of information. The findings clearly reveal that reporting on poverty is dominated by power holders and the poor are marginalized. Economic perspectives of poverty are dominant, and the newspapers under study primarily used the economic frame (54.7%) over other types of frames. In other words, the newspapers could not communicate the complexity of poverty in the country from a variety of perspectives. In order to avert such “miscommunication about poverty”, the media organizations are recommended to communicate poverty by making the poor at the centre of their reporting and should approach poverty from its multi-dimensional faces, causes and consequences.

Keywords

• poverty
• framing of poverty
• communicating poverty
• marginalized voices
• perspectives of poverty
• ethiopian newspapers