Framed to be forgotten; UK Media framing of Africa's forgotten crises

This is a partial dataset from our broader research that aimed to identify some of the dominant frames in UK newspaper coverage of Africa’s forgotten crises in DRC and CAR and further examine the role this framing plays in perpetuating their status as forgotten crises. Research Question (RQ) 1: What are the dominant frames in UK newspaper coverage of the humanitarian crises in DRC and CAR? RQ 2: How does this framing perpetuate CAR and DRC’s status as forgotten crises? Data Collection and Analysis Overview This study employed a mixed-methods content analysis to examine how UK national newspapers frame Africa’s forgotten humanitarian crises—specifically those in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic (CAR)—between 2016 and 2020. Using LexisNexis, we sourced 120 news articles from The Guardian, The Independent, Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, focusing on keywords such as “Congo humanitarian crisis,” “DRC refugees,” and “CAR crisis.” These four newspapers were selected to represent a spectrum of political orientations and influence within the UK media landscape. Data and Coding The unit of analysis was the full newspaper article. We developed a detailed codebook incorporating 34 variables across three categories: unit identification, salience markers, and frame identifiers. A mixed deductive-inductive coding approach was adopted—drawing from existing literature to identify priori frames (e.g., blame, advocacy, human interest) and allowing for emergent frames (e.g., afro-pessimism, western-centrism). Intercoder reliability was tested on 25% of the sample, with Krippendorff’s alpha reaching 0.89 after codebook revisions, ensuring consistency and validity in coding. Key Findings Quantitative analysis revealed five dominant frames across the dataset: episodic (80%), violence (78.3%), western-centric (51.7%), blame (47%), and afro-pessimism (47%). These were more prevalent in right-leaning papers. Notably, there was a weak but significant correlation between the use of western-centric and afro-pessimistic frames. A qualitative analysis of selected articles further showed how framing choices—such as metaphor, omission of historical context, and prioritisation of Western actors—reinforce hierarchies of life and place, casting distant sufferers as passive, violent, or alien. Interpretation and Relevance The data suggests that Western media framing plays a critical role in the invisibilisation of certain humanitarian crises like DRC and CAR. By favouring episodic, violent, or decontextualised narratives, and foregrounding Western perspectives, these publications contribute to a hierarchy of suffering that limits public empathy and solidarity. This framing not only affects media representation but may also influence humanitarian prioritisation and global solidarity.