Somalia 2006 - Just another forgotten war on a forgotten continent? A comparative study on the coverage by newspapers in four western countries

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: B, Malmö University (School of Arts and Communication), course: Special course: Media War Resistance, language: English, abstract: At Christmas 2006 Ethiopia declared war to Somalian Islamists, in heavy combats thousands of people have been killed within few days. Newspaper readers in some western countries could have expected the war, others might have been surprised. This essay tries to sum up the results of an explorative study on the news coverage in the online editions of four newspapers in four countries. The study analyses the articles about Somalia in the online editions of The Times (London/United Kingdom), Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm/Sweden), Los Angeles Times (United States) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich/Germany) within the calendar year 2006. Even the first cursory analysis of the articles could show that readers in the four different countries were informed quite differently, every newspaper presented its own (hi)story of the war in Somalia. When the readers of the Los Angeles Times on December 21st have been confronted for the first time with a longer article about the situation in Somalia, Dagens Nyheter since January 2006 had already published 65 articles about Somalia. This essay sums up the most obvious differences in the coverage of the Somalia war, tries to find reasons for the unequal approaches and leads to the question, if it is necessary at all to cover the various 'wars of others'.