The Western media representation of Chinese private security companies in Africa

The research paper aims to unpack the process of news production, particularly the Western representation of Chinese private security companies in Africa, with a focus on U.S. based news media outlets namely The Voice of America and The Wall Street Journal. The approach for analysis will take account of the Critical Discourse Analysis method along with deploying tools of media analysis such as Focalisation and Framing to assemble a textual and visual analysis of the contents of the two respective news articles. Through the analysis, the research intends to reflect on how news is articulated and what is the larger intention behind the presentation. As part of the analysis, the paper utilizes Hall's Theory of Representation to illustrate the agenda-setting phenomenon used by the news media to develop stories. With several studies conducted to understand the cause of rising tensions between the West and China, this paper intends to inspect the aspect of how the news media contributes to serving the pleasure of intensifying the geopolitical relationship with the transnational actors involved.