The study rests on a conceptual framework borrowed from social theory. Oboh anchors his analysis in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, the notional space in which governments, media, and citizens exchange views on matters of common interest. Since Habermas’s work was translated into English in 1962, scholars have used the idea to explain how democratic societies negotiate collective concerns. Contemporary researchers of counterpublics have extended the model, arguing that the public sphere is better understood as a multiplicity of overlapping publics rather than a single unified arena. Social media, Oboh notes, has accelerated this transformation: citizen journalists now create virtual spaces where people process their thoughts and share ideas on any issue of public interest, much as Habermas envisioned for the print-era bourgeois public sphere.

Within that framework, the media occupy a pivotal position. They are, metaphorically, the nexus that connects countries and regions in a notional space, and for most people they are the primary source of political information, including information on the conduct of governments and citizens. Oboh argues that the thoughts and feelings people hold about Africa are partly built on what media report about the region, and that media can also serve as ideological weapons projecting the views of their proprietors. A government that performs well in office, he observes, gains little public credit if the media fail to report that commitment, which is why objective coverage matters both for accountability and for image formation.

To test these propositions empirically, the study adopted a survey method with a non-probabilistic, purposive sampling technique. The sample was drawn from staff and students of Benson Idahosa University and from media practitioners in Benin City, Nigeria. A total of 384 questionnaires were distributed and 368 were retrieved, an attrition rate of 4.3 percent. The instrument was a structured questionnaire with 29 items in four sections, covering respondent background, the effects of media coverage, the effects of government actions, and the effects of citizens’ conduct on the African image. Responses were recorded on a five-point Likert scale, with mean scores above 3 indicating general agreement and standard deviations capturing the dispersion of opinion. Three null hypotheses were then evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient.

The results on media coverage were the clearest. The statement that media coverage of the good things done by Africans creates a good image for Africa recorded the highest mean in its block, 4.26, signaling strong agreement, while the claim that media reports of government actions do not affect Africa’s image scored a low 2.18, indicating disagreement. The grand mean of 3.44 for the media block suggested that respondents broadly accepted that the media exert a reasonable influence on how Africa is viewed. Statistically, the Pearson correlation between media coverage of African affairs and the public view of the African image was r = 0.365, a positive moderate relationship, with a significance value of 0.000, well below the 0.05 threshold. The null hypothesis of no correlation was therefore rejected: the more the media cover African affairs, the more other regions are likely to know about the continent.

Government actions also proved consequential. The single strongest item in this block was the statement that corruption by some African leaders has an impact on the image of Africa, with a mean of 4.11. The grand mean of 3.21 indicated that respondents believed government conduct shapes public assessment of the region, although a fairly high standard deviation of 1.32 revealed considerable diversity of opinion. The Pearson correlation between government actions and the public view of the African image was r = 0.340, again a positive moderate relationship significant at 0.000, leading to rejection of the second null hypothesis. In plain terms, when governments act in ways aligned with public expectations, the image of the region improves; corruption and misgovernance do measurable reputational damage.

The evidence on citizens was weaker but still significant. The grand mean of 2.95 for the citizen block showed respondents were essentially neutral about how much individual conduct shapes the continental image, and a standard deviation of 1.28 confirmed a fair diversity of views. Yet the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.229, significant at p = 0.000, indicated a weak positive relationship between the actions of African citizens and the public view of the African image. The third null hypothesis was rejected as well. Oboh interprets this to mean that how African citizens relate to members of other regions, including what they share on social media, does feed into external perceptions, even if the effect is smaller than that of media and government.

Beyond the survey, the study situates Africa’s image problem in the structures of global politics and economics. Oboh argues that the region’s difficulties today stem less from colonialism than from misplaced priorities by past and present leaders who ignored citizens’ welfare. He highlights the debt burden as a central constraint: between 1970 and 2002, Africa received 540 billion dollars in loans, paid back 550 billion, and still owed 293 billion at the end of 2002. Some African nations remain aid-dependent, with foreign assistance exceeding 50 percent of government expenditure in certain cases, a dependency that erodes economic sovereignty. He also points to the absence of a permanent African seat on the United Nations Security Council, noting that UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for reform of the council’s outdated structure and criticized its lack of representation for Africa as undermining the body’s credibility and legitimacy.

The digital dimension runs throughout the analysis. Oboh argues that technological development is not value neutral, and that Western control of digital technology shapes how virtual spaces frame discussions of globalization and digital governance. He urges African governments to use both legacy and new media to project their positions, and to exploit social media networking sites to share the continent’s own narratives and correct impressions that have undermined its image. At the same time, he warns that citizen journalists sometimes circulate untrue stories about African governments, and that such stories carry negative consequences precisely because audiences abroad are more likely to believe accounts shared by African citizens about their own governments than accounts shared by outsiders.

The study’s conclusions come with candid limitations. Because the sample was purposive and drawn entirely from Nigerian academia and media, the findings reflect an African perspective on Africa’s image and cannot be generalized to non-African audiences; Oboh recommends that future research survey international respondents or compare African and non-African viewpoints directly. His recommendations are nonetheless pointed: media organizations should report factual accounts of government actions; governments should encourage inclusive, participatory democracy; citizens, at home and in the diaspora, should feel a sense of ownership in their governments’ success and report on them objectively; and the United Nations should consider making Africa a permanent member of the Security Council to enhance both the continent’s image and its contribution to global peace. The overarching message is that Africa’s reputation is a joint enterprise, and that governments, media, and citizens who work more closely together on socioeconomic development will, in the process, reshape how the committee of nations sees the region.

Subject of Research: Public perceptions of how African governments, media, and citizens influence Africa's global image

Article Title: Impact of the actions of governments, media, and citizens on public view of African image

Article References: Oboh, G. E. (2026). Impact of the actions of governments, media, and citizens on public view of African image. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00373-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00373-y

Keywords: Africa, public sphere, media coverage, governance, citizenship, survey research, Habermas, correlation analysis, African image, UN Security Council, foreign debt, social media

The study, published in the journal Journalism Practice, examined almost 2,000 news stories published between May and December 2023 by six Canadian and US news organizations: The Globe and Mail, Le Devoir, Le Journal de Montréal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The New York Post. The sample was deliberately broad, spanning English- and French-language coverage, prestige broadsheets and popular tabloids, and both straight news reporting and opinion writing. That breadth allowed the researchers to ask not only how often climate change came up, but which kinds of newsrooms, formats and contexts made those mentions more likely.

The headline finding is striking for anyone who has followed media scholarship on climate coverage. Nearly 40 per cent of all stories in the sample mentioned climate change, and more than 30 per cent explicitly connected the wildfires to it. Those figures stand far above the levels reported in earlier studies of disaster coverage, which the study’s corresponding author, Amélie Daoust-Boisvert, an associate professor in Concordia’s Department of Journalism, describes as typically ranging from only 2 to around 15 per cent. In other words, the 2023 fires produced some of the highest rates of climate attribution ever documented in mainstream press coverage of a natural disaster.

Daoust-Boisvert says the team was somewhat surprised by the sheer volume of climate mentions and connections they observed, given how low the levels found in previous studies tended to be. She was less surprised to find a gap between legacy broadsheets and tabloids, but noted that even the tabloids were not entirely silent on climate change. The co-author of the study is Brianna Losinger Ross, a PhD candidate in political science. Together, the two researchers combined automated text mining with human coding, a hybrid method that proved essential to the accuracy of their results.

That methodological choice matters. Keyword searches alone could flag climate-related terms in stories where no actual connection to the fires was being made. A phrase such as spreading like wildfire, for example, contains the word wildfire but says nothing about the climate. By manually reviewing the relevant stories, the researchers could distinguish genuine attribution from incidental vocabulary, avoiding the false positives that can inflate counts in purely computational analyses. This distinction between mentioning climate terms and making an explicit causal link is at the heart of the study’s contribution.

The analysis also revealed which factors most strongly shaped whether a story connected the fires to climate change. The likelihood of attribution varied most according to the newsroom producing the story and whether the piece was news or opinion. Language, country and whether a publication was a tabloid or a broadsheet had smaller effects. Opinion writing was by far the most climate-conscious category: almost 78 per cent of opinion pieces mentioned climate change, and about 65 per cent of them explicitly tied the fires to it. News stories lagged behind, with about 34 per cent mentioning climate change and 26 per cent making the explicit connection, a pattern consistent with the traditional reluctance of reporters to editorialize about causes.

One event appears to have acted as a turning point within the coverage period. In August 2023, the international scientific collaboration World Weather Attribution published a report examining the root causes of extreme climate events, concluding that climate change more than doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire weather conditions seen in Quebec. According to the researchers, climate mentions and connections became more pronounced after the report’s publication. Their statistical analysis shows clear trends before and after that date, suggesting that journalists seized on the peer-reviewed attribution work as the authoritative source they needed before asserting that climate change was involved in the catastrophe.

Daoust-Boisvert points out that journalists always need a source before they can write that climate change is involved in or contributing to a natural disaster, and that the World Weather Attribution report provided exactly that. She also notes that the field of extreme weather attribution has expanded considerably over the past few years, which means reporters increasingly feel confident making the link between warming and specific disasters going forward. The researchers suggest that media practices are shifting in part because of journalists’ better understanding of the scientific consensus around climate change and its relationship to extreme weather events. In effect, rapid attribution science is giving newsrooms a defensible factual basis for statements that once would have been treated as too speculative for straight reporting.

The findings arrive with important caveats. Daoust-Boisvert emphasizes that climate remains a politicized and polarizing topic, and that straightforward reporting on it faces pressure from influential voices across the political spectrum. Newsrooms navigating that landscape must weigh scientific evidence against audience expectations, ownership priorities and the risk of accusations of advocacy. The differences the study found between newsrooms and between news and opinion formats reflect those tensions, even in a year when the physical evidence of a climate-fuelled disaster was impossible to ignore.

There is also a subtler risk on the horizon. As extreme weather events become the new normal, Daoust-Boisvert cautions, they could lose their newsworthiness, leading to a decrease in the urgency of addressing anthropogenic climate change. The 2023 wildfire season, fuelled by record-breaking drought and unusually high temperatures, was voted the Canadian Press news story of the year, and its unprecedented scale helped push climate framing into the mainstream. Whether that realignment persists, or fades as such disasters become routine, may determine how effectively the media informs the public about the defining environmental challenge of the era. For now, the study offers quantitative evidence that a historic disaster can move journalistic norms, and that attribution science is becoming the bridge between the newsroom and the climate research community.

Subject of Research: Media attribution of the 2023 Canadian wildfires to climate change

Article Title: Canada’s 2023 wildfires broke longstanding media caution around climate reporting

Article References: Canada’s 2023 wildfires broke longstanding media caution around climate reporting. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, wildfires, journalism, media coverage, attribution science, World Weather Attribution, Concordia University, Canada, news analysis, extreme weather, Journalism Practice, climate communication