Paper short abstract:

Based on interviews with Burundian journalists in exile, I show that a renegotiation of journalistic norms, conventions, and practices is required to respect non-Western contexts and enable a more inclusive media representation.

Paper long abstract:

Crises on the African continent are generally underreported or misrepresented in Western media. Among other reasons, this is due to the unrepresentativeness of Western media themselves, reflected both in the demographic of newsrooms and their reporting. Besides a lack of ethno-racial diversity in Western newsrooms, normative theories of journalism underlying their ideas of reporting lead to conventions and practices which often ignore or exclude non-Western contexts such as crises on the continent or reporting from exile. For example, despite exiled journalists having media expertise, well-established networks on the ground and expert knowledge, their media productions from exile remain largely unknown, or their objectivity and professionalism are questioned by Western institutions. To examine the latter, this paper presents findings from ten in-depth interviews on journalistic norms like objectivity and professionalism with Burundian journalists in Rwandan exile conducted in January 2020. The study shows that reporting from exile brings along a change in journalistic conventions and, indeed, argues that exiled journalists can only partly adhere to Western normative theories. But this does not validate the dismissal of their journalistic work. On the contrary, the analysis of Burundian exile journalism proves that a renegotiation of Westernized journalistic theories and practices is required to respect non-Western contexts and enable a more representative reporting of crises on the continent by including exiled journalists’ knowledge. It calls for a flexible approach to journalism that includes theoretical considerations from African journalism and non-idealistic practical realities of reporting, for example from exile.