A Corpus-Linguistic Analysis of News Coverage in Kenya's Daily Nation and The Times of London

Abstract

This study uses institutional theory, which suggests that groups of organizations within the same field, such as the press, develop shared characteristics and unique tendencies that reflect their particular social and political systems, to advance empirical understanding of non-Western media organizations. This research uses word frequency comparison to examine word use across two newspapers representative of press systems in different political and social environments. The news styles show evidence of norms shared across significant cultural and geographic distances and of influences unique to particular cultural and regulative contexts—suggesting that news organizations adapt to both shared global standards and institutional constraints unique to surrounding cultures and that, despite the globalization of journalism culture, local context still matters.