Framing Leadership and Identity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of French and Selected African Leaders in RFI Headlines

Abstract

This study examines how political leadership is linguistically constructed in French-language headlines published by RFI between September and December 2025. While existing research has identified asymmetries in global media representations of Western and African political actors, limited attention has been paid to how such differences are realised at the level of headline discourse within a single international broadcaster.

The study compares how Emmanuel Macron and selected African leaders are represented within a single international broadcaster. This level of analysis remains underexplored in existing research. A corpus of forty purposively sampled headlines is analysed to identify patterns in agency attribution, transitivity, modality, and crisis-related framing.

The findings show systematic differences in the linguistic construction of leadership. Macron is predominantly represented as an individualised and active agent performing deliberate actions, whereas African leaders are more frequently represented within institutional, collective, or crisis-related contexts, where agency is more distributed or backgrounded.

These patterns indicate that headline-level linguistic choices contribute to differentiated representations of political authority and contextual stability, highlighting how micro-level discourse structures can reflect broader asymmetries in international news coverage.