INFRAESTRUCTURA VIAL Y TRANSPORTES 1 INFRAESTRUCTURA VIAL

“It hurts to have lived through the pain when it happens. It hurts more when the story of your pain is either ignored, distorted, un-understood, or misinterpreted” (Ararssa, 2026n).

The above quote is from one of the Facebook posts of Tsegaye Ararssa, an Oromo social media activist of the Oromo protest movement. It is just one example of how many Oromo social media activists reacted to the way the news media covered the Irreecha event of 2016. Tsegaye Ararssa and other social media activists whose Facebook posts were studied reacted differently to the news media coverage of the Irrecha incident. Some of them shared the news stories about the incident on their pages without commenting, some shared but also invited others to read or listen to those news stories, while others disputed how the news media framed the death of protesters, mainly highlighting the cause of the deaths. Still some of expressed their anger at how the news media framed the cause of the deaths at the Irreecha incident.

Some activists reacted to the news media by disputing the framing, particularly of the causes of death, of protesters at the event. For example, the following is how Mohammed (2016O), disputed the Washington Post’s frame of the cause of the death of protesters as a “stampede.”

[sic] Washington Post correct your stupid report. Stampede was not the main cause. The stampede was a result of people running from machine gun bullets and teargas [] thrown from helicopters. You want proof, ask those bunch of diplomats and foreign journalists who were sitting there at the VIP lounge. They saw the whole thing and filmed it but unwilling to speak the truth. (Mohammed, 2016o).

In the above quote, Mohammed, challenged TheWashington Post’s Paul Schemm who wrote the news article on October 2, 2016) on the cause of the death using assertive language: “The stampede was not the cause.” Moreover, he provided an alternative frame without denying the contribution of the stampede to the death by pointing to what caused the stampede itself: “The stampede was the result of people running from machine gun bullets and teargas.” He also

suggested The Washington Post ask people (diplomats and foreign journalists) who were at the scene.

However, the researcher noted that: The Washington Post’s article Mohammed (2016O) alluded to was updated twice saying, “This article has been updated with new details throughout” and “This article has been updated with more details and comment from the government”

respectively (2 October 2016). The researcher also noted that the article changed its title from

“Dozens of deaths during stampede at Ethiopia religious event” (2 October 2016) to “Dozens

killed during stampede at religious celebration in Ethiopia” (2 October 2012). The title of the

updated article shows a change in the frame of the cause of the death with the word “killed,” which is more suggestive of how the protesters died: “dozens killed.…”

Like Jawar Mohammed, Etana Habte, another Oromo activist, disputed media

representation of the cause of the death at the Irreecha festival. In his Facebook post published on 2 October 2016, Habte (2016h) expressed his disagreement with the way news media framed

the death of protesters. He claimed that massacre, not the stampede, was the cause of the deaths at Irreecha. He said the news media framing of the death otherwise hurts more than the death of protesters for which he blamed journalists as being lazy, ignorant, and irresponsible: “What is hurting even more than the death of hundreds of our beloved ones today at Irreecha is lazy, ignorant and irresponsible journalism reporting the massacre simply as a stampede” (Habte, 2016h, para. 1).

Similarly, Tufa (2016b) disputed the news media’s frame of the cause as a stampede. He even went further by equating portrayal of the cause of Oromo protesters’ death at Irreecha as a stampede to supporting the “massacre.” As he put it, “Framing today’s #Massmassacare [] as simply caused by #Stampede on the side of international media is [sic] amount [sic] to condoning the massacre” (Tufa, 2016b)).

Likewise, Najat Hamza on 5 October 2016 shared a post by Asafa Jalata (which was published on 2 October 2016), an Oromo and a professor at the University of Tennessee, who accused among other things, the Western media of misrepresenting the cause of the death at Irreecha. Jalata claimed that the Ethiopian security forces fired teargas and live ammunition into the crowd. He blamed the Western media for “spreading inaccurate information about the tragic events of this day” (Jalata, 2016, para.1 shared by Hamza, 2016n).

In addition to disputing the news media frame of the cause of the death at Irreecha, some activists also expressed their feelings in different ways. Some of it involves the use of profanity. For example, Habte(2016i) in his post published on 2 October 2016 called the BBC “idiot.” “ [sic] BBC is idiot.” Although Habte did not specify why he described it that way, The BBC he was citing framed the cause of the death as “stampede” as opposed to what the activists prefer to portray it as, a “massacre.” Likewise, Mohammed (2016p) questioned the quality of the BBC

report without specifying the reason or saying which edition of the BBC he was referring to. He just wrote: “Shame on BBC. What a shitty report. Who is their reporter who compiled this crap?” (Mohammed, 2016p). Mohammed (2016O) also referred to The Washington Post’s news article published on October 2, 2016 as a “stupid report.”

Tsegaye Ararssa also expressed his annoyance at the way the news media covered the Irreecha incident. In his post on 2 October 2016, Ararssa (2016n) Ararssa used an emoji that says, “Tsegaye Ararssa is feeling annoyed.” Without naming a specific media outlet that

annoyed him, he wrote about the foreign news media’s reluctance to cover what was going on in Ethiopia. Ararssa listed the following as possible reasons for media hesitation to let the world know about the incidents in Oromia:

Part of it is the result of the fear and self-censorship among their 'informants' close to the event for fear of being arrested, tortured, or even killed by the regime. Part of it is their deranged sense of history. But part of it is from their liberal fantasy of achieving journalistic 'objectivity' and 'balance' in an environment that is so unfair and asymmetrical in every imaginable respect. (Ararssa, 2016n, para.1).

He described the results of this as “annoying level of inaccuracy, distortion, undervaluation or ignoring of weighty events/facts/incidents, decontextualization, and/or misinterpretation” (p. 1).