On November 4, 2020, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed requested a military incursion against provincial forces in Tigray region. He explained that the military offensive was a response to an attack led by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) on an army barracks for government troops inside the region. In the following months of dissension between Dr Abiy's administration and heads of Tigray's most predominant political party, the TPLF, the conflict escalated heavily. In the past few months, the lack of information of what is happening in the Tigray region has set the scene for a fully-fledged propaganda war.

In light of newfound claims of human rights abuses carried out by federal troops, a national debate regarding the Tigray-crisis has been ignited. This study intends to examine the framing of the Tigray-conflict news coverage by two domestically operated media companies, namely, the Reporter and the Ethiopian Herald. To conduct this investigation, the thesis will focus on four specific frames that have been identified by scholars such as W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just, and Ann N. Crigler, Holli A. Semetko, Patti M and Valkenburg Valkenburg. The four frames are (a) Human Interest Frame (HIF), (b) Conflict Frame (ConF), and (c) Attribution of Responsibility Frame (AttrF), and (d) Economic Frame (EconF).

Although some minor differences exist, our findings indicate that there are major similarities between the state-owned and private media's coverage of the Tigray-crisis. The selected newspapers framed the federal government and the T.P.L.F in similar fashion. In both the Ethiopian Herald and the Reporter, the main aggressors of the conflict were framed to be high-ranking TPLF officials and their sympathizers. In comparison, Ethiopian Herald and the Reporter’s representation of the two fighting groups and their reasons for the battle were significantly uniform in terms of tools/concepts they implemented to support or delegitimize the two sides. Moreover, researchers have contended that both the positive and the negative roles of media mediation are contingent on the way media covers and frames disputes among the conflicting parties.