The study examined CNN's news discourse on two African countries, Tunisia and South Africa.  Using critical discourse analysis to show how dominant ideology manifests in the discourse news discourse on the subject of violence from the two countries was used to show the discoursive portrayal of the two countries. Drawing on Fairclough, the comparative sudy examined how discursivestrategies sustain power relations and maintenance of social order. Assumptions from previous studies have pointed to the fact that CNN's reporting on Africa has been inadequate and negative, while the broadcaster's reporting has been driven by its American values and commercial model. CNN transcrips on the two countries available online for the period October 2014 to February 2016 were downloaded and analyzed.  From a corpus of 42 news stories, 12 typical texts were studied using van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis to unravel how meaning was created and embedded in the text.  The study concluded that CNN's reporting on Tunisia and South Africa was negative and not balanced. While the discursive strategies were mainly similar, they were used for different purposes to achieve different overarching frames of the events that were reported.