Whose Crisis is Newsworthy?

Abstract

In this paper, a qualitative comparative analysis of media representation of three displacement events is performed: the Rohingya exodus out of Myanmar since 1978 to the present day; the Kashmiri Pandit displacement from the Kashmir Valley in 1989-1990; and the displacement of indigenous tribes called Adivasis from Bastar in Chhattisgarh state in India, 2005 to the present day. Based on the concepts of framing (Entman, 1993); agenda setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972); critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995); and humanitarian communication studies (Cottle & Nolan, 2007), the paper examines a specially selected corpus of 54 articles published in 18 different sources, including international English press, national Indian press, regional Kashmiri Urdu, Chhattisgarhi Hindi, Myanmar Burmese, Bangladeshi Bengali, and West Bengal Bengali press. It concludes that the weight accorded to media salience cannot be measured by the scale of human tragedy but depends rather on the geometrics of geopolitical interest. This is evidenced by the findings of the study, which demonstrate an acute discrepancy in media framing in cases of the three displacement events under consideration and highlight vernacular proximate media as a source of greater humanitarian adequacy.