Document Type

Honors Project

Comments

I am grateful to Allah for the health, inspiration, and courage to finish this thesis. I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Lisa Mueller for believing in this project, her rich feedback on all the different versions of the thesis, and for pushing me to put in my best work. I am grateful for my family, loved ones, and acquaintances at Macalester and around the world, who encouraged me through the entire year I have worked on this project. I feel so grateful for the honors cohort at Macalester and our advisor Dr. Lesley Lavery who made the honors journey so much more enjoyable. I could not have done it without the support of so many people who accepted to be interviewed, connected me to journalists, shared my survey link with their network or their students, and taught me the basics of Refworks. Special thanks to Dr Sid Bedingfield who helped me get access to the UofM survey pool. The list is long and I probably forgot some mentions but I feel so grateful to put this work out to the world. I hope and pray the knowledge is beneficial.

Abstract

In the last decade, armed conflicts have been proliferating around the world. While most conflicts still get covered in the mass media, some have received more international attention than others. This disparity in attention can affect the resolution of conflicts and the support victims can get to rebuild their lives. This study seeks to answer the question of why some armed conflicts receive more media coverage than others. I hypothesize that journalists cover conflicts with clearer victims and villains more than conflicts with more vague victims and villains, because clear victims and villains provide stronger narrative frames and fewer actors to cover, easing the cognitive and logistical burdens on journalists. I derive this hypothesis from an interdisciplinary theory-building exercise that draws on communication studies, psychology, and literary criticism, in addition to the conflict studies canon. Combining expert interviews with war journalists and an original survey experiment randomizing narrative frames on journalism students, I find no significant treatment effect on conflict coverage. However, the results still point to the importance of human stories in bringing readers to empathize with conflict victims even when they seem distant. This study enriches the conflict studies literature by analyzing war coverage from a perspective not explored yet: the narrative forms that emerge from different conflict environments.

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