The reality of events :American news framing of the Libyan and Syrian uprisings in the context of humanitarian crises -

Abstract

This thesis compares news coverage of the Libyan and Syrian uprisings from two major American newspapers, The New York Times and USA Today in the context of how strongly the frame of a humanitarian intervention was selected for each. I examine coverage of Libya in the five weeks prior to NATO intervention and the first eight months of the Syrian uprising. The thesis finds that while events were reported as accurately as could be, greater salience was given to the crisis in Libya after it appeared that the nascent rebellion would be crushed following the rebel defeat at Ras Lanuf. Syrians demonstrating and fighting against the Assad government received little more than verbal support from Western governments. The lack of a desire on the part of Western political elites to push for a military intervention for Syria, as had been done in Libya, was reflected in news coverage For this thesis I surveyed over 300 articles from both newspapers in order to establish quantitative trends in news coverage. I used both the quantitative and qualitative results of my survey to establish the news frames that each paper used for reporting on the respective conflicts.