Seyram Adzo Essey | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Seyram Adzo Essey
罢颈迟濒别:听Controls The Crisis? A Framing Analysis Of Western And Who Controls The Crisis? A Framing Analysis Of Western And Non-Western News Coverage Of The Sudan Crisis In 2023-2025 Non-Western News Coverage Of The Sudan Crisis From 2023 to 2025
Majors: Communication Studies; Global Media & Digital Studies
础诲惫颈蝉辞谤:听Mehri Yavari
When international news outlets cover a humanitarian crisis, they do more than report the facts; they shape how audiences understand who is suffering, who is responsible, and whether anyone should act. This study examines how four major news outlets covered the Sudan humanitarian crisis between 2023 and 2025, asking whether Western and non-Western media tell the same story, and what the consequences of those differences are. Using Robert Entman’s framing theory to analyze written content and John Fiske’s three-level semiotic model to analyze images, this research examined 40 articles and 14 photographs from CNN and BBC (Western) and Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency (non-Western). The analysis found that all four outlets consistently frame Sudanese civilians as victims, armed groups, the Sudanese Armed Forces, and the Rapid Support Forces as villains, and international organizations as overwhelmed responders, while Sudanese political voices remain largely absent. Despite this shared foundation, meaningful differences emerge in how each outlet tells the story. Western outlets, particularly the BBC, personalize suffering through individual testimony and emotional narrative. Non-Western outlets rely more heavily on statistics and institutional data to convey scale. Visually, all four channels reproduce the same imagery of displacement, destruction, and despair, reinforcing a global convention of victimhood that transcends geographic and editorial differences. This study argues that media framing does not merely report crises; it actively distributes responsibility, shapes public perception, and influences humanitarian response. Understanding how that process works, and whose voices it silences, matters deeply for the populations.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
