Building Narratives: A Comparative Study of the NYT Reporting on Abuses Against Muslim Minorities in China and in India

The present study fits into a broader body of work that can be traced back to the so-called Propaganda model, an analytical framework developed by Herman and Chomsky to identify the US government’s efforts aimed at manufacturing public support for its foreign policies. More specifically, this thesis sets out to attest whether the US administration is taking active steps to build propaganda narratives that seek to contain its current strategic competitor, China, in an effort to maintain its position of hegemony in world affairs. However, proving intent is always a challenging task: there might be various reasons behind Washington’s desire to limit Beijing’s increasing clout. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to examine the narrative around a specific issue i.e., abuses against Muslim minorities in China, and assess whether the increasingly hostile tones adopted by the administration towards China are the result of genuine concerns over human rights violations or whether they are merely following the economic and political interests of dominant elites. To this end, another comparable situation i.e., abuses against the Muslim community in India, is also studied. A quantitative content analysis was chosen as methodology to dissect and scrutinise a total of 92 news articles published by The New York Times over a two-year period (2020-2021). As anticipated, the analytical framework that guides this study is Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, in conjunction with Robert Entman’s cascading activation model. The findings of this work illustrate how the US government is indeed instrumentalising the human rights narrative to depict China as a wicked state that deserves US hostility: the coverage of abuses against Muslim communities in China is significantly more intensive and aggressive than that reserved to Muslim minorities in India. The reasons for this difference in tones can only be political in nature, given that they are merely a reflection of elite interests.