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.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

La Città Altra: Storia e immagine della diversità urbana: luoghi e paesaggi dei privilegi e del benessere, dell’isolamento, del disagio, della multiculturalità

[English]: This volume proposes a rich corpus of papers about the ‘Other City’, a subject only few times dealt with, but worthy of all our attention: it imposes itself on the scene of international modern and contemporary historiography for its undeniable topicality. Throughout history, the city has always had to deal with social ‘otherness’, i.e. with class privileges and, consequently, with discrimination and marginalization of minorities, of the less well-off, of foreigners, in short, with the differences in status, culture, religion. So that the urban fabric has ended up structuring itself also in function of those inequalities, as well as of the strategic places for the exercise of power, of the political, military or social control, of the spaces for imprisonment, for the sanitary isolation or for the ‘temporary’ remedy to the catastrophes. From the first portraits of cities, made and diffused at the beginning of the fifteenth century for political exaltation purposes or for religious propaganda and for devotional purposes, which often, through increasingly refined graphic techniques, distort or even deny the true urban image, we reach, at the dawn of contemporary history, the new meaning given by scientific topography and new methods of representation; these latter aimed at revealing the structure and the urban landscape in their objectivity, often unexpected for who had known the city through the filter of ‘regime’ iconography. The representation of the urban image still shows the contradictions of a community that sometimes includes and even exalts the diversities, other times rejects them, showing the unease of a difficult integration / [Italiano]: Questo volume propone un ricco corpus di contributi sulla ‘Città Altra’, un tema sinora poco battuto ma degno di tutta la nostra attenzione, che s’impone sulla scena della storiografia internazionale, moderna e contemporanea, per la sua innegabile attualità. Nel corso della storia, la città ha dovuto sempre fare i conti con le ‘alterità’ sociali, ossia con i privilegi di classe e, conseguentemente, con la discriminazione e l’emarginazione delle minoranze, dei meno abbienti, degli stranieri, insomma con le diversità di status, di cultura, di religione. Sicché il tessuto urbano ha finito per strutturarsi anche in funzione di quelle diseguaglianze, oltre che dei luoghi strategici per l’esercizio del potere, del controllo politico, militare o sociale, degli spazi per la reclusione, per l’isolamento sanitario o per il rimedio ‘temporaneo’ alle catastrofi. Dai primi ritratti di città elaborati e diffusi sul principio del Quattrocento per fini di esaltazione politica o per la propaganda religiosa e per scopi devozionali, che spesso, attraverso tecniche grafiche sempre più raffinate, falsano o addirittura negano la vera immagine urbana, si giunge, all’alba della storia contemporanea, al nuovo significato dato dalla topografia scientifica e dai nuovi metodi di rappresentazione, atti a svelare la struttura e il paesaggio urbano nella loro oggettività, spesso cruda e inaspettata per quanti, prima di allora, avessero conosciuto la città attraverso il filtro dell’iconografia ‘di regime’. La rappresentazione dell’immagine urbana mostra ancora oggi le contraddizioni di una comunità che a volte include, e persino esalta, le diversità, altre volte le respinge, tradendo il malessere di una difficile integrazione