Hegemony of BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera’s Framing of Protests in China: The Cases of Wukan and Hong Kong

This study focuses on how the global news media report on protests in China. It contributes an original analysis of the global news media coverage of protests in China from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives. The research is based on the purposive sampling of the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera English, in order to discuss how international news media outlets report on protests in mainland China and Hong Kong, especially given that they are non-Western contexts. Samples from Wukan and Hong Kong are evaluated by using both quantitative and qualitative methods, including qualitative analysis software (NVivo), framing analysis and critical discourse analysis to determine the ways in which they are represented by the selected news outlets. The main findings have revealed hegemony in the news representations of protests in China, which includes biases, domestication, and geopoliticised news angles. The analysis in the Wukan case showed that the reports offered a limited voice to the Chinese side, while carrying frames of bias from Western journalists. The analysis of the selected global news reports unmasked ideological presuppositions about Chinese political reform, including the perception that the Chinese regime was monolithic, and that most Chinese protesters craved Western democracy. On the contrary, the evidence from the Al Jazeera documentary analysed in this study illustrated a Chinese government that is loosely structured, and that the protesters were more concerned about the land issue than they were about political ideology. As for the Hong Kong case, the results indicated that there were traces of domestication and the geo-politics of news regarding HK protests in both CNN and the BBC in relation to several topics, whereas Al Jazeera had a slightly different approach to reporting the protests: The BBC and CNN tended to relate protests with domestic politics and topics, while AJE balanced pro-Britain and pro-America discourse among the protesters. The study also discussed Orientalism, which is still highly relevant to Hong Kongers’ identity issues, and how Western media report on China today.

The research findings add to work by other scholars in media and journalism that has questioned the partiality of leading international or global (Western) media, particularly when it comes to reporting on non-Western and less developed countries. The research adds original evidence and insights to debates on the hegemony of international news coverage of protests, in the context of the Global South. It should be noted that leading media from the dominant Global North, in this case, excluding Al Jazeera, project the interests of the developed countries while voices from the Global South are less heard.