News Coverage of the Nile Dam Crisis in Chinese, Qatari and British Media: Exploring Proximity to Egypt and Ethiopia as a Framing Influence on CGTN, AJE and BBC's Reporting

Abstract

Academic literature points to proximity, including geographic, political, economic, and cultural, as a key news value that influences media attention, sourcing, and visual framing across conflicts. Focusing on the prolonged Nile Dam crisis that has put Egypt and Ethiopia on the verge of military conflict, the study uses quantitative and qualitative content analyses to explore how China, Qatar and the UK's proximity to Egypt and Ethiopia relates to the framing of the conflict in China Global Television Network (CGTN), Al Jazeera English (AJE), and British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) English-language news articles and photographs online in 2019-2021. While proximity factored in AJE's more frequent coverage of the dispute, the study reveals how media systems and dependency on news agencies can mitigate proximity's impact on coverage and how temporary political tensions and economic aspirations can prompt more favorable reporting of the least culturally, linguistically, geographically, economically, and/or politically proximate country.

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