Painting Uyghurs: News Media Representations of Uyghurs

Abstract

This thesis examines the portrayal of Uyghurs in fourteen news media outlets from 2014 to mid-2020, revealing the broader discourses deployed in discussions of Uyghurs and the PRC’s treatment of them. The study was carried out within the theoretical framework of critical geopolitics and using discourse analysis as a methodological foundation. News outlets studied are based in the US, Russia and Uzbekistan and as a result the completion of the study necessitated the utilization of Russian and Uzbek in addition to English. Trends within individual outlets and among outlets within a single country are identified and analyzed through close-reading of select articles and computer-aided analysis of corpora created for the study. The corpora were formed based on outlet of origin as well as country of origin and consisted of all articles returned based on the search term “Uyghur” for the period 2014-2020. The study reveals a particularly stark divide between US and Russian news media representations of what has been labelled a genocide by a growing number of countries. This division sees US media focusing on human rights and the legislative response of the US to the PRC’s actions while Russian outlets focused more on international power struggles perceived to pit Russia and the PRC against the US and Europe.