Framing the Rohingya Crisis: A Data-Driven Multi- Country Analysis of Government-Media-Citizen Relations in Spectator Countries

Abstract

This research explores the framing of the Rohingya issue in Myanmar by governments, traditional media and social media in India, Bangladesh and the Unites States —three nations that serve as conflict spectators and recipients of the Rohingya refugees. Critical media studies have the relationship between the press and the state is well-established. However, there is a gap in the literature as to whether online citizen frames are similarly implicative of a government’s national interest and whether traditional media frames play a role in this regard. This research aimed to provide a deeper understanding of how government, traditional media, and online citizens interact over time, as well as whether social media offers a different form of framing for an ongoing conflict. The manner in which messages regarding the Rohingya conflict are framed in traditional news and on social media in observer countries serves as a benchmark for analysing how national interest facilitates the framing of online citizens. In this study, I utilised text-as-data techniques to determine the breadth of this alignment by identifying issue-specific frames and sourcing patterns between traditional media and social media. I performed a correlation analysis to assess the alignment of frames between the government, traditional media, and online citizens. The extent to which a country’s national interest gets replicated among online citizen users depends on a complex interplay of factors, including the nature of the national interest and the degree of government influence on traditional media narratives. The results challenge the dominant narrative that online communication is liberating and raise questions about the hegemonic influence of social media in democratic states.