CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Slootweg, Rick |
|---|---|
| Title | (In)Vested Interest: Visibility of the Uyghur Genocide in Dutch and Belgian Media Coverage |
| Summary | This thesis investigates to what extent economic relations impact the newsworthiness of foreign human rights abuses through a content analysis of six Belgian and Dutch newspapers on Uyghur repression between 2015 and 2021. Given that the Netherlands has significantly stronger economic ties with China than Belgium has in terms of trade and FDI, we expect that Dutch media are more interested Uyghur related stories than Belgian media. The findings indeed show that Dutch news coverage exceeded Belgian news coverage, that it was featured more prominently in newspapers, and that coverage was more sustained between 2015 and 2021. A significant share of Belgian news coverage was driven by either domestic developments or involvement by international actors like the EU or the UN, implying that Belgian news coverage of the Uyghur genocide is not determined by the extent of the human rights abuses but rather by the involvement of domestic actors and the international community. Furthermore, we show that Dutch newspapers published references to genocide both earlier and to a greater extent than its Belgian counterparts. These findings thus confirm that economic ties drive media’s interest and awareness of partners’ controversial issues such as human rights abuses. |
| Supervisor | Sata, Robert |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/slootweg_rick.pdf |
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