Global Media

The human rights crisis in Darfur, in Western Sudan, grows worse with every passing day. At least 300,000 are believed dead at this point, with over two million displaced. Some have called the situation genocide. This paper examines how to different major newspapers have framed the conflict—the New York Times and the People’s Daily, China’s official newspaper. The Times has tended to consider the crisis to be genocide, while the People’s Daily has framed the situation as an internal conflict. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, these frames were uncovered by examining the types of stories in each paper, the emotional intensity of the stories, who the newspaper blames for the conflict, and what sources are used in each article. The two general positions on the crisis by each newspaper reflect the larger foreign policy interests of their respective governments