Abstract

The news media's construction of humanitarian crises through textual and visual framing tends to affect audience responses. This study draws on Robert Entman’s framing theory and John Fiske’s three-level semiotic model from Television Culture (Fiske, 1987) to investigate how Western and non-Western news media define problems, assign responsibility, offer moral evaluations, imply treatment recommendations, and analyze how visuals reinforce or defy narratives on the 2023 Sudan crisis. By focusing on news coverage published from 2023 to 2025, the research collects 80 news articles and analyzes 40 news articles from four news channels: CNN, BBC (Western), Al Jazeera, and Anadolu Agency (non-Western). Through coding and analysis of text and visuals, this study identifies recurring frames that position civilians as primary victims of the conflict, armed groups, mainly the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as the main villains, international actors like the United Nations as important yet constrained responders to the conflict and Sudanese government officials as largely absent from meaningful crisis resolution. While all outlets share a dominant humanitarian frame, key differences emerge between Western (CNN and BBC) and non-Western (Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency) channels. Western channels more frequently personalize suffering through civilian experiences and emotional narrative, particularly the BBC, whereas non-Western outlets rely more heavily on statistical scale and institutional data. Additionally, visual analysis reveals consistent reliance on imagery of displacement, destruction, and despair, reinforcing narratives of victimhood and urgency across all four channels. Conclusively, this study argues that media framing does not merely report humanitarian crises; it actively structures responsibility among actors involved, shapes public perceptions, and vi influences how humanitarian response occurs. By combining textual and visual analysis, the study demonstrates how news both constructs and distributes agency in humanitarian crises, and why that matters for populations at the center of those crises.

Advisor

Yavari, Mehri

Department

Communication Studies

Disciplines

Communication

Keywords

News framing analysis, humanitarian crisis, Sudan, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Fiske, Entman, Western media, non-Western media, humanitarian aid, framing, visual framing

Publication Date

2026

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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