Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 15, Issue 1, January 1996, Pages 21-46
Political Geography

The inscription of difference: news coverage of the conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia

https://doi.org/10.1016/0962-6298(95)00041-0Get rights and content

Abstract

There are many parallels between the current civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia. Similarities can be found in military tactics and in how external imperialism, ethnicity, rural underdevelopment and even topography shape various parameters of the conflicts. Despite the comparable message potential inherent in these parallels, the US news media have elected to cast their coverage of the two wars in two different frameworks of understanding. Through content and intertextual analysis of six major US newspapers, and through juxtaposition of news coverage of Bosnia, we reveal how the press distorts Rwanda coverage to fit a frame. This frame relies almost entirely on non-African sources, depicting Africa as a timeless and placeless realm of “tribal” conflict, the repository of deep-seated US fears of African “others”. This inscription of difference implicates the news media as a central player in the social construction, categorization and defamation of peoples and places in the emerging post-Cold-War geopolitical (dis)order.

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