The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started in February 2022, has garnered extensive U.S. media coverage, particularly on the effect of the war on civilians. Meanwhile, the armed conflict in Yemen, which began in March 2015, has received much different (and more minimal) U.S. media coverage. A new article in Third World Quarterly by SIS Professor Jeff Bachman and Esther Brito Ruiz compares these two seemingly dissimilar conflicts because: (1) civilians have been victims of both conflicts; (2) both conflicts have undermined food security; (3) the US has provided military support to a party to each of the conflicts; and (4) the conflict in Yemen is in the Global South whereas the conflict in Ukraine is in the Global North.

Bachman and Brito comparatively analyze U.S. media coverage of the conflicts in Yemen and Ukraine, via New York Times headlines, by documenting the number of stories and their placement; assessing the types of media frames used; reviewing headlines for attribution of responsibility; and conducting a content analysis to identify the descriptive and normative terminology used. They find extensive biases in coverage and framing, rooted in peripheralism, culturalism and differential geopolitical U.S. positioning. This results in reduced coverage of the war in Yemen, shielded in neutral language and lacking responsibility attribution—serving to devalue the suffering of victims and condemning the crisis to be functionally forgotten.

Read the full article here.