Naming violence in The New York Times : US foreign policy and the politics of genocide recognition

Abstract

Genocide recognition has come to represent a major political battlefield since the term ‘genocide’ was coined in the 1940s, and the news media are one of the primary sites for contestation over how to categorize different acts of political violence. While scholarship has largely contradicted the popular notion of press independence in the US, previous studies that investigate Western media bias in genocide recognition often rely on single case studies and have sometimes been dismissed for being ‘anecdotal’. With particular attention to six postwar cases of mass violence that have been widely identified in scholarship as genocides, the authors collect time series data spanning the start of each case to 2020. Their analysis explores systematic differences in the volume of coverage of each case and the proportion of articles that employ the term ‘genocide’ in The New York Times. Consistent with indexing and hegemony theories of press–state relations, the authors find that atrocities committed by US allies and clients receive less attention over time, and the term ‘genocide’ – as well as other contested categories of political violence such as ‘massacre’ and ‘slaughter’ – is more often withheld.