A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF COVERING NEPAL: HOW REPORTING DIFFERS BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISTS AND LOCAL JOURNALISTS _______________________________________ A Professional Project presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________________ by LAKSHNA MEHTA Beverly Horvit, Committee Chair DECEMBER 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my mother and my friends, Zivile and Jinghong, who patiently heard my rants while working on this project, and tolerated my talking- out-loud moments. Thank you to the chocolate company, Patchi, for their delicious chocolate that was both comfort food and fuel for all the nights I stayed up. Thank you to my committee for their time and sticking with me through this semester. !ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements.................................................................................................. ii List of Tables ...........................................................................................................iv List of Figures ..........................................................................................................v List of Illustrations ..................................................................................................vi Chapter one: Introduction ........................................................................................1 Chapter two: Weekly reports ....................................................................................3 Chapter three: Self-evaluation ...............................................................................25 Chapter four: Evidence ..........................................................................................29 Chapter five: Analysis ............................................................................................33 References ..............................................................................................................42 Appendix ................................................................................................................44 Project proposal .....................................................................................................43 Changes to original proposal .................................................................................64 Research materials .................................................................................................65 Bibliography ........................................................................................................185 iii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Total number of sources used in all articles, broken down by newspaper and type of source ..................................................................................................37 !iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Trends in international news coverage of Nepal in 2015 .......................34 Figure 2: Sourcing trends in My Republica ...........................................................38 Figure 3: Sourcing trends in The Wall Street Journal ............................................39 Figure 4: Sourcing trends in The Hindu ................................................................40 !v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration 1: Screenshot from the VOA60 Africa video produced Aug. 29 .........29 Illustration 2: Screenshot from the VOA60 World PM video produced Sept. 1 ....30 Illustration 3: Screenshot from my stand up for the VOA60 Election video produced Oct. 12 ....................................................................................................31 Illustration 4: Screenshot from the VOA60 Election video produced Nov. 10 .....32 !vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION I have wanted to be a journalist for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I seriously considered any other profession. Telling stories — stories that didn’t get enough attention, stories of people who aren’t fairly represented, stories of situations that need to remain in the forefront but get pushed to the back because of the timeliness factor — is what I felt I was born to do. When I started the journalism program at the University of Missouri, I picked classes that pushed me to think of topics and angles I hadn’t been exposed to despite the many books I had read and was reading. (The only place I went to without a book in hand or in my bag was a bookshop.) Murrell (2014) writes that journalism remains one of the few professions still offering “discovery, adventure and possible glory,” (pg. 27). Many journalists become foreign correspondents for the adventure, travel, excitement and, in the case of Robert Fisk, “to be a personal witness to history” (pg. 27). I have been working towards becoming a foreign correspondent, not for the travel or to be witness of history. I want to be a foreign correspondent to tell stories. Stories of places and people that don’t seem to get enough coverage, like Nepal with its political turmoil. A subset of foreign correspondents is parachute journalists — journalists who report on a specific news item in a foreign country for a short period of time. Many studies have shown that parachute journalism has limitations that are !1 unavoidable (Otto & Meyer, 2012; Erickson & Hamilton, 2006; Palmer & Fontan, 2007; Musa & Yusha’u, 2013). In their 2006 study, Erickson & Hamilton found that “parachute journalism has been portrayed just as simplistically” as critics accuse parachute journalists of portraying their subjects (pg. 45). When I was in Yangon, Myanmar, for a free press conference in 2014, many of the local journalists I spoke with there told me how they did not appreciate a lot of the stories produced by parachute journalists reporting on the conflict between the Rohingyas, the government of Myanmar and some of the Buddhist monks, especially those belonging to the 969 Movement led by Ashin Wirathu. The Burmese journalists would talk about how some of the parachute journalists would not understand or report on the cultural and political history that led to the conflict, or why the conflict erupted when and how it did. Listening to them, I decided I would do everything I can to not be the kind of journalist who ignored the complexity, or who over-simplified an issue. This study aims to better understand the nuanced differences between the reporting done by international journalists and local journalists in and from the country where the international journalist is reporting. It also seeks to find sourcing patterns — if any — for the two sets of journalists, and whether they match findings from prevailing literature. !2 CHAPTER TWO: WEEKLY FIELD NOTES Aug. 29 Internship This week at my internship at Voice of America’s Media Lab, I produced 60-second videos on the day’s headlines from the African continent. The production of the video involves selecting and writing the headlines (from wire services Reuters, AFP and AP), finding relevant video clips with good nat sound, and editing the text and video together. In addition to the headline-video, I produced the same Africa segment, this time working with voice-overs from a VOA reporter, Mariama Diallo. One difficulty that I am having with working on the Africa videos is the voice-over section. I am still fine-tuning my ability to cut audio in such a way so as to make it as short as possible without deleting any necessary audio waves. I have gotten the general hang of it, but it takes me many tries to get it right. Links to published work Aug. 25: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVI3w6y7zUo Aug. 24: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQh-khCnZqg Aug. 23: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=783N_8EkSus Aug. 22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAWBldfEWU0 Project !3 For the research project, my chair (Amy McComb) resigned from the school, so I am currently trying to find another chair for my committee. I have also finished a draft of the codebook required for the quantitative analysis and sent it to Harsh Taneja for review. This weekend, I also did the first search wave to select the articles for my analysis. I used the Factiva and ProQuest Newsstand databases. Since the search results came up in the tens of thousands, I have asked Harsh Taneja on how best to pare the results to come up with a workable number. Seminar For the semester’s first seminar, my key takeaway from our meet with Mike McCurry was that everything is not the media’s fault, and that it is possible to have positive relations with press secretaries. His idea that combining religion into politics more deliberately will make politics more honest and politicians care more about the “other person” was worth exploring more, especially since America’s founding fathers designed the constitution and Declaration of Independence with a separation of church and state in mind. Also, a separation of church and state is also what created the divide between Great Britain and the Vatican, although for very different reasons. Sept. 5 Internship This week, I was re-assigned to produce videos on the election. The process to produce these is a little different than the other products. It requires !4 more careful selection of which news articles to select as VOA cannot appear to favor one candidate over another. Also for the election videos, the content has to be created from scratch as there is no pre-shot video that can be used. Another element that goes into production is the use of stand-ups in both English