From Western sourcing and postcolonialism in The New York Times to a cosmopolitan paper for the future?

: A quantitative study of “white” sourcing practices in The New York Times’ coverage on the war in Afghanistan

Abstract

Within the domain of conflict reporting, (American) mainstream media tends to focus on
official, ‘elite’ sources. However, these sources often promote a Western-biased view of events.
This is what Dutch journalist Bette Dam experienced during her stay in Afghanistan. As a part
of Dam’s Ph.D., this thesis examines which sources The New York Times, one of the world’s
most powerful newspapers, has used for its coverage of the Afghanistan conflict. By analyzing
sourcing practices in a corpus consisting of 690 articles from 2002 to 2021, this research
unravels the focus on the dominant master narrative, which is the American War on Terror
narrative. It shows how this macro-narrative is embraced and enforced by the strong focus on
elite sources, and how suppressed narratives like false reporting phenomena and particularly
the Taliban’s attempts to surrender were neglected. In the end, we reflected upon different
options for change in the future, which Dam will take into account during her conversations
with The New York Times.

Date of Award	31 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Jelle Mast (Promotor) & Bette Dam (Promotor)