MEDIA AND HUMANITARIAN CRISES: A COMPARISON OF BBC’S COVERAGE OF TSUNAMI 2004 AND EELAM WAR IV

In the recent Sri Lankan history, two disasters shook the island state: one natural (2004 Tsunami) and the other man-made (Eelam War IV). Both the events were massive and received enormous attention in the international arena. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) played a major role in bringing these events to the global audience.The research compares the BBC World News coverage on the Tsunami 2004 and Eelam War IV.These two events were selected keeping in mind the relevance of the crises and mass response to it, during its occurrence. The nature of the events, that is, a natural disaster and a man-made conflict in itself, becomes a subject for comparing the coverage of the two by the channel. The question of whether the coverage of Tsunami 2004 escalated the already existing ethnic tensions in the country is also analysed. The paper focuseson the ‘media framing' strategy adopted by BBC in covering the events as a foreign media. Media framing can simply be defined as the perspective from which a story is told. The frame of a story will inherently influence the way it is investigated and reported.