Comparing Media Coverage of the South China Sea Conflict: A Cross-Regional Approach

This study investigates news media coverage of the South China Sea (SCS) conflict from the three major Southeast Asian disputants: Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia. Three-selected newspapers (Saigon Times Daily, Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Jakarta Post) are used to identify and compare name contestation, prominent topics, news sources and national interest frames. Combining content analysis, topic modelling and discourse analysis, this thesis finds that news media prefer to use their own local geographic terms instead of the SCS. International conflict is also nationally perceived through securitisation of fisheries by means of narrating ‘fishermen on the front lines’.