This summer, Bangladesh has once again found itself in the global spotlight.
Student-led protests began in early July 2024 with demands to reform how government jobs are allocated,
and culminated in the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on August 5. She fled the country, but not
before her security forces had allegedly killed hundreds of student protesters across Bangladesh. Western media
outlets scrambled to cover the dramatic turn of events, with striking photos of protesters storming the Prime Minister's
residence dominating the homepages of major news outlets. While these moments of intense coverage are often crisis-driven,
they also raise a broader question: What do Western media outlets talk about when they talk about Bangladesh?
Outlets like BBC, CNN, Fox, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and The New York Times follow a pretty familiar pattern when
it comes to Bangladesh. Coverage tends to spike during big disasters—think the Rana Plaza collapse or the Rohingya crisis.
But what about when there's no major crisis? To dig deeper, I analysed nearly 2,000 articles from 2012 to 2024 to spot the
recurring themes that show how the world sees this country.
I focused on six major news outlets, three from the UK and three from the
US, selected for being the most-visited within their respective countries, according
to SimilarWeb, which ranks sites by how much traffic they get.
They reach millions of readers and by looking at how they cover Bangladesh, we get a glimpse of how the country
is framed for audiences in two of the world’s largest and influential media markets. Using "Bangladesh" as my keyword in headlines,
I pulled all the articles from 2012 to June 2024 to see how these media giants are shaping the conversation.
Negative Narratives
I analysed all the collected articles and categorised them into themes such as politics, natural disasters,
refugee crises, and labor issues. These categories reveal not just what makes the news, but also how the narratives
are shaped. Moments of heightened media attention, such as the Rohingya refugee crisis or the Rana Plaza collapse, tend
to drive coverage, while stories outside of these crises often reflect broader, ongoing issues that define how Bangladesh
is portrayed globally.
Every dot you see represents a story about Bangladesh, arranged by the year it was published.
Each dot is colored by the type of story it represents — politics, natural disasters, refugee crises,
labor issues — to give a picture of how Bangladesh has been framed in global media coverage.
Two moments dominate. In May 2013, over 1,200 people died in the Rana Plaza factory collapse.
Three years later, a deadly attack in Dhaka left over two dozen people dead. These two events mark the peaks of media
coverage in the last decade.
Negative stories, crime, politics, and disasters, dominate the coverage.
Crime alone accounts for around one of every eight stories, followed closely by politics
and sports. In contrast, the economy, business, and culture barely make a dent. The economy and business each make up
around 1% of all the articles. It’s clear the focus leans toward crises rather than the everyday life or growth of the nation.
Crime ranks in the top three for all publications except for The Guardian, which stands out for its focus on sports.
In fact, nearly three-quarters of all Bangladesh-related sports coverage across these outlets comes from The Guardian, a
striking contrast to the crime-heavy coverage elsewhere.
Where is coverage concentrated?
Each country has a few places that are better known, and media coverage tends to concentrate on those hotspots— often because
major events happen there, or they are the big cities or key economic centers. Bangladesh is no different. To explore this pattern,
I extracted every place name mentioned in the 2,000 articles and mapped them to the country’s 64 districts. My goal was to see if the
media’s focus is spread across the entire country or concentrated in just a few familiar regions. This analysis helps reveal whether
the coverage offers a full picture of Bangladesh or repeatedly focuses on the same areas.
This map shows the places mentioned by the BBC when they talk about Bangladesh. Even though it has the least coverage of Dhaka
compared to the other outlets, the capital still dominates, making up 65% of the mentions. Chittagong in the south-east follows with
13%, and Sylhet in the north-east corner comes in at 5%. The rest of the country is almost entirely overlooked.
Fox News gives the most coverage to Dhaka, with 83% of their mentions focused on places within the district.
The only other place that even registers is Chittagong, with just 4%. The rest of the country? Almost completely off the radar.
When looking at the combined map for all publications, the pattern is clear: Dhaka dominates. Three-quarters of all places mentioned
are in or around the capital, with the second city Chittagong coming in at just 8%. In fact, the international media’s coverage of
Bangladesh is really just coverage of Dhaka. The rest of the country barely gets a mention.
When Bangladesh makes headlines, it’s often tied to stories about other nations. From the Rohingya crisis with Myanmar
to trade deals with the US or diplomatic tensions with India, Bangladesh is rarely reported on its own. By mapping
every country mentioned alongside Bangladesh in 2,000 articles, I found that its story is frequently told through its
connections with the wider world. Be it in times of conflict or cooperation, these links offer a glimpse into Bangladesh’s
foreign relations — though seen through the lens of Western media.
The Guardian ties Bangladesh to 80 different countries in its coverage, more than any other outlet.
A big part of this likely comes from their focus on sports coverage, especially cricket. As one of the top
cricket-playing nations in the world, Bangladesh's international connections often play out through the sport.
One surprising thing about The Guardian’s coverage is how often Africa comes up.
A quarter of the countries it mentions alongside Bangladesh are African; more than any other publication.
CNN’s coverage of Bangladesh is narrower and mentions only about 50 other countries. Half of those are in Asia,
with Myanmar standing out the most because of how much attention the Rohingya crisis has received in their reporting.
Overall, Bangladesh's neighbours account for nearly 40% of the mentions, with India being the most prominent at 16%.
The majority of the remaining mentions go to the UK, USA, and European countries. A significant portion of the UK's mentions
come from The Guardian's sports-related coverage.
Words That Shape the Narrative
The words we choose shape the stories we tell, and the ones that come up the most can reveal what’s really being emphasized.
By pulling out the top 100 words from each publication, I wanted to get at the recurring themes that drive how Bangladesh
is talked about. Whether it’s politics, disasters, or something else, these words tell us what makes it into the headlines again and again.
In the chart, each of the most frequent words is represented by a thin horizontal bar, stacked to show how often they
appear across all publications. When you select a bar on any column, the frequency of that word is shown in the line chart
on the right. This lets you see not only how often a word is used overall, but also how its importance has changed over the years.
What doesn’t get talked about in all this coverage is climate change. Despite Bangladesh's vulnerability to climate
change and its pioneering climate-resilient initiatives, climate-related words don’t even crack the top 100 in media coverage.
Bangladesh’s story in Western media follows a familiar pattern—focused on crises and centered mostly around Dhaka.
Political events, disasters, and labor issues dominate, while other stories and regions fall into the background.
These patterns give us a snapshot of how the country is framed internationally. By looking at the words and places most
often mentioned, we can start to see how the media shapes our understanding of Bangladesh—and what might be missing from the bigger picture.
METHOD
Data Collection: To collect the articles, the first step was finding all the URLs from the six selected publications that mentioned "Bangladesh"
or "Bangladeshi" in the headlines. For outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian, I used their APIs to
easily pull the links. For those without APIs, I wrote custom Python scripts and used Octoparse to speed up the scraping process.
For BBC, where scraping was trickier, I used Google’s site search to find the relevant articles. All URLs were stored in a CSV file for easy access later.
Extracting the article content wasn’t always easy. Some sites loaded content dynamically, meaning the full text would only
appear after scrolling or interacting with the page. To handle this, I automated those actions using Selenium.
Once I had the content, I saved it along with metadata like publication dates and author names in JSON format.
Category: When I collected the articles, very few of them had
pre-assigned categories from the publications. Even when they did,
the categories weren’t consistent since they came from different
sources. So, I had to figure out the categories myself.
To do this, I used ChatGPT. I fed it the headlines
from all 2,000 articles, in batches of 200, and it
helped identify the main themes based on the headlines.
Place Names:I manually created a dictionary that included all place names in Bangladesh, such as sub-districts (Thanas), districts,
and cities, as well as country names and capital cities globally. Then I ran this dictionary against the text of the articles,
which returned the mentioned names along with their frequency count. I compiled the list by cross-referencing data from government
and open databases. This was necessary because existing named entity recognition tools, like spaCy, often overlook specific
place names, especially in places like Bangladesh. A random manual check determined that this method succeeded nearly 100% of the time
in extracting all the names mentioned.
Frequent Words:To find the most frequent words for each publication, I used NLTK, a Python library for
working with text. First, I removed common stopwords ('the', 'is', 'and' etc.) to focus on words that reveal key themes
in the articles. I then calculated word frequencies. Instead of using raw counts, which can be misleading due to varying
article lengths, I normalized the word frequencies per 100,000 words. This provided a more accurate comparison of how often
certain words appeared across different publications, regardless of the number or size of the articles.
Data, analysis and code, used for this project is available in this github repo.