A multimodal analysis of the representation of the Rohingya Crisis in BBC’s Burma with Simon Reeve (2018): building consensus for political action?

The Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar has been given considerable coverage in the news media following the displacement of around 700,000 people to Bangladesh in August 2017. The United Nations Human Rights Council has been following the situation closely and has put forward calls for action from the international community. Burma with Simon Reeve (BBC, 2018) is one of the few TV cultural programmes to have investigated the issue first hand.

This paper presents a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996; van Leeuwen 2005; Machin and Mayr 2012) of the text, focusing on how the Rohingya crisis is represented and on how this representation is negotiated by one viewer. It is argued that the text seeks to build political consensus in support of intervention from the international community.

The paper contributes to discussions in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Media Studies by researching the genre of infotainment and by exploring its effects on an audience.