And the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Haroon Hakimi, whose focus is on the BBC’s representation of Afghanistan in its news reporting. Internationally, people are often perceived through the popular image of their nation, and this is especially pronounced for countries which many people will have no personal experience of, such as Afghanistan.
More generally, national image can be shaped at the personal level, through friends and contacts; at the organisational level, where PR companies might run image campaigns; and the mass media level, where news reporting strongly affects how audiences perceive the country. Word and image choices in news coverage can have a significant impact here.
Haroon examined this through a semantic network analysis of BBC News coverage of Afghanistan, which highlights issues, emphasises attributes, and engages in network agenda-setting; he also conducted a sentiment analysis to test the emotional tone of news coverage. This focussed on some 5,600 articles published by BBC News.
Much of the coverage is neutral in tone, but within the non-neutral coverage negative sentiment dominates. Specific sentiments fluctuate over time, but in recent years there has been something of a normalisation of the Taliban regime: sentiments like fear and sadness peaked in 2022, while trust gradually increased as a sentiment in the coverage. Word choices related to the sentiments differ substantially, as is to be expected. This is likely to influence the public perception of Afghanistan.
