Telling stories from the New Silk Road: A news discourse analysis of BBC’s podcast episodes on the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

Since its announcement in 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has drawn considerable international attention and remarkably influenced the global economy and politics. By employing the methodological framework of the Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), this study scrutinizes how the BBC World Service portrays the BRI. Using its podcast “Stories from the New Silk Road,” we analyzed its coverage of how ordinary people see the BRI. Through different episode elements, such as interviewees, presenters, images, and titles, the findings reveal how news values are shaped. The four episodes of the podcast share, with slight differences, a similar pattern in constructed news values as seen in the narratives of the interviewees and presenters. Economic and environmental issues are frequently discussed in the narratives of the BRI in the podcast episodes. While the news value of Positivity is prevalent in the episodes, it has been observed that the construction of Negativity is mostly in the foreground.