When lack of impartiality makes an impact: a comparative study of VietCatholic and the BBC

Giang Nguyen, a BBC fellow and head of the Vietnamese Service at the BBC World Service, examined how a Catholic news website is having a big impact in and outside Vietnam, despite, or because of, its partisan editorial policies.

In his paper called ‘When lack of impartiality makes an impact: a comparative study of VietCatholic and the BBC’, Giang Nguyen examines how VietCatholic used its newsgathering network of over 200 Catholic volunteers in Vietnam and abroad to attract over eight million page impressions in just three months during Catholic demonstrations in Hanoi in 2008. By carrying out extensive content analysis of the BBC and VietCatholic websites, he shows how the VietCatholic website is characterised by a high degree of editorial engagement on the part of their reporting team in the events bordering on explicit agitation, a lack of impartiality and a minimum of effort to represent the government’s viewpoint. Giang Nguyen also draws a comparison with the position of the churches and dissident samizdat press in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. He ends with a discussion of whether the ascendance of VietCatholic is just a phenomenon specific to the media landscape in Vietnam, or if it fits a pattern of faith-based media on the rise in East Asia.

As with all Fellows’ research papers, any opinions expressed are those of the author and not of the Institute.