https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635219846029 Media, War & Conflict 1–26 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1750635219846029 journals.sagepub.com/home/mwc MWC Transnational news media coverage of distant suffering in the Syrian civil war: An analysis of CNN, Al-Jazeera English and Sputnik online news Xu Zhang and Catherine A. Luther University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA Abstract This study analyzed news stories published on the online sites of CNN, Al-Jazeera English, and Sputnik to investigate how the transnational news outlets framed the human suffering associated with the Syrian war. Unlike prior studies that have tended to be based on traditional nation-state paradigms, this research approached the analysis from a cosmopolitan perspective. The findings revealed that in concert with standard journalistic routines and news values, all three news outlets commonly employed a mass death and displacement frame to depict human suffering inside Syria. The adoption of this frame suggests that in telling the story of human suffering, the three media outlets focused on brief facts and shocking statistics without detailed depictions of the human suffering. The meager presence of a cosmopolitan outlook in the news coverage indicates that although transnational media target a global audience with English as Lingua Franca, they cannot be completely independent of geopolitics. Keywords distant suffering, cosmopolitanism, Syria, war, CNN, Al-Jazeera English, Sputnik, framing Introduction Growing out of the unrest of the 2011 Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war soon became a multi-sided armed conflict in Syria, involving the intervention of major international powers. The still-ongoing conflict has caused instability and tremendous humanitarian catastrophe in the specified region. From the spring of 2011 to the spring of 2016, an Corresponding author: Xu Zhang, University of Tennessee, 345 Circle Park Drive, Suite 333, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA. Email: xzhan104@vols.utk.edu 846029MWC 0 0 10.1177/1750635219846029Media, War & ConflictZhang and Luther research-article 2019 Article