Post-conflict societies are subject to other societal forces than non-conflict or conflict societies. As a result, news production might differ between these three societal forms. In conflict, news is influenced either by the affiliation with a conflict party or at gunpoint. In non-conflict, it is shaped by manifold influences that are mostly connected to journalistic routines. In addition, post-conflict news production can be characterized by a high relevance of the conflict context and an emerging importance of routines. This article analyzes how journalists perceive self-censorship as an influence on post-conflict news production. It conceptualizes self-censorship as an analytic category and introduces different forms of self-censorship. Finally, the authors demonstrate the relevance of self-censorship as a force in post-conflict news production with the help of qualitative interviews conducted with journalists in Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia.
The newspaper articles written by the Australian Harry Gullett and his English counterpart Philip Gibbs during the opening months of the First World War provide important insights into the nature of war reporting, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship between the press and the military. Despite differences in background and temperament, their reports, which were written prior to official accreditation, were remarkably similar in tone and content for Gullett and Gibbs shared the belief that war was a regenerative force that would purify and strengthen a degenerate pre-war Britain. Both writers adopted a rhetoric in their initial wartime correspondence that emphasized traditional martial and patriotic values that they believed were an antidote to the weakness and disunity of a pre-war Britain beset by industrial, social and political upheaval. Battles would therefore be best presented as extended heroic narratives in which there was order, honour and greatness. This approach exerted an influence as pervasive as censorship itself.
Media coverage surrounding the repeal of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DADT) military policy was analyzed to examine how tones in coverage change over time and along the contours of increases in official consensus. In advancing the concept of indexing beyond actual military conflict, or the threat of war and honing in on a domestic but still military issue, this study examines broadcast network news coverage for a period of one year before and after DADT was repealed. Findings observed here indicate that media coverage may be more independent of official consensus than shown in previous research, specifically in reporting more negatively after official consensus was achieved. These results further suggest that coverage was moderated by network and that conceptions of indexing may not hold in the contemporary media and political environment. Implications are discussed in relation to media coverage of contentious issues and performance in polarized politics.
Social media platforms have become important in spreading propaganda images during conflicts, as demonstrated in several recent cases including the Israeli–Hamas confrontation in 2012 and graphic internet videos by the self-proclaimed Islamic State in 2014. This study examines the role of visual propaganda in the social media age by analyzing themes, frames, and structural features of images posted on the official Facebook pages of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces in 2013 and 2014. Our content analysis shows interesting differences and similarities between the two sides in using images to promote their political agendas during the recent Syrian conflicts following the 2011 uprisings. The Syrian government used visual frames to support its narrative that President Assad is a fearless leader protecting its people and that life has continued normally throughout Syria. The Syrian opposition used various images to solidify its narrative of the Assad regime’s brutality and sufferings of Syrian civilians. There were significant differences in terms of audience reactions to images with different themes and frames. These and other issues are discussed in the context of visual propaganda and framing in social media-based information warfare.
This article discusses the dilemmas documentary filmmakers face when acting upon the cosmopolitan ethos in a context of ongoing civil warfare and peace facilitation from the international society. This ethos is well known and accepted among Western audiences. When applied outside the Western hemisphere, the perspective of human-interest stories tends to get lost among audiences attached to the conflict. Instead, these stories may easily become identified as new public diplomacy on behalf of the participants on the ‘perceptual battlefield’ of war. The authors focus upon how this can be a challenge for Western states involved in peace processes in the same conflicts, especially for those small states that have little hard power and have to rely on gaining the trust of the conflicting parties. The article uses a case study of the Norwegian documentary My Daughter the Terrorist about the civil war in Sri Lanka as an example. The film became the epicentre of a major controversy during a critical stage in the peace process facilitated by the Norwegian government. The authors suggest the concept of diffused war can be translated as diffused peace facilitation to describe its effect on the peace process.
The literature on the warning-response gap in conflict prevention over-emphasizes political will as the crucial variable, whereas warning is not considered problematic. This article makes the case for distinguishing more clearly signs and indications from actual warnings. Furthermore the article argue that the quality of warnings matters for achieving at least partial persuasive success with decision-makers. The article identify key factors limiting or enhancing warning impact, focusing on source credibility, message content and communication mode. They argue that warning communicators need to take credibility problems more seriously, invest more time in identifying, understanding and building relationships with the most relevant recipients and tailor warnings accordingly in terms of content, timing and communication mode. If organizations lack the capacity to provide credible prescriptions on how to act, they should concentrate on high quality reporting to enhance rather than damage their credibility.
This article explores whether national political agendas influenced the content of domestic and foreign television news media coverage of the 2011 Israel–Hamas Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal. The deal, which released Israeli soldier Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners, is the largest prisoner exchange agreement in Israeli history for a single live soldier, but the third largest prisoner exchange agreement as a whole. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 2,162 news reports from five international and national news networks – BBC, CNN, Fox and Israel’s Channels 1 and 2. The findings suggest important differences in the way foreign and national news networks cover controversial political events. Findings reveal that Israeli networks strongly aligned themselves with the government’s position, while the BBC provided the most balanced coverage. Prominent differences were found between the two US channels – CNN and Fox News. This work builds on a growing body of research on media framing of political events.
Homeland is built on the conspiracy plots that provide entertaining suspense in the television series, which also reflects the fear culture that has developed in the wake of 9/11. CIA agent Carrie Mathison embodies the paranoid framework that undergirds the narrative, leading her to question the visible and to posit conspiracy theories behind coincidental events. Appropriating the narrative tropes of the gaslight films, Homeland enhances the unstable narrative structure produced by the combination of conspiratorial thinking with the serial. This article explores five seasons of Homeland and analyses the conspiratorial narrative it unfolds, highlighting how the serial format allows the creators to envision several scenarios illustrating individual and mass manipulation on the international stage, promoting a signifying system that blurs the final political message of the series.
This article comprises a discourse analysis of The Times’ (the British daily newspaper) coverage of Israeli deployment of white phosphorous during the first Gaza war. It argues that this issue is of special theoretical importance as it demonstrates a rare instance of a medium that is considered supportive of an agent (i.e. the state of Israel) offering apparently substantial criticism of that particular agent. The article progresses by uncovering layers of the newspaper’s coverage. It starts by introducing some quantitative characteristics, then moves on to analysis proper – explicit arguments and implicit meaning in editorials. In doing this, the author argues that an understanding of the discourse around criticism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict needs to account not just for overt arguments but implicit meanings which, consciously or not, are sustaining those arguments.
This article examines mobile phone videos that have been disseminated via YouTube since the beginning of the Syrian civil war to illustrate how media aesthetics and public discourse interact in the perception and interpretation of conflicts as crises. The Syrian civil war has shown that scenes of immediate protest and military action recorded on mobile phones become instruments of war and conflict as they bear a new aesthetics that influences the perception and interpretation of the situation in Syria. The article introduces a research perspective that is informed by discourse analysis and media aesthetics and can be used for the study of the perception and interpretation of war and conflict in relation to social media in general and mobile phone videos in particular. By providing new insights from this perspective for the study of war and conflict reporting, it furthers the debate on the perceptive and interpretive impact of images.
Reporters covering the Middle East are often confronted with situations where information is notoriously hard to verify and where confrontations with witnesses’ harsh realities can be extraordinarily intense. How does one deal with claims that there are no chemical weapons in Syria, for instance, if no foreign visitors are allowed to enter the neighbourhoods where the attacks allegedly took place? And how far does one go in adopting or contextualizing the story of a crying little girl blaming ‘terrorists’ for destroying her life if you are taken to her by a regime official, who considers every form of opposition an act of terror? Under such conditions, reporters can hardly rely upon seemingly self-evident routines, nor can they simply revert to general values such as impartiality or bearing witness without much further ado. Instead, they find themselves forced to make judgements on particular situations time and time again. Based on 14 in-depth interviews with Dutch and Flemish reporters covering Syria, this article sets out to identify, first, the challenging situations with which these journalists have been confronted, and second, how they have responded to these challenges through the use of particular professional strategies. To explore these challenges and strategies, the article develops a theoretical and methodological approach centred around situated value judgements.
To assist researchers studying the relationships between mass media messages and escalating conflict or peace-building, this article introduces two new datasets generated from Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the critical period before the Belfast Peace Agreement’s ratification. The first, the Northern Ireland Media Dataset (NIMD), contains coded data from a stratified, systematic random sample of articles from the three daily newspapers plus available articles from two paramilitary-related publications. The second, the Northern Ireland Community Relations Dataset (NICRD), resulted from merging one existing database – the Northern Ireland section of the Global Terrorism Database from the University of Maryland (College Park) – with the University of Ulster’s Chronology of the Conflict and coding the combined data for new variables that signify degrees of antagonism, non-antagonism, or peace-building. The latter set contains significant events, such as acts of violence, demonstrations, ceasefires, elections and peace rallies. Together and with other datasets, the NIMD and NICRD help researchers analyze and measure different aspects of mass media messages in either the escalation of violence or building peace in one conflict region. As a small showcase of the data, the research tests one hypothesis of newsworthiness in times of conflict and peacemaking, demonstrating that news norms of drama, conflict and events favor coverage of political parties like Sinn Fein, which used these norms to become the most covered political party during this time.
Some international crises – such as the Cuban Missile Crisis – receive widespread media coverage, while others are barely reported at all. Does this matter for the behavior of the dispute participants? Can widespread media coverage change the course of history? The authors’ goal is to assess how varying levels of coverage in elite news sources – The New York Times and The Times of London – influence the outcomes of international crises. Their analysis of over 300 dispute dyads indicates that, even after controlling for potential endogeneity and standard explanations of dispute outcomes, higher levels of media exposure make it more likely that targets of threats will escalate crises.
This work examines the ways in which YouTube videos inform audiences about international news, issues, and events. As new media increasingly becomes the public’s primary news source, research has produced conflicting contentions of how, and to whom, information is conveyed. Some studies have found Twitter and Facebook to be important tools for social organization and facilitating political involvement. Others, however, assert that these media act as echo chambers, reinforcing preexisting views rather than providing new information or perceptions. This research analyzes videos pertaining to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to reveal how they provide information. The findings show that the methods – empirical and visceral – used to frame information in YouTube videos correspond to the narratives supported by the uploaders. Additionally, the results indicate YouTube videos are watched by a heterogeneous public and have the potential to transcend selective exposure and present viewers with new information and perspectives.
This article analyzes how visual scopic regimes of military drones configure violence as a form of man hunting. For the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, man hunting embodies a type of cynegetic (hunting related) violence, which military drones can execute by power surveillance. Research often focuses on the political, legal, anthropological, and ethical aspects of this type of violence; the aspects of its visual framing are often underexposed. In order to change this shortcoming, this article draws attention to the medial aspects of this violence by investigating the drone’s scopic regime. The scopic regime refers to the drone’s visual configuration, i.e. its ocular operations of capture, its optical perspective on the target, the visual sensing of the drone pilot, as well as the target’s range of vision. Three scopic dimensions of military drones, namely hypervisibility, visual immersion, and invisibility are investigated. In doing so, this article explores how drones stage, interpret, convey, mediate, and execute violence as man hunting. Excursions to the works of contemporary visual artists are conducted in order to illustrate aesthetic interventions against the drone’s visual superpower.
The commemoration of wartime often has emerged alongside brutal practices waged on the enemy, and the photographed events at Abu Ghraib are no exception. Indeed, the composition of these images builds upon a visual history in which certain dynamics are represented within more general and often innocuous combat photography. This article focuses on two things in order to articulate this premise. The first is to outline how ‘war trophy photography’ is the result of the entwined practices of war photography and trophy collection. Mapped using a combined comparative historical approach and visual semiotics, this research draws upon three images, one from WWI, another from WWII, and one from Abu Ghraib. Specifically to highlight how posing within these photos acknowledges the images as trophies, the second function of this article emerges with the concept of ‘commemorative violence’, as the representation is fused with emotional communication and cultural memory.
In this article, the authors examine the ways in which the social movement in Ireland opposed to the Iraq war was represented in the national press. The article draws upon data generated by the largest research project of its type ever conducted in an Irish context. The authors considered representations of the anti-war movement in 11 daily and Sunday newspapers over a period of 9 months. One of the principal threads that ran through newspaper coverage of the time centred upon concerns about the possible ‘economic consequences’ of opposing the war against Iraq. A close reading of the data reveals that the familiar reliance of journalists on official sources and interpretations ensured that the national press tended to cast the anti-war movement in Ireland as a danger to both the regional and national economy at a time of seemingly unprecedented prosperity.
To contribute to analysis of the interplay between sport and politics, this study examines Jewish-Israeli attitudes towards the Iranian football team during the 2014 World Cup tournament. A survey amongst a representative sample of the Jewish-Israeli population reveals that the Iranian team was the least favored team to win the games but, at the same time, young and secular respondents were more likely than other groups to believe that the Iranian team is not controlled by their government. An analysis of Israeli sportscasters’ comments during Iran’s games reveals that the sportscasters regularly referred to the Iranian team as representatives of a terror state. In contrast, an analysis of online mentions of the Iranian team reveals that many of the comments were positive and empathized with Iranian soccer fans. The findings strengthen the notion that sport and politics are fused, but also illuminate that the World Cup games promoted realms, albeit peripheral, of less dichotomist stereotyping.
This article examines the influence of national identity on coverage of human rights and international law. Based on a content analysis of New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today’s coverage of torture at Abu Ghraib and the Obama administration’s expansion of drone warfare, it is argued that the news media largely protects the American identity by ignoring or marginalizing considerations of human rights and international law, despite these issues being central to the events. This research posits that the news media adheres to the Dan Rather Maxim named after long-time CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, who noted that in times of conflict the press tends to ‘follow the flag’. In other words, national identity informs and ultimately skews coverage of conflicts. This article adds to the existing scholarship on social and national identity biases in the news by giving primacy to international law and human rights frames during controversial periods. The content analysis finds that the actions of US political actors and institutions do not receive ample treatment when viewed through the lens of human rights and international humanitarian law.
In their 2014 article in Terrorism and Political Violence, Ayalon, Popovich and Yarchi proposed a different strategy for states to better manage asymmetric conflict, presenting the notion of ‘imagefare’ – ‘the use, or misuse, of images as a guiding principle or a substitute for traditional military means to achieve political objectives’ (p. 12). The current study tests their theoretical framework, and examines whether the use of imagefare as part of a political actor’s conflict strategy improves its foreign image as presented by its ability to promote its preferred frames to the foreign press. The study compares the foreign media’s coverage of two recent rounds of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in one of which (operation ‘Pillar of Defence’) image considerations played a significant role in the Israeli policy-making process. Findings suggest that whenever a country uses imagefare as part of its strategy, it increases its ability to promote its preferred messages to the foreign press and to improve the country’s image.
This article analyses magazines and books of Nazi propaganda representing meat in order to demonise the Jews. Nazism adopted controversial policies on meat. On the one hand, it banned vegetarian associations; on the other hand, Hitler and many Nazi officials professed their vegetarianism. Moreover, Nazi Animal Protection Law protected animals from the same tortures that the Nazis inflicted in the concentration camps. The article draws on Bauman’s theory that Nazism may be understood through the opposition purity/impurity, and on Gambrill‘s propaganda studies. Moreover, it is based on Elias’s Civilising Process and on Fullbrook’s ‘uncivilising process’. Finally, it focuses on other studies on Nazism and on ancient myths on animals revived by the Nazis. Qualitative propaganda and semiotic analysis focuses on Jews dealing with producing, selling and eating meat. Magazines and books have been sampled according to maximum variation strategy, and therefore this study focuses on a great variety of propagandistic images and texts. Results show that propaganda targeted the Jewish slaughterers, dealers, butchers and eaters in order to represent them as involved in the uncivilising process. In the end, meat contributed to the representation of the Jew as ‘impure’. Related to this, blood is overrepresented and is often part of a code of violence that depicts the Jew as separate from the rest of the world, as threatening the German civilising process and, again, as impure. Moreover, the symbolic meat eating contributed to the fabrication of the legend of the Jews as human flesh eaters. Finally, propaganda for children conveyed the Nazi criminal message more directly than any other form.
A significant part of a modern war entails the struggle over news frames to influence public opinion. Studying these news frames in a comparative international context may offer insights into the factors behind frame construction. The 2006 Lebanon–Israel war offers a well-defined case for such comparative study. This study examined how mainstream Arab, Israeli and US television networks framed the conflict. It found strong regional framing trends explained as an outcome of the interplay of political, economic and cultural factors that confined each network’s journalistic practices. The trends revealed a strong correlation between Israeli and US news framing, with some exceptions, and a division between two Arab media camps, both of which generally offered framing supportive of Hezbollah.
This article is a descriptive comparative quantitative content analysis of the construction of Islam and Muslims in 2006–2007 in four Swedish publications – the liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter representing mainstream media, the Evangelical newspaper Dagen, the fundamentalist newspaper Världen idag representing the Christian right, and the journal SD-Kuriren, the official organ of the Sweden Democrats, a neo-nationalist party. The aim is to see where a chasm between those media that accept the presence of Muslims and Islam in Sweden, and those that do not, occurs. The results put the liberal Dagens Nyheter and the Evangelical Dagen on one side of the divide and the fundamentalist Världen idag and the neo-nationalist SD-Kuriren on the other. Världen idag and SD-Kuriren tend to describe Muslims and Islam as threatening, and ‘our’ elite as retreating. In these two media, Muslims are consistently described as aggressive and the cause of social and political problems. Finally, in both media, Muslims are related to negative behavior; good Muslim behavior is constantly disregarded, while bad behavior is assumed to reflect their true character. Världen idag also claims that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Liberal Dagens Nyheter and Evangelical Dagen avoid describing Muslims and Islam as a threat and more often seek constructive solutions to different problems. Dagens Nyheter moreover describes conflicts between Muslim and Christian actors in political, not religious, terms. Dagen also sees Muslims and Christians alike as victims of the forces of secularization.
Studies of US and UK media reveal that the press adheres to a dichotomous religion-based us/them worldview that portrays Muslims as terrorists but ‘repairs’ the image of Jews and Christians as criminals, creating concerns that the Western media promotes a clash-of-civilizations thinking pattern. To examine whether this pattern is representative of other Western democracies, the authors analyzed Israeli press coverage of Jewish settlers’ attacks against Palestinians (N = 134) and Norwegian press coverage of Anders Breivik’s 2011 attacks (N = 223). Content analysis reveals that the Israeli and Norwegian media labeled all the perpetrators ‘terrorists’, the attacks ‘terror’, and the motivation as ‘ideology’ rather than solely mental. The perpetrators – all subscribing to right-wing ideology – were not vindicated despite being Jewish or Christian. Beyond weakening the clash-of-civilizations notion that terrorism discourse in the West is necessarily religion-related, the findings highlight that the US press was ironically more eager than the Israeli media to ‘repair’ the image of Jewish perpetrators. The authors discuss the implications of our findings and suggest directions for future studies of biases in terrorism discourse.
The importance of bearing witness to what is transpiring in harrowing circumstances is a lynchpin of war and conflict reporting. More often than not in recent years, however, the person first on the scene with a camera has been an ordinary citizen, if not one of the combatants themselves. Accordingly, this article explores a number of pressing questions confronting news photographers – both professionals of the craft and bystanders offering improvised contributions to newsmaking – committed to relaying what they see unfolding before them, however disturbing it may be. More specifically, the discussion focuses on two crisis events recurrently characterised as ‘terror attacks’ in the US and British press: the bombing of the Boston marathon in April 2013, and the killing of a British soldier in Woolwich, southeast London, the following month. Drawing on a visual analysis of the photo-reportage of these attacks, the author examines diverse forms of citizen witnessing and their potential to reinvigorate photojournalism’s social contract to document conflicting truths.
This article analyzes how the Norwegian news media framed the terrorist attacks in Oslo and the island of Utöya, which killed 77 mainly young people on 22 July 2011. Did the news media favour or counteract the propaganda of the terrorist? After discussing earlier research about terrorism and media and presenting theories on news framing, results from a content analysis of 924 news articles in two major Norwegian newspapers during the first two weeks after the attacks are analyzed. The coverage of the attacks is found to be very descriptive, focused on the perpetrator as an individual, giving him questionable political exposure and not analyzing reasons and consequences on a political–societal level. The news framing functioned as a way of depoliticizing the terror attacks by portraying the attack as conducted by a lone lunatic in contrast to a politically motivated terrorist linked to right-wing extremism.
Mediated responses to reports of abuse during the Global War on Terror are puzzling. Few of the many revelations of abuse prompted concerted reactions (e.g. scandals), and those that did were often very similar to reports that were ignored. This article draws from empirical research into responses to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to develop new concepts that help untangle the mediatization of American wars. Feedback helps to model the variety of polemical interventions that are adopted in public discussions as a result of a scandal. The concept of feedforward, introduced here, enables us to model polemical interventions that develop within an organization in response to such feedback. Together, these concepts encourage greater sensitivity to the cultural horizon of mediated events. Further, they point to a new theoretical focus for mediatization research, namely the cycles of feedback and feedforward that help shape new forms of understanding and behaving within organizations.