Panel 5: Reporting the Conflict
Chair: Dr Prasun Sonwalkar
Examining newspapers as representational and documentation modes of communication
Claudia Heske, University of Pittsburgh (US)
imperialism, nationalism, discourse, objective, mode of production
Relying on archival research, particular events occurring during the First World War will be singled out that generated articles in the popular press, and acts of close reading will be performed to see which journalistic styles and techniques are being used to relate the details of wartime events. I will also explore how imperialism is featured, either as an implicit or an explicit construct, when journalists write articles concerning global affairs. This focus on the thematic representation of war and the epistemological supposition of an imperialist order in newspapers will show the ways in which a nationalist discourse is configured. Newspaper reports are ideally thought of as a transparent and impartial medium. However, in studying the links between the mass production and circulation of popular newspapers, the dramatic increase of a literate public, and the state of the British imperialist project in the early twentieth century, journalism’s so-called transparent discourse can be fundamentally questioned.
The second half of the paper will briefly discuss a current political or wartime issue and examine how it is handled in the contemporary press to demonstrate the influences of ideologically constructed language in a so-called objective medium. The 2005 London tube and bus-bombing reports will serve as a contemporary example of a highly publicized event in Britain. This wartime event will be examined in two respects: (1) how the press treated the issue of national security in light of a terrorist attack on British soil, and (2) how the press treated “other” British subjects during wartime.
The battle for hearts and minds: the media relations of the antiwar movement
Ian Taylor, Loughborough University
antiwar activism, grassroots activism, local media
With rare exceptions research into the workings and significance of the local media in Britain has been thin on the ground. Worse, is that in spite of some recent research into the matter, the role of the local press into political communications is even more neglected. By focusing on the controversy surrounding the Iraq war, this paper seeks to go some way towards redressing that imbalance by examining the relationships between a sample of locally based anti-war activists and the local press in their respective areas, who after all, they sought to engage with in order to make a case against the conflict.
Based on the content analysis of a sample of local papers, this article will present a general summary of the main trends in the reporting of the controversy. It was found that in the main, opposition to military action was reported in a non-hostile manner so long as the activists confined themselves to ‘moderate’ arguments and ‘reasonable’ behaviour. In no sense however, could they be said to ‘set the agenda’: government news management and international developments guided the reporting, even when the paper’s editorials expressed scepticism about the case for military action. The limited nature of any success that anti-war activists may have had in making their case then, must be accounted for in terms of their arguments being refracted through the prism and imperatives of more long standing media logic. These arguments are supported by research also based on surveys and interview testimonies.
Explaining media frames of contested foreign conflicts - Irish national newspapers' frames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (July 2000 to July 2004)
Mary O'Regan, University of Stirling
foreign newspaper coverage, frame analysis, social construction, Israeli-Palestinian conflict
This proposed presentation will outline the findings of PhD research that analysed how four Irish national newspapers – The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune – framed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from July 2000 to July 2004. This research applied a social construction model of media analysis that integrated four different, yet interrelated research methodologies: contextual analyses of the historical and political environments characterizing the arenas of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Irish-Israeli relations and Irish-Palestinian relations; a longitudinal, descriptive newspaper analysis; a qualitative frame analysis of newspaper discourses; and finally, exploratory interviews with key media, political/diplomatic and NGO actors.
Two sets of significant findings emerged from this research. Firstly, it was concluded that the politico-cultural context supplied by Ireland’s “small state” and post-colonial status, its consequent lack of “hard” foreign policies towards the Middle East, as well as its official dependency on UN and EU worldviews, influenced these newspapers’ treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Media factors, such as the overall level of media commitment to foreign news coverage and prevailing levels of inter-media competition, as well as the operation of intrinsic news factors, such as resource constraints, editorial judgments and news values, also had important constructivistimplications for news outcomes. Secondly, this study’s qualitative frame analysis found that the sampled newspapers constituted themselves as contested sites (albeit unequal sites), variously displaying the assertions and frames of competing Israeli and Palestinian political sources, rather than exclusively transmitting hegemonic, or elitist frames.
Taken together, these findings strongly critique the propaganda, indexing, hegemonic and political control perspectives that have characterized research to date. In contrast, this PhD research concluded that competing conflict protagonists’ level of media access is best viewed as a constructed and achieved outcome, which changes in line with developments in the wider political and media environments and changes in the operation of news factors.
Telling the Truth about war? The role of the media in conflict
Yennue Zarate Valderrama, University of Westminster
The objective of the PhD research project is to study the Journalism within conflict particularly the Peace Journalism, a new approach, which put forward the news reporting by emphasizing peace and conflict solution. The intention is to analyse what Peace Journalism is, their origins, philosophy, history, the critical reflections among journalists and academia, and the effects of this approach. The purpose is to test the effectiveness by the use of a case study, whether it functions in practice and the way it works, particularly if has influence in conflict resolution and on the building of peace.
The media and conflict is a topic that has been studied exhaustively over recent decades, however the relationship between media and peace has been a subject far less studied within the communication discipline. One reason could be the nature of the contemporary media that has the tendency to show violence, tragedies and conflicts as their most important news content. On the other hand as Wolfsfeld (2004:2) mentions, reporting peace efforts in the media takes a longer period of time, because the construction of peace is a slow and difficult process, which the essence of the contemporary media tends to avoid.
The arguments on how media should handle a conflict and the war-reporting discourses are the centre of the current debate in the field. According to Allan (2004:13) includes: ‘issues of censorship influence and propaganda, “us” and “them” narratives, access to sources, “24/7 rolling news”, “CNN Effect’, “embedded”, and “unilateral reporters”, visual images of war, tension between objectivity, patriotism and humanitarianism’. Phillip Knightley (2003) examines the journalist’s role in promoting war, and the myth surrounding the war correspondent seen as a real journalist and a celebrity with a hierarchy of status. Within the on-going discussion of war reporting, some journalists have analysed the ways of contemporary war/conflict reporting, as a consequence certain scholars and professionals have become unsatisfied with the journalistic practices and norms, and have proposed that war news can be reported different, by using the peace journalism approach.
In this regard, the discourse that journalists use is important, whether it is (Kapuscinski 2003:2) ‘the one that foments comprehension and understanding or the one that foments aggression against the other’. Media information within conflict can play a negative or positive role or depending on the case could play both roles or neither, according to particular circumstances and conjuncture, media can play both roles or neither in conjunction with the socio-political, historical, economic context - that can increase or decrease misunderstanding and propagate violence or vice versa. Many humanitarian disasters and conflicts has been exacerbated by the media mentions Metzl (1997:1) ‘radio spread Nazi propaganda, Somali warlords used to propagate violence, radio and television fomented ethnic animosity and bloodshed in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia’ about the Milosevic’s media control to justify and promote ethnic fear ‘, or what Thompson (1999) called the ethnic nationalist media that had an important role in forging the war, however as happens in other civil conflicts, are originated, developed and promoted by political forces, and the journalism played role in manufacturing the conflict.
Panel 1: Imperialism and Globalisation
Panel 2: Online Citizens and Democracy
Panel 3: Television Audiences
Panel 4: Mediating Identity 1
Panel 5: Reporting the Conflict
Panel 6: Journalism and Social Responsibility
Panel 7: Sexual Representations in Cinema
Panel 8: Popular Culture
Panel 9: Still Image
Panel 10: Branding, Advertising and Corporate Cultures
Panel 11: Film and Theatre
Panel 12: Alternative Film
Panel 13: Feminism, Gender and Identity
Panel 14: Fan Culture and Online Audiences
Panel 15: Public Service Broadcasting and Radio
Panel 16: Design for Screen
Panel 17: Uses of Music and Sound in Film
Panel 18: Mediating Identity 2
Panel 19: Citizens, Interaction and the Public Interest |
