A Writer Is His Cause: An Examination of American and British Press Coverage of Ken Saro-Wiwa

Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policy-making, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Its definitions are contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In spite of its common usage, there is little research about how sustainability is represented and refracted in public discourse in different national contexts. We examine British national press coverage of sustainability and sustainable development in 2015 in a cross-market sample of national newspapers. Our findings show that key international policy events and environmental and social justice frames are peripheral, while neoliberalism and neoliberal environmentalism vis-à-vis the promotion of technocratic solutions, corporate social responsibility and “sustainable” consumerism are the predominant frames through which the British news-media reports sustainability. This holds regardless of newspaper quality and ideological orientation.

On the basis of a corpus of British and German press coverage of European Union (EU) politics over the 1990s, the paper analyses uses of the geopolitical heart metaphor. Over the course of the 1990s, successive British governments promised to work at the heart of Europe. However, no one ever claimed that Britain was in the heart of Europe, even though other geographically peripheral parts of Europe (e.g. the Balkan peninsula) have been situated there by the British press. Instead, British media and politicians tended to foreground scenarios of heart illness or even heart failure to express scepticism towards further political and economic integration. Conversely, in German public discourse, the heart of europe seems to be most often proudly identified as a German one, with selected places in central Europe (Prague, Vienna, Wroclaw/Breslau) as ‘runners‐up’. On the basis of the corpus evidence, it is argued that the heart of europe metaphor plays a central role in EU-related political discourse, which links it to the tradition of BODY POLITIC concepts.

This paper examines the Turkish-Greek War on the Western Front during the National Struggle period of 1921 by analyzing British press coverage. The study aims to unveil how the Turkish-Greek fronts were portrayed in the British press. The research employs a comparative analysis method, assessing news and articles in the British press by comparing them with local sources. The study primarily focuses on news from Reuters, Associated Press, Havas agencies, as well as articles authored by newspaper reporters and war correspondents. The British press extensively covered the Greek occupation in Western Anatolia, which received strong support from the Allied forces, particularly the British. Initially, the Greek invasions were lauded, but starting in September 1921, the British press began reporting more negative developments regarding the Greek invasions and expressed admiration for Turkish progress. It is important to note that the British press did not maintain a consistent attitude throughout the Turco-Greek War. Furthermore, the stance of the British press significantly differed from the policy of the British government, indicating that the British press aligned its coverage with the evolving dynamics of the war. The British press predominantly featured news and statements from the victorious advancing side, while rarely including perspectives from the defeated and retreating side in the Turkish-Greek War.

A content analysis revealed that Britain's 'popular' press provided generally less health information to its relatively lower social class audience in comparison to the information provided by the 'quality' press to its upper class audience. The implications of these findings for the public, health educators and journalists are discussed.

This chapter emphasises the interpretative and evaluative features of British daily newspaper coverage of the Spanish Civil War, as well as their inter-relationship. It explores the extent and temporal distribution of civil war coverage in the British national daily press. Furthermore, it considers how the British press interpreted and evaluated the indigenous participants in the War. It then evaluates British press coverage of the immensely controversial policy of international non-intervention in the war and Britain's involvement in its formulation and sustenance. The data generally shows that press evaluations altered as the war progressed and many became markedly less hostile to the Republic. It also demonstrates that liberal and left-wing press opinion never wavered in its support for the Republic, even though their opinions as to how its interests could be best served certainly did.

(1993). Three days in November: An analysis of the British and French press coverage of the opening of the Berlin wall. Journal of Area Studies: Vol. 1, Perspectives on German Unification, pp. 37-52.

The British press, public and parliament are not generally thought to have played a significant role in the process of Britain’s decolonisation in Africa. Neither do most studies of the broad British metropolitan experience foreground the importance of African nationalism. This article begins to challenge both of these views by providing an assessment of the significance of the British press’s rather sensational treatment of an incident of late-colonial violence in the context of an African demonstration in Blantyre, Nyasaland, in 1960. African activists exploited the British press presence in Blantyre as a means of advancing the nationalist cause and fighting the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. British correspondents responded positively for a variety of ideological, political, personal, situational and institutional reasons. In addition, by 1960, the British press recognised the strength of African nationalism in the context of African violence and agitation across that continent in preceding months and years. Its critical articles, which interlocked with British parliamentary proceedings and specific sets of historical concerns, had important effects among two core readerships: sections of the white settler communities of the Federation, and the British Government.

Based on the analysis of 500 news articles in the British national press, this chapter examines the news coverage of the events that took place in the Gaza Strip between 1 April and 30 June 2021, when Palestinians protested against the decision of Israel’s Supreme Court to evict dozens of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. These protests were followed by the storming of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound by Israeli police forces, the launching of rockets into Israel by Hamas, and the targeting of the Gaza Strip by Israeli airstrikes. Combining content analysis and critical discourse analysis of the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mirror, the Sun and the Daily Mail, the chapter explores two main aspects of the coverage: (1) the description of different forms of violence, from ‘terrorism’ and ‘war crimes’ to ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation,’ and how some agents of violence were portrayed as more legitimate than others; and (2) how the clashes were situated in the broader historical conflict. The chapter concludes that journalists should take a more thematic approach to contextualise the conflict, in order to avoid the reductionist views that the British press often promotes.

This study aims to explore the representation of Turkey in the British news texts covering the Cyprus problem in the 2000s. The article goes on to question how the British broadsheet press represents Turkey, as one of the role-playing states in the fate of Cyprus. Using Said’s Orientalism and Young’s White Mythology as a theoretical basis for evaluation, a qualitative content analysis was utilized upon 45 news texts. Findings established that the othering of Turks was alive during this period. The British press portrayed Turkish people involved in the Cyprus problem as ‘dark-skinned Turks’, ‘from underdeveloped eastern Anatolia’ that ‘wear Islamic dress and have large families’ and are ‘settlers’ invaders or occupiers on the Cyprus island. Comparatively, the other role-players in the Cyprus problem (Greece, Greek Cypriots, and Turkish Cypriots) were less frequently Orientalized and not in the traditional sense, as presented by Said, their level of being orientalized relating to their relations with the British.

In this article, the authors draw upon the results from a substantial content and framing analysis of the British media's treatment of the 2003 Iraq War to show how Britain's national press managed their coverage of the initial combat phase of the war against the background of substantial public and elite opposition. They show that reporting was dominated by coverage of the ongoing battle, that newspapers offered a similar subject agenda to one another and that coalition actors were prominent and likely to be reported neutrally. But the article uncovers a substantial diversity of opinion and tone across the British press and identifies five different editorial approaches to the conflict which are sustained across the news and editorial pages of different newspapers. Through a closer examination, the authors attempt to account for the existence of these approaches in relation to the effects of public opposition to the war, patriotism and newspapers' longstanding political allegiances. Finally, they suggest that, in the British press at least, this plurality of opinions and forms of coverage offers a challenge to longstanding assumptions about the extent to which the media have tended to offer support to official positions in relation to war.

The imaginary of the Deep Web is commonly associated with crime, crypto markets and immoral content. However, the best-known Deep Web system, the Tor Network, is a technology developed to protect people’s privacy through online anonymity, in the context of the contemporary culture of surveillance, thus enabling civil liberties. To understand this contradiction, this thesis looks at the British press representation of the Deep Web and the Tor Network. An extensive empirical research study unveils how newspapers portray these technologies, by looking at meanings, uses and users. In order to meet this goal, this research conducts a content analysis of 833 articles about Deep Web technologies published between 2001 and 2017 by six British newspapers – tabloids Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Sun, and quality newspapers Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Times – and a critical discourse analysis of 58 reports mentioning the Tor Network, issued by the same newspapers, between 2008 and 2017. The findings demonstrate that the British press represents the Deep Web in a sharply negative way, through negative concepts, definitions and associations. This portrayal attributes opacity to the Deep Web, engendering distrust of its uses and propagating user stereotypes that reflect an overall criminalisation of privacy. Also, the press presents a hyper- panic approach by consistently connecting this new medium to well-known social anxieties and portraying these technologies as undesirable, immoral and illegal. Hyper-panic is the theoretical contribution of this thesis and can be explained as the way in which media panic (the Deep Web, in this case) multiplies moral panic (for instance, terrorism, paedophilia and drug consumption). Specifically about Tor, this work concludes that the media present multiple aspects of this system, from discussing the ways in which one can enable civil liberties, to condemning criminals hiding behind technology, addressing the inherent ambivalence connected to the uses of online anonymity, i.e. it is neither completely bad nor completely good. The general synopsis about Tor, however, is still negative. Finally, the consistent association by the British press between the Deep Web and criminal and antisocial behaviours promotes a dissociation between the Deep Web and the Web itself, in that cyberspace is separated between negative uses (the Deep Web) and positive uses (the Web), instead of being understood as a nuanced whole.

The Irish question and women’s suffrage were two noteworthy topics of debate in Britain and Ireland in the period surrounding the Great War. Both questions challenged British constitutional politics, split opinion, and prompted newspaper coverage. This article is interested in the debates as they occurred in Britain. Through a case study of two British suffrage newspapers, The Suffragette/Britannia (1912–18) and The Woman’s Dreadnought/The Workers’ Dreadnought (1914–24), edited respectively by Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, this article investigates how British suffrage press reported on Ireland. It asks: how did British suffrage press coverage of the Irish question develop throughout 1912–18? It argues The Suffragette/Britannia and The Woman’s Dreadnought/The Workers’ Dreadnought are useful representations of the Pankhurst sisters’ diverging political opinion, which also evoked wider women’s suffrage themes, and how the Great War and immediate post-war period shaped and interacted with the competing political priorities of women’s suffrage and the Irish question.

Between 1990 and 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa led a prominent peaceful campaign for the recognition and just treatment of his community by the military dictatorship of General Abacha. As author and activist, he wrote - and generally self-published - across a huge range of genres: novels, plays, short stories, children's tales, poetry, histories, political tracts, diaries, satires, and newspaper columns. He used the versatility of the written medium to speak out internationally about the abuses suffered by his small Niger Delta minority community, the Ogoni. Meanwhile, his efforts at home as leader of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, helped to mobilise a mass protest, 300,000-strong, against Shell Oil in January 1993, following which the company withdrew from the area. He was hanged on 10th November 1995 on trumped-up murder charges along with eight fellow Ogoni activists.

British news media were central to the amplification of health risk concerns in the late 1990s and early 2000s such as mobile phone radiation, genetically modified foods and the MMR vaccine, which made an international impact. Few comparable examples seemed to follow, suggesting this was a distinctive period of risk amplification. This impression was investigated both qualitatively and quantitatively. Content analyses were conducted on a corpus of British risk reporting (n = 63,423) from across the range of daily national newspapers. Quantitative content analysis investigated changes to the volume of risk-based news publication, alongside the expression of sensationalist and politicising language. The qualitative content analysis utilised a rhetorical framing analysis to explore the changes to risk amplifying news frames across a sample of highly amplified news stories (n = 1490). The framing analysis sought to investigate temporal changes to the expression of uncertainty, certainty, blame, trust, stigma and dread within risk reporting. We found evidence that there was an early peak period and subsequent waning of amplification. Further, we identified four distinct periods of risk reporting which are elaborated in the paper: a period of low risk amplification between 1985-1994; a second period of high-risk amplification between 1995-2004; a third period of low but distinct amplification between 2005-2014; and an ongoing contemporary and more speculatively defined period from 2015 of higher amplification.

<p align="JUSTIFY"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Sport uważa się za uosobienie procesów międzykulturowych dzięki łączeniu ludzi w zgodnych działaniach przy jednoczesnym generowaniu konfliktów między nimi. Ta dwoistość sportu często znajduje odbicie w medialnych sprawozdaniach z imprez sportowych. Niniejszy artykuł przedstawia rezultat badań nad tekstami w prasie brytyjskiej i irlandzkiej poświęconymi finałom Mistrzostw Europy w piłce nożnej (Euro 212) rozgrywanym w Polsce i na Ukrainie, prowadzonych pod kątem ich międzykulturowego oddziaływania. Ton doniesień w gazetach pochodzących z dwu sąsiednich krajów i często należących do tych samych koncernów okazał się bardzo różny. Prasa brytyjska nie dostrzegła obszarów kulturowego zbliżenia między gospodarzami a gośćmi mistrzostw, przyjmując taktykę powielania znanych swoim czytelnikom historycznie utrwalonych stereotypów kulturowego i cywilizacyjnego zacofania Europy Wschodniej. Relacje o kulturowej interakcji Polaków i Irlandczyków zamieszczane w prasie irlandzkiej, choć w większości bardzo pozytywne, także opierały się na stereotypach i banalnych uogólnieniach o obu nacjach. Badanie wykazało, że zarówno doniesienia w prasie brytyjskiej jak i w irlandzkiej rządziły się wewnętrzna logiką i interesami tych mediów, a nie troską o jakość efektów międzykulturowych. </span></span></p><p> </p><p align="CENTER"> </p>