Western Media Coverage Research Articles

Neocolonial Subtext In Western Media Coverage Of Ukrainian Crisis

Abstract The article examines one of the key factors of modern European philosophy and outlook - neocolonialistic and orientalistic mentality of nowadays Europe and its impact on the informatioanal sphere and the character of inernational relations. Neocolonialism and orientalism are, thus, studied in the context of the analysis of western media coverage of Ukrainian crisis which occasionaly appears to be stereotyped and deeply engaged.

The Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict through the prism of the British media and The New York Times, 1988–1994

This article applies discourse analysis to examine the coverage of the Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict by the leading British media outlets, such as BBC TV, The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times and The Independent from February 1988, which is the widely accepted date of the start of the current stage of the conflict, to May 1994, when a ceasefire agreement was signed, and to compare it with the coverage of the conflict by The New York Times. It argues that the coverage of the conflict by the studied British and the US media outlets was influenced by such factors as the sources of information of correspondents, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, riots in the UK and the USA, perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new realities it brought. The article contributes to a better understanding of Western media coverage of different conflicts around the world, Western media practices and their impact on Western public opinion.

Of Protests and Riots: The Media Coverage of June 2009 Events in Iran and those of August 2011 in Britain

In the wake of America’s post - 9/11 ”anti-terrorist” policies the old scenario of regime-change in Iran entered a new phase. The media coverage of the 2009 presidential election and especially the election aftermath in Iran, believed by many to be unprecedented in the history of Western media coverage of any presidential election, was clearly in line with color revolution strategies. Predictably, the BBC and VOA played a key role. Soon afterward, the August and September 2011anti-capitalism protests in London and New York provided a good chance once again to test the Western governments’ claim of respecting their people’s “right-to-protest.” Focusing mostly on the BBC’s coverage of the two events, as a case study, and drawing upon insights from colonial and postcolonial studies and critical discourse analysis, this study attempts to investigate how the BBC recontextualized and reported the post-election “protests” in Iran and August 2011 anti-capitalism “riots” in Britain through prepackaged information.

Domesticating the Internet in a South-Western Chinese Town

This chapter draws on ethnographic evidence to examine the social implications of different methods of internet access on family life and kinship in a county-town in south west China. As opposed to many established theoretical approaches to the internet, which have places an emphasis on the separateness of online and offline spaces, this paper asserts that an ethnographic approach to the internet (as advocated by Miller & Slater, 2000; Miller, 2011) lends itself to a better understanding of both of these domains, and the interconnectedness between them. Adopting such an approach in this fieldsite precipitates two sociological observations: first, for young people who use the internet in the town, these online spaces predominantly provide mediated communication with pre-existing networks of friends in their immediate offline social world; secondly, that young people’s patronage of internet cafes to undertake these forms of communication with their peers necessitates an absence from an altogether different network: the kinship network of parents, grandparents and family.Parents respond to their children’s absence with anxiety regarding their offspring’s vulnerability to an array of dangers perceived to be located in the ‘offline’ environment of the internet cafe (i.e. disease, dirt, radiation, immoral people, etc.); which far outweigh concerns they have for hazards that may exist online. This paper thus argues that the online occupies a unique place in these parents’ social imaginary, which cannot be assumed to align itself with certain Western discourses which portray online spaces as potentially dangerous or damaging to those that inhabit them (Turkle, 2011). Furthermore, rather than displaying awareness of, or resistance to, apparently monolithic nationwide-level state controls of the internet (which are often afforded precedence in Western media coverage), the town’s parents’ exhibit far more concern with local government measures and controls on keeping the environs of the town’s internet cafes safe.This overriding concern with the safety of the environment of internet cafes, rather than online safety, has provoked a particular parental response. Parents in the town are adopting, in ever-increasing numbers, home broadband connections chiefly in an attempt to regain the presence of their children at home. This chapter will illustrate that the introduction of home broadband, however, creates a series of unexpected consequences in the home, challenging the flows and patterns of everyday life in the domestic sphere. The paper will argue that the degree of success to which such internet technologies are able to become integrated into family life is dependent on the extent to which these technologies challenge or sustain pre-existing routines within the home.

News values, cultural proximity and cross-cultural media framing: How western and Muslim media covered Darfur

Abstract This article is an academic investigation of the burgeoning trend of cross-cultural transfer of images within the current global communication scene, in which a dominant technology is transcending political borders and geographical barriers, and threatening to create a global audience with a unified public opinion. News values, sensationalism and cross-cultural framing of news are three constructs pertinent to the investigation of the Darfur coverage in the international and Muslim media. The article compares western media coverage and frames of the Darfur crisis with the coverage and frames present in two newspapers from the Muslim world. It tests the hypothesis that, in the absence of Islamic proximity as a news value, sensationalism-driven western news sources continue to dominate the news scene and, as a result, pass the negative characterization of Islam and Muslims to the Muslim world through a process of cross-cultural framing.

Terrorism and news of Africa post-9/11 coverage in The New York Times

Western media coverage of the world decreased considerably in the post-Cold War world. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the western response appeared, to a limited degree, to have contributed to some renewed media interest in the outside world – primarily the parts of it that were seen as threatening western interests. But to what degree has this applied to Africa, a part of the world that has been perhaps most consistently marginalized by both policy-makers and the media? Did media coverage of Africa in the West rise following 9/11? If so, to what degree was this rise attributable to issues of terrorism or the response? Furthermore, was coverage of Africa related to terrorism focused primarily on western concerns or did they apply to a broader variety of terrorism in Africa? With a particular focus on the United States, this study aims to answer these questions using quantitative analysis of coverage of Africa by The New York Times pre- and post 9/11.

His bloody materials: Reasons for adapting Yasuzo Masumura's Red Angel into a tragic opera set in 1990s Sudan

ABSTRACTThis article proposes an examination of this opera librettist's engagement with Masumura Yasuzo's Red Angel (1966), a violent and tragic love story set during the Sino-Japanese war. Why does Masumura's work provide a structural model for addressing the recent history of suffering and war in sub-Saharan Africa? What are the formal devices from Masumura's theatre background and films that provide the ground for the contemporary librettist developing new aesthetic strategies for addressing the extreme? The article offers an account of the journey to the adaptation; a description of a parallel scene from the film and adaptation; and a speculative discussion of the relationship between Japanese theatre and the film. The article points towards an aesthetic model for the informed ‘reading’ of contemporary events with the split attentiveness of closeness and distance, replacing the emotional immersion or forgetful distancing sometimes induced by mainstream western performance forms and media coverage of extreme events.

Climate Change Coverage in Indian Print Media: A Discourse Analysis

Climate change has attracted much political and media attention in recent years. While western media coverage of this issue has been well-documented, there is a paucity of media analysis for climate change coverage in developing economies. This paper examines the media discourse generated in India among three leading English-language dailies (with centrist and conservative news values) during globally prominent climate change events. A quantitative analysis shows a peak in coverage when the Fourth Assessment Report by the IPCC was released in February 2007, and when climate change crusaders won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2007. A qualitative content analysis reveals that frames such as scientific certainty, energy challenge, social progress, public accountability and looming disaster are widely employed by the elite Indian press to raise relevant social, economic and political issues. Cross-cultural comparisons of media constructs, especially with Europe and America, help identify the further development of risk communication in this field. In a broader, global sense, this work can be tied in to the idea of the ‘climatic turn’ as suggested by European researchers with climate change evolving into a grand, transnational narrative.

Media and conflict in Sierra Leone: national and international perspectives of the civil war

The rise of the media in Sierra Leone. The media and the civil conflict. The evolution of the conflict. The Western media perspective of a "barbaric" Africa. Western media coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone: the British example. The role of NGOs in news reporting.The end of the twentieth century saw an adverse escalation in armed conflict. A characteristic of this was that whilst the majority of wars that took place before the 1990s were fought between states, conflicts post 1990 progressively began to take place within countries. The doctrines of major world powers no longer seemed to determine the ideologies and objectives of warring groups and, almost as a new war strategy, combatants started to target civilians rather than fighting sections in order to achieve their objectives. Atrocities began to be the statements that publicised political positions. In countries that were rich in natural resources, such as diamonds, the political goals of wars were often linked to the complex logics of resource appropriation (Bangura, 2004).Rather than providing an account of the events that shaped the unfolding of the civil war in Sierra Leone, this paper focuses on the analysis of the role that the media played in elaborating the perception of those events, both at a national and international level. A theoretical examination of the impact of the conflict’s media coverage - which has been explored and reviewed by authors such as Khan (1998) and Shaw (2006) - is conducted and its effect of the war explained.The growth of the Sierra Leonean press is discussed and its limitations reviewed, examining both the financial and legislative constraints that characterised it, some of which derive from the colonial period. The role of the media is then evaluated in relation to the internal influence that “biased” journalism had on the shaping of the war, and how it impacted on the fighting. Finally, an example of the Western media coverage of the conflict is also reviewed within the context of theories that illustrate the way the African region is often regarded as an uncivilised and hopeless continent, where little can be done by the developed world to put an end to violence.

Representation of Africa Online: Sourcing Practice and Frames of Reference

The dominant perspective on the representation of Africa in the Western media claims that Western media coverage is bias and crisis oriented, and the liberal perspective claims that the coverage of Africa is not as negative as is often assumed. However, there is a paucity of literature on the representation of Africa online. This research inquiry is relevant because literature claims that the Internet has the potential to resolve the journalistic predicament of representing other culture through political participation and deliberation. But this requires a reorientation of the sourcing practice of news organization to embrace sensitivity to and knowledge of African cultures. Moreover, the journalistic predicament can be resolved or not depending on the newsgathering approach adopted by the news organization. Literature has identified two approaches, that is, “gatekeeping,” used mainly by dominant traditional media, and “gatewatching,” used by alternative media in their quest to counter mainstream ideology. This study examines the impacts of the gatewatching approach adopted by the Africa Have Your Say (AHYS) website on its representation and frames of reference of Africa. It uses onsite observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis to gather data. The study found that although the sourcing practice at the AHYS is elaborate and complex, the gatewatching approach makes its susceptible to second-level agenda setting. Hence, its frame repeats the attributes and tone used by the mainstream traditional media. However, a minority of users did not repeat this frame in their comments.

The Rise of China: media perception and implications for international politics

In recent years, the rise of China as an emerging great power has been widely perceived across the world. How has the rise of China been represented over time in the Western news media? Has the image of China as a rising power had any impact on the country's soft power? These questions remain unanswered but answering them is of great significance in helping us understand the impact of the news media on the transformation of international politics in the information age. This paper conducts a longitudinal study to examine the nature of Chinese coverage and explores how the image of a rising China—economically, politically, regionally and globally—has been represented in three transnational newspapers in Europe. It further argues that the Western media coverage of China's rise is as a soft power, which, to some extent, has an impact upon China's foreign relations.

Islamophobia – The Experience in Worlds Old and New

Organized jointly by the Australian Intercultural Society, the AustralianCatholic University, and Monash University together with the Gülen conferencea few days earlier, this conference was devoted to a particularly important and pressing topic: the anti-Islam discourse slowly becoming a standardfeature of western political competition and media coverage. As the topic issimilarly a rather polarizing one, an event of high scholarly quality could notbe taken for granted. However, this is just what organizers, speakers, andaudience managed to achieve during this event, held during 18-19 July 2009at Monash University in Melbourne. The phenomena subsumed under theterm Islamophobia, their expressions, preconditions, and multiple roots andfacets were discussed through different approaches in theoretical, descriptive,and analytical terms ...

The Conflict in the Caucasus

The war between Russia and Georgia (RGW) from 8–12 August 2008 triggered different interpretations. Although initially Western discourse and media coverage took at face value Georgia's version of the unfolding of the war, subsequent evidence has disproved the latter. Russia only reacted to an unprovoked attack on South Ossetia in the middle of the night, which caused hundreds of civilian deaths as well as those of many Russian peacekeepers. Much of the initial argument about Russia embarking on a ‘new Cold War’ does not, therefore, stand up to scrutiny. By examining the war and the developments that led to it—as well as the behaviour of Russia, the United States, the European Union and NATO—this article argues that, far from opening a new Cold War, the RGW may have been a turning point, but in a very different direction. It indicates the end of the ‘unipolar moment’ and the beginning of a new era in the international system, in which the imperative for recognition and respect of newly emerging or resurgent powers has come into its own.

Reporting Chinese human rights

: China's human rights issue has received a great deal of attention since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. How the news media cover human rights is important for a number of reasons beyond simply informing the public. However, the research on the nature of the Western media coverage of the Chinese human rights issue is largely absent. This article examines the nature of the European transnational media coverage of this issue from 1989 to 2005 and explores the factors influencing the development of coverage. The finding shows that there is little connection between the real world human rights situation in China measured by NGOs and the media coverage. Based on the analysis of western government policy and interviews with journalists, the article further argues that news values, the growing prominence of economic issues in media agenda and the sensitivity of diplomatic and political conflict are the factors that drive human rights reporting.

Media Coverage of Violent Deaths in Iraq: An Opportunistic Capture-Recapture Assessment

Western media coverage of the violence associated with the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has contrasted in magnitude and nature with population-based survey reports. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the extent to which first-hand reports of violent deaths were captured in the English language media by conducting in-depth interviews with Iraqi citizens. The England-based Iraq Body Count (IBC) has methodically monitored media reports and recorded each violent death in Iraq that could be confirmed by two English language media sources. Using the capture-recapture method, 25 Masters' Degree students were assigned to interview residents in Iraq and asked them to describe 10 violent deaths that occurred closest to their home since the 2003 invasion. Students then matched these reports with those documented in IBC. These reports were matched both individually and crosschecked in groups to obtain a percentage of those deaths captured in the English language media. Eighteen out of 25 students successfully interviewed someone in Iraq. Six contacted individuals by telephone, while the others conducted interviews via e-mail. One out of seven (14%) phone contacts refused to participate. Seventeen out of 18 primary interviewees resided in Baghdad, however, some interviewees reported deaths of neighbors that occurred while the neighbors were elsewhere. The Baghdad residents reported 161 deaths in total, 39 of which (24%) were believed to be reported in the press as summarized by IBC. An additional 13 deaths (8%) might have been in the database, and 61 (38%) were absolutely not in the database. The vast majority of violent deaths (estimated from the results of this study as being between 68-76%) are not reported by the press. Efforts to monitor events by press coverage or reports of tallies similar to those reported in the press, should be evaluated with the suspicion applied to any passive surveillance network: that it may be incomplete. Even in the most heavily reported conflicts, the media may miss the majority of violent events.

Making monsters: heterosexuality, crime and race in recent Western media coverage of HIV

In the early HIV epidemic, Western media coverage encouraged the idea that infection was linked to 'other' identities located outside the 'mainstream'; outside 'proper' heterosexuality. Today, however, HIV has become repositioned as a global heterosexual epidemic. Analyses show that since the 1990s Western media have shifted away from blame and hysteria to an increasingly routinised reporting of HIV as a health story and social justice issue. But recent years have seen the emergence of a new media story in many Western countries; the criminal prosecution for HIV-related offences, and with it a reframing of old discourses of 'innocence' and 'guilt', but now with heterosexuals in focus. We examine this story in recent domestic media coverage in Australia, a country where heterosexual HIV transmission is rare by global comparison. Echoing similar stories in other Western media, in Australian coverage the idea of criminal intent converges with the symbolic weight of black sexuality and African origins to produce a 'monstrous' masculinity, which at the local level taps into contemporary racial tensions and, in so doing, conjures an imagined Anglo-heterosexuality at once vulnerable to and safe from HIV in a globalised epidemic and world.

The CARMA Report: Western Media Coverage of Humanitarian Disasters

This 17-page article shares CARMA International research examining western media coverage of 6 humanitarian disasters: the earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir (October 8 2005), Hurricane Stanley (October 1 2005), Hurricane Katrina (August 23 2005), the Indian Ocean earthquake/Tsunami (December 26 2004), the earthquake in Bam, Iran (December 26 2003), and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan (since February 2003). The purpose was to ascertain what factors drive western media interest by investigating the relationship between media coverage and national interest to gain a sense of the cultural and economic tenor of relationships between the disaster region and those nations writing about it.

Synlighet, status och strategisk skillnad? Attityder till slöjan efter den 11 september

On September 11 2001 the world was changed, butforwhom and how? In hercriticaianalyses, Alison Donnell scrutinizes the attitudes to veiling in the Western media coverage after the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The human rights abuses, and especially the sanctioned violence against women in Taliban Afghanistan had been known for many years, but was post-September 11 suddenly made media-visible - on Western terms. And in the massive coverage the veil or headscarf soon became an effective symbol of oppression. The former Orientalist gaze is being replaced, Donnell argues, by an Islamophobic. The veil, formerly viewed as an object of mystique, exotism and eroticism, is becominga highly visible sign of a despised difference. Consequently, in spite of several women's organisations opposingthe Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and in spite of the mutiple functions and values of the veil in different Islamic communities, the veiled woman is constantly represented as a passive victim and as a visual reminder of the incommensurability between Western and Islamic societies.

Read the Whole Thing: Journalism, Weblogs and the Re-Mediation of the War in Iraq

This paper examines a particular form of online activity — weblogging — and how it has allowed for specific new forms of popular political communication in the context of the Second Gulf War. After describing the basics of weblogging, the paper discusses Western media coverage of the war and then shows how ‘warbloggers’ positioned themselves vis-à-vis media coverage and propaganda, creating commentaries that frequently combined media and political criticism. While bloggers of every political hue offered a range of perspectives and personal styles, some general tendencies are evident in warblogging discourse. The piece ends by questioning the significance of warblogging in terms of its potential contribution to democratic communication.

The Mystification of Culture

In Western media coverage, Japan is portrayed as a country defined by its difference from the West. The repeated emphasis on cultural difference is a coded way of discussing racial difference. Examples discussed include British press coverage of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. A similar `racial' conception of culture also underpins academic analyses of Japanese cultural difference, for example in anthropology. Far from offering an explanation, the tendency is to mystify culture by treating it as the starting point for analysis, rather than examining its social and historical roots. Cultural studies has attempted to challenge essentialist conceptions of identity and difference by treating cultural phenomena as operating `like a language'. Yet similar problems - of dehistoricizing culture, naturalizing differences and making culture appear as a determining force - beset this approach too.