Western News Media Research Articles

Tangled Web: The Syrian Civil War and Its Implications

Western news media outlets have paid considerable attention to the civil war in Syria, but much of the coverage is simplistic and melodramatic. Too many accounts portray the conflict as a Manichean struggle between the evil, brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad and noble freedom fighters seeking to create a new, democratic Syria. The reality is far more complex and murky. Syria’s turmoil has troubling, long-term implications not only for that country but for the Middle East as a whole, and even for the international system. The searing images of civilian casualties coming out of Syria have been hard to watch. Several thousand innocent people perished between the eruption of resistance to Assad’s regime in March 2011 and the beginning of 2013, with no end in sight. There is little doubt that government forces were responsible for the majority of deaths. The prospect that Assad might be overthrown is understandably appealing to Westerners from a moral standpoint, but the West needs to be fully aware of the potential for unintended, and possibly quite unpleasant, consequences.

Good Iranian, Bad Iranian: Representations of Iran and Iranians in Time and Newsweek (1998–2009)

This article analyzes the ways in which Iran and Iranians are represented in Western news media sources. Through detailed textual analysis of articles in Time and Newsweek between 1998 and 2009, it demonstrates that journalistic representations of Iran and Iranians are not simply efforts aimed at describing the real Iran, but rather form the basis of what Said refers to as a powerful “community of interpretation” that often reflects and reproduces certain xenophobic stereotypes of non-Western foreign subjects. While some shifts in Western media representations of Iranians have occurred in the thirty years since the revolution, the underlying ontological assumptions of these representations have remained remarkably durable. That is to say, the dominant representational discourse found in these newsmagazines depicts the political behavior of Iranians on the basis of essentialized notions of Persian and/or Islamic civilization, while very often emphasizing the taken for granted superiority of the West. Earlier Orientalist discourses focus on the difference of non-Western foreign subjects by denigrating them as fundamentally anti-modern and incapable of political, cultural and economic development without Western intervention. This article presents an unmistakable discursive pattern in American journalism whereby certain Iranians are incorporated into Western civilization by virtue of their embrace of a Western modernity.

'History is Screaming at Us': Humanitarian interventionism and the popular geopolitics of the Bosnian war in Leigh Jackson and Peter Kosminsky's Warriors

The representation of the 1992–1995 Bosnian war in both news media and popular cultural forms has received remarkably little scholarly attention. Drawing upon the recent work of radical historians and critics, this article begins with a reassessment of the dominant western news media narrative of the Bosnian conflict. It then proceeds to consider some popular representations of the conflict, focusing on Leigh Jackson and Peter Kosminsky's unduly neglected BBC two-part television drama Warriors. By comparison with United States and United Kingdom news media coverage of the conflict and other popular screen representations of the Bosnian war, Warriors offers one of the most sensitive and sophisticated accounts of the conflict. Nevertheless, the drama reproduces many of the fundamental western news media biases and implicitly endorses the discourse of humanitarian interventionism that has been used, particularly since the 1990s, to justify western military imperialism. That Kosminsky, who is known for making dramas that question dominant political paradigms, should have adopted an interventionist line in Warriors may suggest something of the potency and reach of western news media propaganda throughout the 1990s on behalf of what Noam Chomsky has called 'humanitarian imperialism'.

La Liseuse by Paul Fournel

fits more the category “thriller” than “literary novel.” But like its trilogy in toto, it fulfills an important function, transporting us to a distant, troubled nation seen largely through Western news media and film. One stumbles at first through the clumsy narration, choppy action scenes, and a “cast of thousands,” including reluctant pirates, middle men, Islamists, political and economic opportunists, teenage suicide bombers, and would-be martyrs. But as Farah chronicles the chaos both before and during Ethiopia’s most recent invasion of a weak Somalia loosely governed by the “Union of Islamic Courts,” the narrative at last evolves into a web of internal and external threats and stratagems that builds to a “breathless” dénouement. Crossbones’s principal setting, Mogadiscio—a warren of dusty, narrow streets lined with ruins, chaotic markets, and people of all classes and dress darting everywhere—effectively mirrors the plot machinations radiating from its core and back. Expatriate Jeebleh, his son-in-law Malik, and Malik’s brother, Ahl, fly to Somalia to find and retrieve Ahl’s teenage stepson, Taxliil, who, radicalized in his Minnesota mosque, has chosen to martyr himself. To this end, his relatives must pursue fragile, interwoven threads that lead to the courts, al-Shabaab militants, pirates, bordering states, and more powerful nations. But this proves merely the scaffolding on which hang the layered political intrigues that Crossbones reveals. For even as events unfold with the intensity of an edge-of-the-seat “thriller,” one apprehends that unlike the latter, drawn from headlines to entertain, Crossbones plumbs the murky depths, probing what the Somali-Malay-Chinese journalist Malik calls “a spiraling degeneracy that a near stranger like me cannot make full sense of.” Through its characters ’ odyssey, for example, the novel critiques the standard Western depiction of the pirate situation as simplistic and self-serving. Linking it rather to Western financial operatives, it faults stronger Western and Eastern nations for destroying Somalia’s fishing industry. Moreover, it takes aim at America’s interventions in Somalia while simultaneously problematizing their manipulation by equally selfserving Islamists. Ultimately, it portrays the intricate dance that both expats and natives must perform to survive in a city rife with agents of the courts, Ethiopians, al-Shabaab, criminals, foreign agents, and spies for all these forces, many linked in complex ways, all fueled by “personal gains and personality conflicts.” For as Malik writes, “This conflict has nothing to do with clan or religious rivalries. Rather, it has everything to do with economics.” A novel is not, of course, “true,” and all narrative, whether history or fiction, reflects its narrator’s position . But this glimpse through indigenous , not Western or Eastern, eyes deepens our vision of the forces and history that shape today’s Somalia. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Paul Fournel. La Liseuse. Paris. P.O.L. 2012. isbn 9782818014172 Paul Fournel’s new novel encourages us to think about the way we read books—and about how the way we Irina Bogatyreva, Igor Savelyev, and Tatiana Mazepina Off the Beaten Track: Stories by Russian Hitchhikers Glas This collection showcases new stories from three talented Russian writers, winners of the recently launched Debut Prize for young authors. Each journey introduces unique people and interesting encounters to create a vivid portrayal of travel and discovery. Merlinda Bobis Fish-Hair Woman Spinifex Fact and fiction flow together in this tale of love, murder, and political upheaval. Fireflies and the scent of lemongrass haunt the river in the Philippine village of Iraya, where the legend of the fish-hair woman and the stories surrounding her give both structure and meaning to heartrending human events (see WLT, Jan. 2009). july– august 2012 57 Nota Bene 58 World Literature Today reviews read books is changing. The title refers to an e-reader that is pressed upon Robert Dubois, the head of a Parisian publishing house, in the name of efficiency and modernity. Dubois is a paper-and-ink guy, long devoted to typescripts, mountains of which encumber his office. As he attempts to come to terms with his new e-reader, he recognizes that his profession has skewed his own reading practice. Rarely does he read a finished piece of writing these...

Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah

56 World Literature Today reviews unfolding of a promise in the Promised Land over a span of thirty-eight years. “Free Fruit for Widows” is an Israeli coming-of-age tale filled with bittersweet moments and oddly effective morality lessons that are counter to any code of ethics taught in Sunday schools. Young male fantasy life provides the fuel for “Peep Show,” which parodies Jewish guilt as though Franz Kafka and Woody Allen had invaded Englander’s dream life. Only two of the eight stories fall a bit short of Englander’s high standards: “The Reader” because it is a slightly self-indulgent insider’s tale about authors and their audiences that is never truly satisfying, and “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” because it is an intriguing experiment that doesn’t quite pay off. But even when the stories are less than sublime, which isn’t often, Englander always shakes the reader up by defying expectation. The peep-show goer must engage in an even greater taboo, which turns him into an object of lust so that he can experience objectification from the other side. The desire to punish someone for as righteous a reason as anti-Semitism in “How We Avenged the Blums” turns into an ethical quandary about acquired and exercised power. And, of course, the Anne Frank game in the title story is no game. With his meticulously crafted language, Nathan Englander is always unsettling and provocative. He rarely takes, or gives the reader, the easy way out—and that may be precisely why he’s such a pleasure to read. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Nuruddin Farah. Crossbones. Riverhead . New York. 2011. isbn 9781594488160 Crossbones completes Nuruddin Farah’s “Past Imperfect” trilogy, in which the nuanced style, rich characterizations , and allegorical power of Maps, for instance (the first in his earlier trilogy, “Blood in the Sun,” also written in English), yields to workmanlike prose, a plot-driven structure, and a cast of relatively under-drawn protagonists, including Bile, Cambara, and Jeebleh, whose fates once more entwine. No aesthetic masterpiece, this latest work fits more the category “thriller” than “literary novel.” But like its trilogy in toto, it fulfills an important function, transporting us to a distant, troubled nation seen largely through Western news media and film. One stumbles at first through the clumsy narration, choppy action scenes, and a “cast of thousands,” including reluctant pirates, middle men, Islamists, political and economic opportunists, teenage suicide bombers, and would-be martyrs. But as Farah chronicles the chaos both before and during Ethiopia’s most recent invasion of a weak Somalia loosely governed by the “Union of Islamic Courts,” the narrative at last evolves into a web of internal and external threats and stratagems that builds to a “breathless” dénouement. Crossbones’s principal setting, Mogadiscio—a warren of dusty, narrow streets lined with ruins, chaotic markets, and people of all classes and dress darting everywhere—effectively mirrors the plot machinations radiating from its core and back. Expatriate Jeebleh, his son-in-law Malik, and Malik’s brother, Ahl, fly to Somalia to find and retrieve Ahl’s teenage stepson, Taxliil, who, radicalized in his Minnesota mosque, has chosen to martyr himself. To this end, his relatives must pursue fragile, interwoven threads that lead to the courts, al-Shabaab militants, pirates, bordering states, and more powerful nations. But this proves merely the scaffolding on which hang the layered political intrigues that Crossbones reveals. For even as events unfold with the intensity of an edge-of-the-seat “thriller,” one apprehends that unlike the latter, drawn from headlines to entertain, Crossbones plumbs the murky depths, probing what the Somali-Malay-Chinese journalist Malik calls “a spiraling degeneracy that a near stranger like me cannot make full sense of.” Through its characters ’ odyssey, for example, the novel critiques the standard Western depiction of the pirate situation as simplistic and self-serving. Linking it rather to Western financial operatives, it faults stronger Western and Eastern nations for destroying Somalia’s fishing industry. Moreover, it takes aim at America’s interventions in Somalia while simultaneously problematizing their manipulation by equally selfserving Islamists. Ultimately, it portrays the...

The blurring of boundaries: images of abjection as the terrorist and the reel Arab intersect

In her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they consolidate the images we have seen in Hollywood films representing Arabs. Furthermore, these depictions have eroded the fine line between the real and the unreal. This article examines the point at which these issues intersect, by analysing individual images vis-à-vis film portrayals of the Arab and, ultimately, how the framed images of terrorists aired on TV screens have conformed to previously accepted notions of the Arab.

The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé

The Rhetoric of Revelation:Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé Gretchen Soderlund (bio) In Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, their humanitarian work of 2009, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn recount their experience working as foreign correspondents in China after the Tiananmen Square protests and realizing for the first time that news media ignore the everyday realities of millions of women worldwide. From the perspective of journalists, the everyday abuses women around the world suffered were not newsworthy: "When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and sold into brothels, we didn't even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen in a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen to girls every day." 1 In this account, sex trafficking—a practice also commonly referred to as modern-day slavery, sex slavery, forced prostitution, and, in earlier periods, "white slavery"—is taken to be the paradigmatic case of gender violence ignored by journalists. Yet positing sex slavery as the exemplary media blind spot is curious when one considers the history of journalism on this topic. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western news media offered extensive coverage of white slavery, making claims about the severity and ubiquity of the practice that had far-reaching and questionable legislative effects. Had Kristof and WuDunn dug deeper, they would have discovered that the advent of humanitarian campaigns against sex trafficking and the rise of investigative journalism share an intertwined history. In fact, the press played a critical role in producing now-familiar narrative conventions and rhetorical tropes commonly used to depict sex trafficking, as well as establishing methods for gathering facts and arriving at conclusions about prostitution and sex slavery. While there may have been a dearth of news reports of sex trafficking in the decades immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union, stories of innocent women and girls held captive in prison-like brothels are not new. Rather, they have, in the last two decades, resurfaced as an object of journalistic attention. This article considers the phenomenon of the sex-trafficking expose´ at two moments, the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, in order to gain some purchase on the relationship between journalistic coverage and the construction of sex trafficking as a practice viewed by many policymakers, feminists, and evangelicals as among the most urgent of global humanitarian issues. A central premise here is that sex trafficking is not so much discovered as it is created as an object of humanitarian action, law enforcement intervention, and human rights policy. Indeed, episodes of heightened concern over trafficking have historically [End Page 193] relied on textual assertions that involve a set of interpretations that give substance and meaning to a phenomenon not readily available to public view. To explore the cultural construction of sex slavery as an object of human rights and humanitarian intervention, this article will focus on three journalistic exposés that brought a great deal of public attention to sex trafficking: "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," William T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette series in 1885 on London's trade in virgins; "The Girls Next Door," Peter Landesman's 2004 New York Times Magazine piece on domestic trafficking; and Kristof's New York Times series from the same year on sex slavery in Poipet, Cambodia. Sex Trafficking as a Cultural Construction In the late nineteenth century, journalists, vigilance movements, and evangelical women activists established a set of images and associations—the enslaved prostitute, the prison-like brothel, the mercenary procurer, and the monstrous client—to describe the players involved in the phenomenon of white slavery. These associations were first popularized in 1880s England, but by the twentieth century's first decade they became deeply embedded in the Western imaginary such that even today the term "trafficking" (and, increasingly, "prostitution") connotes sexual enslavement, captive innocents, and mercenary villains. Yet despite the current ubiquity of mass and activist media productions equating trafficking with sexual slavery and identifying women and girls as its primary victims, sex trafficking...

When citizen photojournalism sets the news agenda: Neda Agha Soltan as a Web 2.0 icon of post-election unrest in Iran

The article discusses the current rise of citizen photojournalism, which has received little scholarly scrutiny. Drawing on a case study of the mobile telephone footage of the Iranian woman Neda Agha Soltan, who was killed during a demonstration in Iran in June 2009, the article investigates the ethical dilemmas of the Western news media’s eager use of citizen photojournalism as a unique and headline-grabbing source. While these images may grant us insight into areas of tension, to which the media has no other access, amateur footage challenges the ethical standards of conventional journalism with its fragmentary and subjective format, not to mention the difficulties involved in tracking a clip’s author and origin. Even though the news media indisputably play an essential role as a platform for editorial selection and communication of citizen photojournalism, this article points to a general lack of editorial procedures for accommodating these new sources.

The evolving narrative of the Darfur conflict as represented in The New York Times and The Washington Post, 2003–2009

News media influence local to global interactions between people, societies, and governments by producing place images. Representations of Africa in Western news media are heavily imbued with colonialist notions of cultural geography. In particular, Western news media have represented conflicts in Africa as ‘tribal’, a trope that erases geographic and historical context, and discourages actions that could prevent or reduce violent conflict. To determine if ‘tribalism’ remains important in coverage of African conflict, we use framing analysis to evaluate news on Sudan’s Darfur region in The New York Times and The Washington Post during 2003–2009. We find that these newspapers predictably relied on stereotypes related to tribalism to simplify Darfur’s geography and make the conflict meaningful to intended readers. Tribal portrayal of African war is inherently political, and, problematically, neither newspaper recognized that their use of the tribal narrative was parallel to the views of both the Sudanese government and external observers that challenged the actions of the Sudanese government. However, we also found that stereotypical representations became less prominent over time, apparently because reporters found that the initial, simplistic framing of the conflict did not match their encounters with geographic reality. We emphasize the decline in stereotypical tropes, because this suggests behind-the-scenes negotiation about representations in these news organizations. Recognizing voices that challenge stereotypical portrayals is necessary to developing place images that are geographically more accurate.

News discourses on distant suffering: a Critical Discourse Analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak

News carries a unique signifying power, a power to represent events in particular ways (Fairclough, 1995). Applying Critical Discourse Analysis and Chouliaraki’s theory on the mediation of suffering (2006), this article explores the news representation of the 2003 global SARS outbreak. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have covered the international outbreak of SARS. By looking into the mediation of four selected discursive moments, underlying discourses of power, hierarchy and compassion were unraveled. The analysis further identified the key role of proximity in international news reporting and supports the claim that Western news media mainly reproduce a Euro-American centered world order. This article argues that news coverage of international crises such as SARS constructs and maintains the socio-cultural difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as articulating global power hierarchies and a division of the world in zones of poverty and prosperity, danger and safety.

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.

War as a Moral Discourse

/ The debate surrounding the coverage of the Iraq War in Arab and western news media has pinpointed the ethical role of the news media in the mediation of suffering. This article analyses the mechanism of mediating war in the front-page articles from four pan-Arab newspapers, printed during the war in 2003. The article draws on Boltanski's discussion of emotional politics or what he terms politics of pity, the aim of which is to trigger sympathy for the Other. The news texts included here are analysed according to their rhetorical strategies and to whether they aim at consolidating a certain ethical stance towards the war. Finally, the article attempts to answer the question of whether this coverage has contributed with rational arguments to the general public debate about the war, thereby fulfilling its role as mediator to the pan-Arab polity.

The hierarchy of global suffering

: In 2007 nearly 17,000 people died because of natural disasters and more than 211 million others were directly affected. News media play a basic role in giving publicity to these numerous instances of global suffering as it is mainly through media reports that the world perceives international crises. Drawing upon theories on distant suffering (cf. Boltanski 1999), this study investigates the mediated representation of international crises, with a focus on natural disasters occurring in Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan and the USA. Applying critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992; Chouliaraki 2006), this article explores how discourses of hierarchy and inequality are realised in news texts about distant suffering. The cases of analysis are nine news items that were broadcast on a public and a commercial Belgian television channel on 2 January 2006. The comparative analysis of these news texts reveals glaring differences that reflect global hierarchies of place and human life. Suffering in the West (USA and Australia) was portrayed as comprehensible and close to the spectator, who could identify with the distant sufferers as if they are like us. While being of a greater magnitude, the Indonesian disaster was in contrast presented as no cause for concern or action, which blocked the engagement with the distant sufferers who were portrayed as ‘Others’, with a capital ‘o’. Pakistan sufferers were also articulated as distant others, but close-ups of gazing children urged the spectator to care for them and potentially act on the represented misfortune. In general, the critical discourse analysis supports the claim that Western news media reproduce a certain kind of global hierarchy, mainly a Euro-American-centred world order, and that news discourse normalises inequalities. This article argues that mediated representations of international crises reflect and consolidate the power relations and divisions that characterise our contemporary world.

Jamshid A. Marvasti (Ed.), Psycho-Political Aspects of Suicide Warriors, Terrorism and Martyrdom; A Critical View from “Both Sides” in Regard to Cause and Cure

Psycho-Political Aspects of Suicide Warriors, Terrorism and Martyrdom is an attempt to explain the antecedents of the suicide bomber/warrior and other forms of violence which are often termed ‘terrorism.’ In addition to this daunting task, possible solutions both on a global and individual level are examined and finally, treatment of survivors of violence is addressed. The editor authored six and co-authored seven of the 17 chapters. His style throughout is to challenge the Western reader with a point of view often not considered; that of the person(s) carrying out the attack. It is a style which will make many uncomfortable and frustrated as the “side” of the audience for which this book is intended is given less attention as compared to the “other side.” This is certainly a book which both challenges and invokes contemplation. The first chapter co-authored by the editor and Valerie Dripchak, exams the many complexities and difficulties with defining people and their actions. As they point out, the terrorist, the martyr, the solider, the folk hero and the freedom fighter may all be the same person engaging in either war, terrorism, heroism, or executing God’s will depending on the observer. Definitions of the words ‘Terrorist’ and ‘Terrorism’ are examined from several agencies before the authors suggest dispensing with the term whenever the aim of the action is to cause political change and instead focus on the action itself. The second chapter is an examination of who becomes a suicide bomber. Marvasti takes a psychoanalytic approach in this chapter, and throughout the book, to help explain violence on a national as well as individual level. He combines the psychoanalytic research with the classic experiment in obedience by Milgram to explain how the individual can believe becoming a suicide bomber is a right and worthy cause. He finishes the chapter by examining how survivor’s guilt and identification with martyrs are primary reasons to explain the increasing numbers of suicide bombers. After looking at who becomes a suicide bomber, Marvasti uses the third chapter to explain the motivations behind the person. The factors of motivation are broken down into; nationalism, rage and revenge, psychic trauma and disassociation, religion, group process, poverty, perceived injustice, cultural support, and remuneration. On the last factor, Marvasti takes care to list out what he believes is the Western news media exaggerations of the promise of virgin girls in heaven and promised money to the surviving family members. The author suggests this is a direct result of western media’s obsession with sex and money as opposed to more salient motivating factors. Marvasti and Dripchak collaborate again on the fourth chapter, psychological responses and treatment in regard to the trauma terrorism. The responses to traumatic events are examined at the boarder population level with particular attention paid to children. Both direct survivors and the population at large are discussed along with a variety of popular treatment models. By necessity the description of treatmentmodels are very brief and are intended as an overview only. Of note is an interesting discussion on intergenerational issues related to psychological responses of trauma. The fifth chapter, written by Marvasti, is an interesting comparison between the Muslim living in the United States and the European Muslim. The author discusses the “homegrown worrier,” that is, the overwhelming majority of Western Muslims who are not engaged in terrorism but are concern about the issues which mark them for discrimination, profiling and rejection in the larger communities in which they J Police Crim Psych (2009) 24:59–60 DOI 10.1007/s11896-008-9036-5

Historical frames and the politics of humanitarian intervention: from Ethiopia, Somalia to Rwanda

This article argues that historical frames we often find in news media discourse can skew the way we perceive distant wars, and that this can have a knock‐on effect on international humanitarian response within a cosmopolitan framework of global justice. Drawing on an empirical exploration of recent ‘humanitarian interventions’ in Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda, the article shows how historical frames largely reinforced the elite‐dominated news frames of ‘their crisis’, and ‘not ours’, which explains the delayed international intervention to end it. I conclude that the non‐intervention, or delayed intervention, of the international community on humanitarian grounds to end these crises was informed more by historical empathy/distance frames than empathy/critical frames in the mainstream Western news media discourse.

All news is local: the failure of the media to reflect world events in a globalized age

An investigation of the 300 year old model of global journalism used by the Western news media. This book argues that the framework of localization is fragile and unable to cope with the issues, events, agents and institutions of globalization that exist, and that the current model of news gathering and reporting requires rethinking.

Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Identity and Issues of Education in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001Confronting Islamophobia in Educational Practice edited by Barry van Driel. Stoke‐on‐Trent, UK: Trentham, 2004. xiii+209 pp. $27.50 (paper). ISBN 1‐85856‐340‐2.Islam and English in the Post‐9/11 Era edited by Sohail Karmani and Sinfree Makoni. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. 95 pp. $30.00 (paper). ISBN 0‐8058‐9483‐7 (originally

Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Identity and Issues of Education in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001<i>Confronting Islamophobia in Educational Practice</i> edited by Barry van Driel. Stoke‐on‐Trent, UK: Trentham, 2004. xiii+209 pp. $27.50 (paper). ISBN 1‐85856‐340‐2.<i>Islam and English in the Post‐9/11 Era</i> edited by Sohail Karmani and Sinfree Makoni. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. 95 pp. $30.00 (paper). ISBN 0‐8058‐9483‐7 (originally

Contested Narratives, Ambiguous Impacts and Democratic Dilemmas: The Western News Media and the “War on Terror”

Because the essence of terrorism is to produce a psychological impact far greater than its physical impact, the relationship of contemporary international terrorism with the news media has often been called symbiotic, with publicity described as the oxygen on which terrorism lives. Although this view is in many respects true, it over-simplifies a more ambiguous, varied and complex reality, and in any case, the policy options open to Western democratic governments in limiting this ‘oxygen’ are very limited both normatively and pragmatically. Equally important, but attracting much less scholarly and popular attention, is the news media's role in the problematic politics of counterterrorism. Here the attraction of heroic narratives to both media and governments – for their own different reasons – creates coincidences of interest. Powerful metaphors such as the war on terror encourage strategies which may be substantially ineffective, perhaps even counter-productive, while politically benefiting the governments adopting them.

Risky News, Madness and Public Crisis

This case study investigates the central role of news frames in constructing risk knowledge for newspaper readers. In Brisbane in 2001-02, a psychiatric patient absconded from a city mental health facility and within a month a second patient had absconded from another facility. A mental health tribunal had previously judged each man as medically unfit to stand trial for separate murders they had committed. The media coverage culminated in a complaint to the Australian Press Council, which resolved the concerns by mediation. The study has implications for how Australian and other western news media routinely frame people diagnosed with mental illness.

A New Imperial Presidency? Insights from U.S. Involvement in Bosnia

In August 1995, President Bill Clinton caught a lucky break. A few days after Congress voted with veto-proof majorities to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, the Croatian government launched an offensive against its dissident Serbian minority. Neither the Serb government in Belgrade nor Western nations responded, despite the fact that this Croatian operation was similar to the earlier Serbian cleansing that had received such negative attention in the Western news media. With the clean ethnic borders more or less in place, Serbia and Croatia appeared finally ready to move toward a settlement that had plagued the two countries since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. However, when the Serbs continued to attack Muslim military positions in Sarajevo, Clinton was able to advance his alternative to congressional pressure to lift the arms embargo to the Western allies-namely, air strikes against the Serbs. The air strikes had the dual impact of blunting the efforts to override the vote on lifting the arms embargo and providing the military muscle to bring the warring sides in the Bosnian conflict to the bargaining table. After several weeks of U.S.-sponsored negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the principals representing the three factions in Bosnia-Croats, Serbs, and Muslims-initialed a peace agreement on 21 November 1995. A few days after the formal signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in Paris on 14 December, President Clinton ordered the deployment of more than 20,000 United States troops as part of a NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) of 60,000, which was charged with patrolling and enforcing a cease-fire and a zone of separation between the newly created semiautonomous entities