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This book analyses British news media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It describes the analytical framework that serves as the basis for theoretically informed and systematic analysis of wartime media performance. The book synthesises a range of models, hypotheses and explanatory variables to set out a framework composed of three models of news media performance: the elite-driven model, the independent model and the oppositional model. It provides three case studies which, in different ways, illuminate each model of news media performance in wartime. The three case studies include the case of Jessica Lynch, the case of Ali Abbas and the case of the anti-war movement. The book then presents an account of how the relationship between foreign policy, news media and war might be expected to operate, based on current theoretical understanding. In order to place British coverage of the invasion in context, the book offers brief summaries of the structure and character of Britain's television news services and its press. The book provides an analysis of the ways in which the news media's visual depictions of the war reinforced supportive coverage. It is devoted to documenting and analysing evidence for negotiated and oppositional coverage. The book also examines the representation of civilian casualties, military casualties and humanitarian operations across both television and press, three subject areas that generated a good deal of media criticism.
hypotheses from across the field of political communication, we aim to overcome these limitations. The framework sets out three models of wartime media performance: the elite-driven model, in which news media coverage is hypothesised to be supportive of government war aims; the independent model, where news media remain balanced towards events and produce negotiated coverage; and the oppositional model whereby news media offer a profound challenge to the legitimacy and conduct of a conflict and generate oppositional coverage. We explain these models further in Chapter 3
composed of three models of news media performance: the elite-driven model, the independent model and the oppositional model. We describe carefully the explanatory and descriptive aspects of each of these models, and discuss their normative basis. We also give an account of how the relationship between foreign policy, news media and war might be expected to operate, based on current theoretical understanding. The second objective of this chapter is to operationalise this framework, so we describe the methodology that was developed in order to implement it.1 Models of
8 Conclusion: Patterns of support, negotiation and opposition Overview The conclusion starts by drawing together our multi-channel, multi-newspaper analysis, reviewing our aggregate-level findings from each chapter and summarising the overall performance of UK news media. In so doing, we provide a substantive assessment both of British news media performance during the 2003 Iraq invasion and of the implications of these findings for general claims regarding the elite-driven, independent and oppositional models. In particular, we discuss the implications of our
, we finish by relating these findings to the explanatory variables, set out in Chapter 3, associated with the independent and oppositional models. Negotiated and oppositional subject areas: challenging the coalition over casualties and humanitarian operations The invasion period was marked by successive reports of civilian deaths from missile attacks on markets, hospitals and homes, and at US checkpoints. Pockets of resistance 108 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 26.7 36.8 55.1 36.8 68 39.7 21.1 5.1 Civilian Casualties 5.3 Humanitarian Issues Supportive
nation to be as unproductive a focus of academic analysis as it was a unit of social liberation. A number of chapters here engage with Gilroy’s formulations, and attempt to forge alternative ways to think about the relationship of diaspora and nation. I find the binary opposition model to be conceptually restrictive, and historically inaccurate; we need to think of the dynamic between diasporic and nationalistic cultures as uneven, variable and at times symbiotic. One of the more valuable contributions of Gilroy’s book, within a postcolonial studies context, was the
, must also remain unchanging. Yet while the consolidation of a Christian ‘truth’ frequently leads to an act of conversion and erasure, this chapter has found that oppositional models – between Jew and Virgin, old husband and young wife – are just as likely to be reconciled. Through an argument between an ageing man and a young woman, the plays unflinchingly admit ‘the carnal, the feminine, and the Jewish’ to the very heart of the Christian narrative, but not purely for oppositional purposes. 134 There has been a tendency to view the Mary of the N-Town plays (and
“race” and nation’. 86 Anglo-Jewry since 1066 is part of that process, fundamentally querying the oppositional model of place and ‘race’ posited by Baucom in his study of Englishness. The chapters that follow explore the construction of the local identities in relation to the ‘other’ and especially Jewish migrants and settlers. They are equally concerned with how minority identities have been constructed in relation to the ‘local’. From both perspectives, there is potential, following the example of Cornish studies, for inclusive and
that French sociologist Henri Lefebvre chooses the body to elaborate upon his theory of space that it ‘is at once conceived, perceived, and directly lived’,9 I explore this theory in the next section. He notes that ‘social practice presupposes the use of the body’, including the ‘sensory organs’.10 However, I am not concurring with his belief that bodily, lived experience is more authentic than visual representation. Art historian Amelia Jones notes that Lefebvre is operating ‘on a belief system that is … based on an oppositional model of the “real” being opposed to
Kojève in Paris in the 1930s, which were attended by protagonists of French existentialism and phenomenology such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Transmitted through these influential thinkers, Hegel’s master/slave dialectic came to shape twentieth-century models of subjectivity and identity, asserts Jones. Coinciding with this, Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon, both working in close proximity to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, introduced a political codification of the master/slave dialectic as they developed it into oppositional models of identity. De