Paper prepared for presentation at the Universal Forum of Cultures &
the Autonomous University of Barcelona,
“Communication and Cultural Diversity”, Barcelona Spain, May 25, 2004.
Abstract
Varying degrees of public support for war in Iraq can be traced to variations in the way news media in different countries represented the crisis to their publics. We present related studies of news coverage of the Iraq war in news magazines of six nations over a one-year period leading up to and including the war and its aftermath. We draw on a sample of stories about Iraq in major news magazines from France, Canada, the US, India, the UK, and Germany. We find support for the hypothesis that news media in these different countries show quite disparate patterns of sympathy and “demonization” of Iraq as the enemy. Such differences not only reflect critically important distinctions in national policy positions towards Iraq, they also have likely contributed to differences in public perceptions of the need for war at all. We also find evidence for the hypotheses that international (non-American) media framed the issues of war and foreign policy objectives by advocating a less aggressive, more internationalist, and more diplomatic foreign policy approach than US media, and that these distinctions represent the widening gap between the United States and Europe on issues of geopolitics and global cooperation.
This paper and the content analysis it draws upon are part of a larger project being conducted by the USF Media Group on news coverage, public opinion, and the politics of fear. Boaz and Paterson are two of four researchers studying Iraq war news coverage under the auspices of the University of San Francisco Media Group, a project initiated by Dr. Bernadette Barker-Plummer of the University of San Francisco.
Introduction
This study of international news magazine coverage
of the American war against Iraq explores the role of news media in naturalizing
violence and creating perceptions of global insecurity concurrent to governmental
calls for war. In presenting this research, we hope to illuminate
some of the key political and cultural barriers to peaceful international
relations, and the implications of these barriers on the development of
international law and norms of global conflict and justice.
Varying degrees of public support for war in
Iraq can be traced to differences in the ways in which news media in these
countries represented the crisis to their publics. We present related
studies of news coverage of the Iraq war in news magazines of six nations
over a one-year period leading up to and including the war and its aftermath.
We draw on a sample of stories about Iraq in major news magazines from
France, Canada, the US, India, the UK, and Germany.
Coding of this large data set was completed only recently, so the analysis at this stage is preliminary and focuses mainly on key quantitative indicators. Future analysis will incorporate a larger sample of articles, additional qualitative data, and a closer analysis of the texts themselves. Although preliminary, we believe our findings are representative of the larger universe of media coverage of the Iraq War, and that they will reveal important differences in war coverage across countries. As such, we believe this research will eventually serve as a significant contribution to the literature on war propaganda and media framing of issues of international politics.
On specific issues related to the Iraq War, we
are most interested in the extent to which news media in the “aggressor”
states of the United States and United Kingdom differ from the rest of
Europe (and other regions, as represented here by Canada and India) in
their portrayal of the threat of Iraq and the guilt or innocence of the
Iraqi people, who were the ultimate victims of the conflict. Do internationally
accepted norms of magazine journalism yield a “neutral” perspective regardless
of nation of origin, and do these media select and describe news in consistent
ways? Or is the telling of a major international story driven by
the country of the media’s origin?
US press coverage in particular in the days leading
up to war portrayed protest and the arguments against war as irrelevant
or unpatriotic (when it spoke of these phenomena at all.) However,
the arguments against a rush to war were given more legitimacy by the rest
of the world, including much of the European press. Although these
trends paralleled the Franco-German resistance to war in Iraq, to date
there has been no major empirical study on media output to clearly show
whether typical aspects of war reporting, such as stereotyping or “othering”
an enemy, are less pronounced amongst media in the predominately anti-war
nations. Likewise, we might expect to find that non-coalition media
would generally present a more sympathetic view of the Iraqis than would
coalition media.
Both American and British press have recently been condemned for their largely jingoistic and unquestioning coverage of the war, and a lack of critical reporting on the reasons for war (most of which has now been exposed as misleading at best, or blatant fabrications at worst). Senior Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Scheer complained at a University of California seminar in March 2004 that “This has been the most shameful era of American media. The media has been sucker-punched completely by this administration.” The high degree of American popular support for war has been regarded as something of an mystery outside of the US, but can easily be understood in terms of the propaganda model of media, whereby mainstream US media filter out dissent through established patterns of framing and source selection, and portray the international victims of US aggression as unworthy of sympathy. We expect to find that our data shows evidence for this model when applied to coverage of the Iraq war.
In terms of issue framing, we argue that international
(non-American) media advocated a less aggressive, more internationalist,
and more diplomatic foreign policy approach than US media and we suggest
some general organizing frames to capture these differences. We also
suggest that news media in these different countries show quite disparate
patterns of sympathy and “demonization” of Iraq as the enemy. Such differences
could not only reflect critically important differences in national policy
positions towards Iraq, they could also have contributed to differences
in public perceptions of the need for war at all.
The authors come from two distinct disciplinary
perspectives, and this work reflects a merging of both. Dr. Cynthia Boaz,
a professor of Politics, roots the discussion of media framing in terms
of geopolitics and foreign policy paradigms and objectives. Dr. Chris Paterson,
a professor Media Studies, takes a more sociological approach to understanding
how mass publics are socialized by media labeling and selective information
dissemination.
Background
We discovered no large-scale comparative analyses of war coverage published to date, but some emerging studies reveal trends that we may expect to observe in the current study. Livingston and Aday (2003) compared US (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox) and Arab (Al Jazeera, ESC) broadcast media during the war. They found 40% of US television coverage concerned “Battle” or “Strategy and Tactics”, as opposed to just 27% on the Arab channels. Stories of diplomacy comprised 5% of the US coverage and 16% of the Arab; and stories of protest against war made up 2% of US coverage and 7% of Arab coverage. A five-country study of war coverage carried out for a German newspaper concluded, “that the BBC featured the lowest level of dissent of all. Its 2% total was even lower than the 7% found on the US channel ABC.” Ironically, it was the BBC that dissatisfied Americans turned to more than any other foreign source to seek unbiased reporting after September 11th.
It is not only the US and British press that have been accused of jingoism. In October 2003, a Belgian journalist published a book accusing the French press of disinformation and “continually predicting the war would end badly for the US-led coalition.” Journalist Alain Hertoghe reports that between March 20 and April 9, the five major French newspapers “carried 29 headline condemning Saddam’s dictatorship and 135 blaming Bush and British Prime Minster Tony Blair.”
Rampton and Stauber provide an illuminating example of the differences between US and international patterns in covering the Iraq war in their book “Weapons of Mass Deception.” They used the LexisNexis database to compile a list of news stories from one week in early April of 2003 that contained both the phrase “cluster bombs” and the word “Iraq”. Cluster bombs are especially nefarious “anti-personnel” weapons of war, and have been condemned by virtually all human rights organizations and banned by over 100 countries because they kill indiscriminately. They thus present serious dangers to civilian populations, especially children.
During the week-long period examined by Rampton and Stauber, US publications mentioned cluster bombs a total of 120 times (out of a possible 2,044 American articles archived in the database.) By comparison, Australian and European publications carried 394 stories mentioning cluster bombs in Iraq, even though that population of stories accounted for only 673 of the total publications. They write that, “In simple terms, this means that European and Australian publications were ten times as likely to mention cluster bombs as their American counterparts.” They go on to note that the characterization of the bombs in the American press, to the extent they were discussed, often consisted of denials that the cluster bombs were being used, references to their use in other wars, or criticisms of their use by Saddam Hussein in past attacks on Kurds and Shiites. With this example, it becomes clear that what is not covered is often as important and revealing about media framing as what is covered.
Otherization
In the present study we ask if “coalition” media
present Iraq as more threatening than did the media of other nations, and
if “coalition” media present Iraqis as less human and therefore less deserving
of sympathy, than did the media of other nations?
This portion of the larger USF Media Group study
seeks patterns of demonization or othering, and conversely, patterns of
sympathetic coverage, toward the perceived Iraqi and Arab enemy.
It examines the extent to which sympathetic or hostile coverage of Iraqi
and Arab people reflects national policies toward those populations.
In other terms, was the Anglo/French/US divide over policy toward Iraq
evidenced through press humanization or demonization of the Arab and Iraqi
'other'? France distanced itself from this conflict more than others,
so a more sympathetic view of the Iraqi and the Arab in French media is
hypothesized. It is hoped this study will suggest the extent to which
stereotyping in national media mirrors a nation's political stance.
The process of demonizing a perceived foreign enemy is just a short step beyond the day to day process of “otherization” – describing a foreign subject – typically, for the European and American press, a Third World subject – that is different from the Western reader in every respect. Typical themes include the presentation of the Other as barbarous, primitive, savage, or hopelessly mired in mayhem of its own creation, and/or a close adherence to a news agenda established by Western governments and power elites. The frames, or "definitive motifs" of developing world coverage suggested by Dahlgren and Chakrapani are especially useful. These were social disorder, flawed development, and primitivism; each motif having an "implied bipolar opposite" in the Western societies creating these representations.
The existence of an implied opposite alludes to the functionality of stereotyping. The creation of negative representations of the Other facilitates a positive image of the Self. People are more inclined to "consume" a feel-good mass media than a feel-bad mass media, and are more inclined to support aggression against an Other they have been trained to loathe. It is beyond the means of this project to demonstrate a strategy of war promotion amongst elements of the media, but the tendency of mainstream media to seek to conform to a mainstream political agenda (Herman and Chomsky, 1988), to comply with the official sources upon whom they are overly dependent (especially in the era of “embedding”), and even, in the United States, to actively censor negative comment on recent US military activity, demonstrate a process of war promotion, whether deliberate or not, is well established.
The manufacture of the image of the Other by media is in itself a rational process in a society marching to war, but it is a process easily propelled where a longstanding racial antagonism already exists. Said (1978) explores in depth the origins and manifestations of European and American hatred of the Arab. Said addresses Orientalism, the primarily European intellectual discourse about the Orient. This discourse, primarily in academic writings, served not only to define the Orient and Oriental, but in so doing, to define the European. Only through such comparison could Europeans consistently maintain their identity as superior in relation to non-Europeans.
Dower wrote that racism permits an unusual degree of psychological distancing which permits men to kill other men with impunity (1986). This function is useful in the skirmishes of colonial expansion, but is vital in the course of all-out warfare. And such was the case in the war with Japan. Stereotypes of the Japanese were officially sanctioned in the U.S., in order to justify an all out, brutal war. U.S. interests in "defending" the Pacific at any cost could not be questioned. Presentation of the Japanese sometimes as sub-human, other times as super-human, increased the degree of the threat and provided justification for the total destruction of Japan (as today the American neo-conservative discourse suggests we must destroy Iraq to save it).
It was necessary that the newly emerging mass media be entirely complicit in the promulgation of these stereotypes. The distancing function of racism continues to be apparent in modern warfare, as seen among U.S. citizens in the cases of Vietnam (Hallin, 1986), proxy war in Africa (Windrich, 1992; Minter, 1994), Latin America (Herman and Chomsky, 1988), the first Gulf War (Hujanen, 1992; Kellner, 1992; Zelizer, 1992).
As Dower writes of World War II in the Pacific, “on neither side did the propagandists offer much ground for the recognition of common traits, comparable acts, or compatible aspirations.” Otherization does not only make the foreign subject more distant and less human, it makes him also frighteningly superhuman – capable of atrocities which defy the imagination, with, as Dower notes, a special capacity for “evil”. In doing the unthinkable, the September 11th hijackers fueled such an image; and the Bush/Blair propaganda apparatus effectively tied that image to Saddam, and Iraqis generally, by promoting the belief of a Saddam- Al Qaeda connection and asserting dangers – such as the alleged missile threat to Britain - which informed observers knew to be nonsense.
Public Perceptions
We are also concerned in this project with the influence of media coverage on public perceptions of the need for war. Were “coalition” media more prone to deliver confusing or misleading information its audience? Fear and consequent support for war are stoked both through the manufacture of threat and a steady campaign of disinformation to increase public confusion. While “coalition” media never sought to be part of such a process, there is ample evidence that they were efficiently used by coalition hawks to those ends.
In January, 2003, a Knight Ridder/Princeton Research
poll revealed that 44% of Americans believed that “most” of the September
11th hijackers were Iraqis, and only 17% correctly stated that none were.
These researchers observed that immediately following the hijackings, there
was no public perception that Iraq was involved. Disinformation emanating
from official Washington has been blamed, but the fault lies with the major
US media outlets which carried such disinformation for so long without
challenge. A month later a Pew Research Center/Council on Foreign
Relations survey showed that 2/3 of Americans believed UN inspectors had
found “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and that the majority of Americans
believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11th attacks.
A well publicized University of Maryland study
later in 2003 confirmed those popular misconceptions and added that a “significant
minority even believed that a majority of people in the world favored the
US going to war with Iraq.” Not surprisingly, they also demonstrated
that “those who have held misperceptions have been far more supportive
of the decision to go to war with Iraq.” The Maryland study also
usefully correlated media exposure to false beliefs and fear of Iraq, and
concluded, “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more
likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their
news from NPR or PBS (the US non-commercial broadcasting services) are
less likely to have misperceptions,” and this was true even when accounting
for demographic differences in both audience groups. The largest
number of people in their sample to identify a single main source of television
news as their main informant said that source was Robert Murdoch’s Fox
News (Program On International Policy Attitudes, 2003).
Still more major surveys show a woefully misinformed
and isolationist American public. A 2002 Pew study showed a general
lack of interest in foreign news, but also found that respondents believed
they were not getting enough background information on foreign affairs
from their media to be able to follow and interpret international news
(Pew, 2002).
Geopolitics and Framing the Foreign Policy Agenda
“You have shown the world the skill and might of the American armed forces. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent. We have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.”
When, on May 1, 2003, George Bush made this speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln with a sign displaying the words “Mission Accomplished” displayed prominently behind him, American media widely hailed it as one of the most dramatic and profound moments in presidential history, and a turning point for liberty and democracy around the globe.
The rest of the world did not quite see it that way. As Rampton and Stauber note, the rest of the world has not experienced the war in Iraq as the clean, surgical operation that was presented by US media. For decades, the United States has won “victories” with overwhelming displays of force, and for most people outside the United States, the military hardware with which Bush surrounded himself on that clear day in May was something to fear rather than celebrate.
Since September 11th 2001, it has become increasingly clear that the United States lives in a very different world from most of its friends. These differences are manifested in a series of varying, even opposing, perspectives on issues related to perceptions of power, conflict resolution, and more fundamentally, values. If we understand media coverage to be a fairly reliable gauge of public opinion, we may even go as far to say that we now live in a post-Cold War world in which the United States and Europe are no longer partners but potential adversaries.
The current American administration is dominated by foreign policymakers who ascribe to a realpolitik view of war and conflict that is rooted in the United States’ role as global hegemon and undisputed military power. European leaders’ more liberal perspectives are often attributed to the relative military weakness of Europe and its irrelevance in global conflict resolution. Several scholars have even suggested that the impotence of Europe’s armed forces have made a European projection of (military) power an international joke. This, it is argued, is a natural consequence of five decades of Cold War military strategy during which the major priority of the United States was the projection of power, but where Europe’s main objective was defensive- to withstand the possible onslaught of Soviet forces. “The problem” writes Robert Kagan, “ is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe’s postmodern norms…It must sometimes act unilaterally…because given a weak Europe, the United States has no choice but to act unilaterally.” While Kagan’s conclusions may be questionable, the perspective underlying them is illuminating. America’s foreign policy priorities are different from Europe’s.
Thus, when it comes to conflict resolution and war, it is understandable that European media would promote a set of solutions to global conflicts that are more diplomatic than militaristic. A glance at European media coverage of international issues reveals an agenda dominated by themes where Europe has the advantage: the ability to project economic power through trade and the promotion of supranational institutions of rule of law and multilateral governance. Thus, Europe’s concerns about the US handling of the Iraq issue are probably based as much on the fact that it represents “an assault on the essence of postmodern Europe” as on the fear that US aggression will destabilize the Middle East. Since Europeans lack the ability to “go it alone,” their hostility to unilaterialism is quite reasonable: “it is natural that [Europe] should oppose allowing others to do what they cannot.” Of course, this perspective is highly Americentric, and is used here to highlight the strategies used by American media to undermine the “foreign” media who cover conflict in a much different way.
Because Europe has certainly learned from the past and present leaders do not wish to repeat the errors of their predecessors, we would expect to see public opinion that resists the use of force and prefers negotiation, that prioritizes economic over military strength, that promotes global integration rather than intervention, and multilateralism and international law over unilaterialism. “Europeans” writes Kagan, “have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace”.
When it comes to the global agenda, recent polls have shown that Americans worry more about global security threats and Europeans worry more about global warming and other ecological threats. This had led some scholars to conclude, “both sets of publics have a remarkably accurate sense of their nations’ very different global roles.” But this raises another important dimension to the question of how citizens view their country’s national interests. To say that these national publics can recite their countries’ own sets of priorities is not to say they understand (or even agree with) them. Where American media tend to advocate a more interventionist and militaristic approach to foreign policy, European (and especially French and German) media tend to advocate more international and diplomatic policy solutions, and these disparities largely bear out in the reports on mass public opinion. We argue that these results are better representations of media agenda-setting than a coherent set of ideological values ascribed to by monolithic national publics.
The role of media in the idea democratic society is to act as a conduit of information between policy makers and the public. Citizen access to information is critical to the health of democracy. It both ensures that citizens (voters) make responsible and informed decisions, and it serves as a watchdog on elected officials to make sure they are doing their job. Media, under these conditions, is both a tool for citizens to debate with one another and to express discontent to the ruling elite. Next to voting, it is the primary channel by which people participate in their own governance. Without media, the democratic liberties embodied in the first amendment to the US constitution (and enumerated in countless constitutions since) would have little substantive meaning. Likewise, media is the primary means by which governments communicate with their publics. In this idealized democracy, media’s role is mostly functional, but also essential. And while it serves as forum for debate, media in this ideal role is not a participant in the policy making process.
In the real world, however, media has a much more active, and thus more powerful, role in public debate. Media’s power to frame issues of domestic and foreign politics (in the United States particularly) has earned it the title of “fourth estate”. Mass media news and information both reflect the content and the prioritizing of the most salient issues, and the representation of issues in the mass media exerts an independent effect on issue content and on public opinion. There is perhaps no issue in which we see this relationship more powerfully than war. The growth of a ubiquitous global media has also led to the development of a symbiotic and highly salient relationship between foreign policy makers and media. On one hand, media has influence in foreign policy making (through the processes of framing and agenda setting), but media is also vulnerable to manipulations by those same policymakers (as a tool of propaganda.) In his empirically supported study, “Mass Media and American Foreign Policy”, O'Heffernan concluded that the media "have a pervasive influence in the foreign policy process, shaping the tone, style and emphasis of U.S. foreign policy in various ways and to varying degrees." There is no reason to think this is not also the case in other democracies.
Framing is a primary device by which media shapes public opinion and the public agenda. It refers to the way events and issues are organized and made sense of by media. Identifying frames in media coverage of war and conflict is essential to understanding how public opinion is shaped, because we know that the way information is structured affects cognitive processing, and ultimately, the meaning people derive from that information. Public opinion on foreign policy and national security initiatives is directly related to the efficacy of the media's ability to naturalize violence and to create a perception of national and global insecurity. The varying degrees of public support between the United States and Europe for various national and international policies regarding the war in Iraq is largely determined by the type of media information to which citizens have access. We suspect that in the period leading up to and during the war in Iraq, non-American media advocated a more diplomatic and more internationalist foreign policy approach than US media. We can discuss these differences in terms of two major sets of media frames on the war: Internationalism/Realism and Military/Diplomacy. We hypothesize that there are significant differences in how media tended to frame the issues related to the justification for war, the progress of the war, and the outcome of the war.
Internationalism/Realism
The Internationalism/Realism frames get at the foreign policy perspective ascribed to by those who make the decisions regarding global relations. The Internationalist view is described above in the discussion of European priorities. This perspective places emphasis on international law, morality, and international organization, rather than power alone, as they key influences on international events. An Internationalist perspective tends to view the global system as a community, and believes that peaceful and cooperative international relationships are possible because political exchange does not have to be a zero-sum game. As such, an Internationalist media frame would be one that stresses the legitimacy of and use of international organizations, laws, and representatives. It would also contain references to multiple states, as a subset of a larger global community. It would promote multilateralism and cooperation among states on issues of global conflict, and it would emphasize those justifications for war that are based on threats to human rights and global cooperation. Based on the discussion above, we expect to find evidence for Internationalist frames in both the French and German press, and to a lesser extent, in Canada (whose silence has been deafening on it’s support for the US administration’s policies in Iraq, and whose public has engaged in a number of mass protests of those policies.)
The Realism (also called Realpolitik) perspective holds that a nation rationally uses power to pursue its self-interest. International relations are understood in terms of power relations. Sovereignty is the most important international norm according to this view. Realism provided the theoretical foundation for the Cold War policy of containment and the fierce determination of US policy makers not to appease China and the USSR. Realists tend to treat political power as separate from, and predominant over, morality, ideology, and other social and economic aspects of life. For realists, ideologies do not matter much, nor do other factors with which states might explain their actions. Realists share three assumptions about how this works: 1) states are the most important actors (or units of analysis), 2) states act like rational individuals in pursuing national interests, and 3) states act in the context of an international system lacking central government (that is, they assume that the international arena is characterized by a state of anarchy). A Realism frame would be characterized by references to heads of state and other notable foreign policymakers as representatives of national interests. Global conflicts in this frame are defined in terms of a power struggle between states, so we would expect to find references to issues defined as “vital interests” of states. As such, this frame will emphasize justifications for war that are based on (perceptions of) hostility by one state against another. Because Realism views the world as anarchic, references to international organizations and laws will be minimized. We expect to find evidence of a Realism frame in the American, and to a lesser extent, the British media, who we suspect have walked the line between supporting the UK’s participation in the coalition of the willing and critique of Blair’s close friendship with his American counterpart, which runs counter to a substantial proportion of British public opinion.
Military/Diplomacy
The Military/Diplomacy frames get at the issue of how global conflict should be resolved. A Militaristic approach to conflict resolution is one that gives greater credence to the use of force as a form of conflict resolution. Not only are military solutions likely to be considered earlier on in the debate, but the type and degree of military force considered reasonable and justifiable are driven by this perspective. A Militaristic frame is one that minimizes or explicitly delegitimizes other, more diplomatic solutions to conflict (because they are not seen as fair, efficient, binding, or enforceable), so we would expect to see few, if any, references to international organs of diplomacy or the representatives of these institutions. Greater emphasis will be placed on military officials as the most credible sources of information and policy. Additionally, because diplomacy (the converse frame) is associated with global coordination of state actions, we would also expect to see issues framed in terms of the necessity of unilateral solutions as opposed to multilateral ones. Other states (besides the target of the proposed aggression) are generally viewed in dichotomous terms, as either military allies (as captured by the use of the term coalition) or adversaries. Based on the discussion above of the US-led call for war in Iraq, we expect to find substantial evidence for a Militaristic frame in American media, and as noted above, to a lesser extent in the British press.
A Diplomatic approach emphasizes negotiation and bargaining as the primary means of resolving conflict. In this approach, war and aggression are considered last resorts. This approach guided the development of international bodies and law devoted to the coordination of states’ actions though a public forum of negotiation. A Diplomatic frame will give more emphasis and legitimacy to the instruments of international law, including the UN and its mandates and representatives. The significance of military leaders as sources of information will be minimized. Because negotiation is essential to diplomacy, and negotiation generally involves the coordination of several state actors, this frame will also stress the participation of multiple and the representation of more interests in the process of conflict resolution (i.e. multilateralism). Not only will the issue be discussed in terms of more actors, but those state actors will be depicted as more relevant players in the conflict resolution (i.e. part of the bargaining process), as opposed to the dichotomous characterization we expect in a Militaristic frame. We expect to find evidence for this frame in the French and German press in particular, and the Canadian press as well, although to a lesser extent because of Canada’s unique geopolitical position – it’s contiguousness with the United States and it’s close relationship with the UK.
Operationalization
In order to test our hypotheses regarding otherization of Iraqis and framing of foreign policy paradigms in international media, we chose to examine the ways in which news magazines from six different countries represented the lead-up to, invasion of, and conduct of the war in Iraq. We theororized that differences in the ways in which national news media presented the run up to the Iraq War would at least partially explain wide differences in levels of public support for that war in various countries. In particular, we wanted to see if the strategies through which US news media seemed to present the war as “inevitable” or “normal” would also be manifested in these other national contexts. Because these other countries, especially France, Germany and Canada, have traditionally taken a more internationalist approach to world politics, we expected that there might also be important differences in their media representations of the "crisis" that would both reflect and explain some of the differences in national policies and public opinions on the war.
We selected national news magazines for this study for several reasons. Magazine journalists have more time to reflect on and elaborate on stories than do their newspaper or broadcast counterparts, and so can be expected to reflect national priorities and shifts in national opinion than other media whose content is mostly reactive to daily events. Magazine journalists have the ability to consult a wide range of sources for their stories, free of the same time and space limits of other media. A larger selection of sources permits us to more clearly assess the framing of stories by determining what sources were privileged.
While not considered agenda-setting publication in the same way that leading newspapers, like the New York Times, are, news magazines are the principle means in each country for educated people – seeking more depth than newspapers or broadcast media provide – to learn about international affairs. The magazines selected from each nation were found to be the best selling magazine in each country which had a focus on current events and traditional – rather than advocacy – journalism. The Economist from the UK is something of an outlier, though, in that it has a smaller readership relative to population than the others and a distinctly economic and erudite focus. In our view, it is the closest equivalent the UK has to the other publications.
Sample and Methodology
This stage of the project draws on a sample of 286 news stories from Time magazine (US), Macleans (Canada), L’Express (France), The Economist (UK), Stern (Germany) and India Today (India). These magazines were chosen because they are all mass-market weekly news magazines that play broadly equivalent roles in each country’s media market. This group of 286 stories was drawn by sampling systematically over time (every third story over the year) from an overall census of about 1,000 stories collected about the Iraq War from six news magazines between 8/31/02 to 8/31/03.
The original census sample of 1,000 war stories was created by six student data collectors who scrutinized archived print copies of these magazines by hand for any stories related to Iraq in the context of international politics. This included, for example, stories about Iraq in the context of weapon inspections, UN Resolutions, sanctions, terrorism, and international politics more generally. From this census, we systematically sampled 1/3 of the articles for analysis in this first stage of the project. We intend to code and analyze the other two thirds of this sample in the next stages of the project, but we assume that patterns will remain the same, given the generally representative nature of the sample.
Coding
A code sheet was developed to systematically analyze the news stories across several key dimensions related to our research questions. The key dimensions include the following:
Actors and Sources: A critical question at the heart of news coverage is whose perspective will be heard. If US news on the war was dominated by official US sources, for example, to the exclusion of international voices, or to the exclusion of domestic dissenters, this would have increased the force of the administration’s unilateral framing of the crisis and the sense of inevitability of war among the US public. We investigate whether this was indeed the case in US news and whether news magazines from other countries presented similar or different ranges of views on the Iraq War. We coded and categorized news actors and sources by role (e.g. national, military, citizens, anti-war movement, international, and so on) and by country, gender and relationally (community context) and looked at patterns of who was in the news, who was speaking, and whose perspectives were being heard in national debates.
War Frames: Using a set of well-publicized explanations for the war, both supportive and critical, we tracked the visibility of various reasons for the war (war frames) across the various national media. These frames included the following explanations for the war. Coders identified whether these were present or not in stories:
-- That Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
-- That a war would liberate and democratize
Iraq
-- That Saddam Hussein needed to be removed
-- That weapons inspections had failed
-- That Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda terrorism
-- That the US wanted control of Iraqi oil
-- American expansionism and imperialism generally
All of these frames for the war had been visible in US media in the months leading up to the war, but clearly some of these frames are more likely than others to create a sense of justification for the invasion. We were interested in tracking the distribution of these frames in US and international media to see whether US or other national media were likely to offer a wider or more critical range of explanations for the War.
UN Visibility and Representation: A key hypothesis in this study was that the “march to war” effected by the US administration was achieved in part by the effective marginalization of the UN and of multilateral political solutions to the Iraq "crisis" more generally. We were interested, then, in seeing how international and US media presented the UN and its role in this crisis, and how they approached the possibilities of international diplomacy more generally. We coded each story for UN visibility, whether the UN was quoted or not, who was talking about the UN and how they UN was described. Additional qualitative analysis of the stories looked at levels of legitimacy in statements about the UN by journalists and sources, and at the ways in which the UN was understood (or not) historically in each magazine.
News Topics: We tracked patterns in the specific topics of news stories related to the war to see if there were important differences in the issues and subtopics that the different national media saw as important. For example, the history and culture of Iraq, especially its history of failed colonization by Europe, was a key topic in European media but almost never in the US, creating a richer historical context for the crisis, and a less black and white framework, than in US news media where war strategy seemed to dominate discussion. Categories included: war strategy; coalition casualties; Iraqi casualties; WMD; Search for Saddam; UN/International Diplomacy; Domestic Politics; Effects on region; Peace Movement/Anti War; Religion; Culture/History; and so on.
News Language: News research in recent years has noted an increase in the use of technical and strategic language and framing in news discourse. This tendency, in which journalists frame their news accounts from the perspective of "insiders" in a "game,” and in which they use insider terminology and language (e.g. "collateral damage" for civilian deaths) has been studied most extensively in relation to election news, where strategy or horse-race framing is associated with alienation among voters (e.g. Cappella and Jamieson, 1996). However this kind of language may have its most pernicious effects in covering international crises where issues of life and death are at stake. To track this kind of coverage, and to see if there were different levels of technical, as opposed to moral, framing across international media, we coded and analyzed headlines and sub headlines for all stories in terms of technical and strategic language vs. more moralistic or empathetic language. For example, coders looked for references that suggested that the international crisis and war be seen as a sport or game (“winning the peace”), a hunting event (“Saddam’s Lair”), or a routine job to be done ("Getting the job done"), or whether more humane frameworks prevailed.
We collected both quantitative and qualitative data on all of these measures. For example, we coded the categorical roles of actors and sources, but also looked at actor descriptors and contexts more qualitatively. Similarly, we counted UN appearances but also looked more closely at frames and themes in UN coverage. This mix of approaches gave us a sense of the big picture on the war, but also of the micro narrative strategies from which that picture was assembled.
Reporting and Interpretation of Results
Otherization/Portrayal of Iraqis
The most common topic across the entire sample was “international politics” (20%), rather than the impact of the war. This is not surprising, since international news studies have consistently reported this to be the main interest of international affairs journalists – that is, it constitutes for journalists the central definition of what news is. Hjarvard, for example, developed models of international news selection updating the classic work of Cohen (1963), Galtung and Ruge (1970), and Sreberny-Mohammadi et al., (1984). Hjarvard (1995) proposes a news selection model which emphasizes change in political power, empirically demonstrating such a focus in 60% of the stories of the Eurovision intra-industry television news exchange.
In our sample, the war’s impact on Iraq and Iraqis seemed of little interest to journalists from all the magazines we surveyed; and casualties amongst the invaders were consistently a bigger story than casualties amongst the invaded. “Iraqi casualties or damage to the Iraq people or environment” were the main topic of only 4% of the articles; “coalition causalities / coalition forces experience” were the main topic just slightly more often, at 6%.” More interestingly, 81% of stories on coalition casualties in our sample were in coalition (US/UK) publications, while just 17% of stories on Iraqi casualties were in those publications.
But Iraqi casualties (including damage to Iraqi infrastructure or environment) was frequently the second most important topic in Time and the Economist. A lack of attention to the victims of war is one aspect of dehumanizing an enemy; a lack of attention to that enemies culture, history, and religion – those things separating the ‘civilized’ from the ‘uncivilized’ – is another. These topics were never the main topic of articles in coalition publications, while a small number (n=12) appeared in the other publications.
Similarly, most headline main topics for Time (46%, n=26) were either “war strategy / war planning / war actions” or “coalition casualties / coalition forces’ experience”, while only (5%, n=3) headlines alluded to “Iraqi casualties / damage to Iraqi people or environment”, and only (2%, n=1) to “peace movement / anti-war protest”. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference to the German and French publications with just (6%, n=5) of their headlines devoted to “Iraqi casualties / damage to Iraqi people or environment”.
In answer to the question “when Iraqi people (excluding Saddam Hussein or other officials) are shown or talked about in this story , what are they doing?,” the largest group of answers in Time (40%, n=10) were in the category “resisting / fighting / protesting”. The majority of answers to that question for Stern were “suffering - casualties / victims of violence” (81%, n=13).
Portrayals of Iraqis as “welcoming” of the invasion are viewed here as essentially unsympathetic in nature, in that it is a portrayal which supports the coalition position that Iraqis required saving by outsiders, and that they were neither competent to deal with their own political affairs nor significantly victimized by the invading forces. Lewis and Brookes (2003) found that 37% of British TV reports about the Iraqi people concerned injury or death of Iraqis, but also, perhaps ironically, that “the Iraqi people were roughly twice as likely to be portrayed as pro-invasion than anti-invasion.” About 1/3 (29%, n=7) of Time stories where the nature of Iraqi activity was defined, categorized that activity as “suffering - casualties / victims of violence”, while Stern did so twice as much (65%, n=13). Only one Stern story described Iraqis as predominately “celebrating / welcoming (invading) forces.” Where the question could be answered for L’Express, there was a seeming balance between sympathetic and unsympathetic portrayals, with 40% “suffering - casualties / victims of violence”, and 40% either “resisting / fighting / protesting” or “celebrating / welcoming (invading) forces.”
Only 13% (n=222) of all key actors identified in the stories across all nations were ordinary citizens or people advocating peace, while 46% (n=793) were national leaders, government officials, or military people. Stern, L’Express, and India Today were not significantly more inclined to feature ordinary citizens or people advocating peace in their stories, and only Stern had stories where the first ten key actors in the story included those categorized as “peace movement, anti-war.”
Sources
In their study of British Television coverage
of the war, Lewis and Brookes (2003) observed that “those who might have
shed light on events – whether NGOs, weapons inspectors, academics, or
experts on and in the Arab world – therefore played very little part in
the story told by television news”. Many critiques of American television
coverage have similarly pointed to a dependence on retired generals as
principle commentators on the war, and a near total absence of informed
and critical voices. We were, therefore, interesting in the question
of whether non-coalition media tended to draw from a broader range of sources
than coalition media. Importantly, a variety of analyses have now
show that the dependence on official sources not only propagandizes news
stories, but it also leads media to frequently get the story wrong (Lewis
and Brooks, 2003; Millar and White, 2003).
59% (n=167) of sources identified for Time were
coded as national leaders, other government officials, or military people
(including rank and file soldiers). Time was therefore the most prone
of all the publications to depend upon military and official sources to
tell this story. Mcleans (52%, n=52), the Economist 56% (n=162),
and, surprisingly, L’Express (53%, n=79), did so almost as much.
India Today (40%, n=39) and Stern (33%, n=36) were significantly, though
far from entirely, less dependent on such sources.
War Frames
Coders were asked to choose from a list which reasons for war were referred to in articles. Some of these privilege coalition government rationalizations which put coalition priorities about the welfare of Iraqis; others reject coalition explanations and suggest alternative explanations for war. Just 15% (n=9) of Time and Economist articles giving reasons for war listed reasons in the second (anti-coalition) set of categories, while 35% (n=68) of non-coalition magazine articles did, illustrating a willingness amongst non-coalition media to entertain explanations for war which emanated from sources other than coalition governments.
Framing and Foreign Policy
To look for evidence of the foreign policy frames discussed above, we selected several variables to act as proxies for the foreign policy paradigms used to justify war, report on the progress of the war, and draw conclusions about the outcome and significance of the war. These variables include those that get at the individuals and perspectives (both actors and sources) mentioned in the article, the frequency and characterization of references to the United Nations and its resolutions and representatives, the war-related topics most frequently mentioned, references to the justifications for war, the countries mentioned and their roles in the debate/conflict, and the tone of the articles (i.e. does the writer seem generally supportive or unsupportive of US-led action in Iraq).
Actors and Sources
This set of variables gets at the question of who are considered the most relevant players in the discussion of war, and what kinds of political actors are allowed to shape the foreign policy agenda as a source of information on issues related to the debate. We can begin to identify various frames by glancing at who is mentioned in the coverage and whose perspective prevails in the coverage. When we look at the data in the aggregate, the most commonly cited individual actors (those whose names appeared most frequently as subjects in the story) were found to be: Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. The most commonly cited individual sources (those whose perspectives drove the tone of the story) were: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Saddam Hussein, and Hans Blix. What is especially interesting about this finding is that two American administration officials (Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Powell) were referenced and cited much more frequently than even the heads of state of key countries, including those in Europe and the Middle East. This suggests that the Americans were especially successful at setting the international agenda on Iraq by dominating the perspectives covered. Even when other media were critical of these perspectives, the overwhelming amount of coverage given to the American administration’s view lends it some (perhaps unjustified) legitimacy.
More notable is the degree to which military actors and sources were referenced. For Time magazine, military actors made up 19.7% (n=71) of the total individuals mentioned in the stories analyzed. The percentages for MacLeans, The Economist, Stern, and L’Express were 5.8% (n=9), 5.4% (n=29), 6.9% (n=16), and 4.2% (n=28), respectively. Similarly, military sources made up 24% (n=67) of the total in Time, but the figures for the other four magazines (as listed above) were 7% (n=7), 5% (n=15), 6.4% (n=7), and 6.7% (n=10).
For non-military sources, the results were somewhat the converse. When we aggregated several source categories, including representatives of the UN and other international bodies, international peace groups, and national citizens representing academia or non-profits, we found that Time and MacLeans referenced these non-military sources as 15% (n=47 and n=15) of the total, The Economist 20% of the total (n=61), L’Express 22% (n=32), and for Stern, a surprising 65% of sources fell into these categories (n=71).
United Nations
This set of variables got at the question of how frequently the UN was mentioned and to what degree it was portrayed as legitimate. In terms of frequency, the United Nations was mentioned in 50% of the articles from L’Express (n=24), 57% of The Economist stories (n=56), 62% of articles in MacLeans (n=13), 67% of those in Stern (n=18), and only in 26% of the articles from Time (n=14). Where it was mentioned, we asked the coders to evaluate to what degree the UN was characterized as legitimate (1=least legitimate, 10=most legitimate.) The results for Time, MacLeans, and The Economist are very similar. In their evaluation of the UN where it was mentioned, these three periodicals rendered for the UN an average score of 6, 7, and 5.8, respectively. The results from the other two periodicals were more illuminating. When it mentioned the UN, L’Express characterized the UN quite favorably as compared to the other magazines, producing an average score of 8.9. On the other end of the spectrum, Stern produced an average evaluation of 4.1 for the UN. A couple caveats should be made regarding this result. Firstly, Stern mentioned the UN far more frequently than any other periodical, which in itself lends legitimacy, regardless of the characterization. Secondly, because the statistic relied on judgment calls by individual coders, it is possible that the Stern coder had a different standard from the other coders as to what constituted a “legitimate” characterization. However, even if this evaluation is supported in further analyses, the apparent contradiction between Germany’s official line on the Iraq war and it’s relatively negative evaluation off the UN (as represented in Stern) can probably be explained by the fact that Germany has a complicated and arguably tenuous relationship with the United Nations. Although the country is one of the most outspoken critics of the US’s disregard of international resolutions and norms regarding war in Iraq, Germany does not have a permanent seat on the Security Council (unlike the US, France, and the UK), and this result may be partially a reflection of the (understandable) resentment on the part of German officials and media for this insult.
War Frames
This variable got at the question of which reasons
for war in Iraq were referred to (regardless of the characterization of
those reasons.) Our suspicion is that the more frequently a justification
for war is brought up in media coverage, the more salient it becomes in
the eye of public opinion.
The most commonly cited justifications for war
in Time were “Weapons of Mass Destruction/Imminent Threat” and “Destroy
Hussein,” each representing 34% of the total references (n=19 and n=19)
and which are notably consistent with the Bush administration’s official
line. Because the aggression against Iraq was initiated and led by the
US, the other countries’ coverage can be evaluated in reference to the
official US perspective. The first American justification (Weapons of Mass
Destruction) was mentioned by MacLeans as 25% of the total (n=9), by The
Economist as 17% of the total (n=25), by Stern 9.6% of the time (n=3),
and by L’Express 23% of the time (n=19). The second American justification
(Destory Hussein) was mentioned 25% of the time in MacLeans (n=9), 18%
of the time in The Economist (n=27), 22% of the time in Stern (n=7), and
24% of the time in L’Express (n=20).
The justification for war that can be considered
the most critical of US perspective (and the one most counter to the official
US line) was “Colonize/take over Iraq/American imperialism.” That perspective
was mentioned 7% of the time by Time (n=4), 5.5% in MacLeans (n=2), 15%
of the time by The Economist and L’Express (n=23 and n=12), and 42% of
the time by Stern (n=13).
Main Topic
This variable got at the question of which war-related topic was the primary subject of the article, i.e. what angle did the author emphasize as the most important? Two topics dominated the coverage in Time: “War Strategy/War planning/War Activity” and “Coalition casualties/Coalition forces experience.” Together, they comprised 45% of the main topics covered in this magazine (n=25). The other magazines considered these topics significantly less frequently, at 14% for MacLeans (n=3), 17% for The Economist (n=17), 24% for Stern (n=7) and 22% for L’Express (n=12). This is illuminating in that is evidence of a very narrow perspective offered by the American periodical as compared to the others. Time discussed the war largely in reference to the United States and its experience, and to the exclusion of a larger context, including its consequences and the implications for global peace and justice. On the other hand, the categories that did suggest a larger context on the war (“Iraqi Casualties/Damage to Iraq,” “UN/Diplomacy,” and “Effects on Region/World”) collectively accounted for 7% of the main story topics in Time (n=4), 14% of the main topics in MacLeans and Stern (n=3 and n=4), 13% in L’Express (n=7), and 19% in The Economist (n=19). In other words, the American perspective was used as the frame of reference for the story two to three times as often in Time versus the other periodicals, and the most broad (anti-American) perspective was offered two to three times less frequently by Time than the other magazines.
Countries Mentioned/Countries Roles
These variables get at the question of how many other countries (besides the country that was the source of the periodical) were mentioned, which countries were mentioned, and how these countries were characterized. The average number of references to other countries in each of the magazines were: Time- 1.7, MacLeans- 2.8, The Economist- 2.0, Stern-2.5, and L’Express- 2.4. Specifically, in Time, the single most frequently mentioned country (besides the US and Iraq) was the UK, which comprised 12% of the total references, and was mentioned 100% of the time in reference to its role as ally/coalition member. Additionally, 44% of the countries mentioned in the Time articles were countries categorized as “Other”- i.e. none of the Security Council members, the largest EU states including the UK, France, Germany, and Spain, or the Mideast allies or targets of the US. This is interesting in that it suggests as very Americentric view of the world, and suggests that some key voices in the debate have been marginalized by the American press. Among the specific states categorized as “Other”, the single most common reference was to Vietnam (in comparisons between the Iraq war and the Vietnam war.) In the few mentions that Time made of France and Germany, the countries were almost singularly categorized as critical of the US. For the other countries, the single most commonly mentioned country (besides the country of origin of the article and Iraq) was, not surprisingly, the US, which comprised 34% of the mentions in MacLeans, 39% of the mentions in The Economist, 36% of the mentions in Stern, and 38% of the mentions in L’Express. The UK was the second-most frequently cited country, comprising 18% of the mentions in MacLeans, 8% in Stern, and 9% in L’Express. In The Economist, the other countries mentioned frequently were France at 12%, Russia at 5.5%, and Saudi Arabia at 5%. In Stern, Saudi Arabia was also mentioned fairly frequently, at 7%. And finally, Germany comprised 7% of the mentions in L’Express.
Article View
This variable gets at (the coder’s evaluation of) the tone of the article- whether it was supportive or US action in Iraq, critical of US action in Iraq, or appeared to be neutral.
The Economist was the only periodical categorized as being supportive of US action more than it it was categorized as critical or neutral (46%, 13%, and 41%, respectively). Time was categorized as neutral 50% of the time, supportive 28% of the time, and critical 22% of the time. MacLeans was categorized as critical 55% of the time, neutral 40% of the time, and supportive 5% of the time. And most strikingly, Stern and L’Express were categorized as critical of US action in Iraq in 75% and 77% of the articles, respectively, and neutral in 25% and 23%. In fact, neither Stern nor L’Express had a single article that was categorized by our coders as supportive.
Conclusions
While our analyses of the data are preliminary, the hypotheses that non-coalition media would focus more on the effect of war on ordinary Iraqis is generally supported. There is quantitative support for the assertion that international (non-American) media advocated a less aggressive, more internationalist, and more diplomatic foreign policy approach than US media. Such differences could not only reflect critically important differences in national policy positions towards Iraq, they could also have contributed to differences in public perceptions of the need for war at all.
Across the entire sample, the story was more about
the reasons to go to war than the reasons not to, and more about the execution
of the war then its human impacts. But as we anticipated non-coalition
media generally wrote more about Iraqi suffering, and generally gave more
voice to those affected by the war than those executing it.
A surprising finding is that while France led
opposition to war in the United Nations, L’ Express varies little from
Time magazine on a couple of key quantitative indicators, namely the sources
referenced and the characterization of Iraqis. Further analysis will likely
reveal more subtle differences in coverage. Such a finding casts
some doubts on the widespread belief, fanned by American politicians, that
the French media were hostile to the war; and contradicts Hertoghe’s conclusions,
alluded to earlier, that French media were biased against the coalition.
However, French coverage did also suggest evidence of key frames, as noted
below.
We found evidence for specific foreign policy frames in international media. Specifically, the evidence from French and German press (as represented by L’Express and Stern respectively) suggested both Diplomatic and Internationalist frames in how the war was couched, though for different reasons. These media relied to a much greater degree on non-military sources for information on the war, L’Express had more positive references to the UN than any other magazine and characterized it as a more relevant and legitimate player in global conflict resolution, and both Stern and L’Express generally demonstrated significantly more skepticism than other sources about the US-defined reasons for war. There was also support for the hypothesis that Canadian media applied, to a slightly lesser degree, these same frames. MacLeans had fewer outright condemnations of US/UK aggression in Iraq than the French and German magazines, but fell much closer to these European countries than the US or even the UK in its selection of war-related topics and the conclusions they drew from the events.
American media (as represented by Time) produced evidence for both the Realism and Military frames on several dimensions, including the actors and sources referenced, its characterization of the reasons for war, the relevant issues associated with the conflict, and the manner in which the conflict should be resolved. Perhaps the most interesting case was the UK (as represented by The Economist), which produced evidence for these same frames, but to a lesser degree. It is interesting to note that this periodical was coded as more supportive of US action than any other, including Time, and that a substantial margin of the remaining articles were coded as “Neutral” in their tone on the question of support for the US-led war, despite raising a number of critiques that were virtually ignored in the American media. This is probably due to the fact that members of the Bush administration were a primary source of quotes and information, and were cited as actors more frequently than in the American press (9.6% versus 6.7%), which undoubtedly gave perception that the administration’s line was more legitimate than not. This all makes the British coverage difficult to characterize, as it is neither clearly pro nor anti-US. Nonetheless, at least at this stage, there is more support for the frames that offer views on geopolitics that are more similar to the US perspective than not.
All of this raises the question of how foreign policy framing in media is related to public opinion. Why does media choose to represent issues in a particular way, and what are the consequences of that framing? Media is a (perhaps the) primary agenda-setter in contemporary democracies. Governments rely on media to not only communicate information, but to get their message across, and to act as a kind of national marketing department. Because the very nature of representative democracy implies that representatives, including heads of state, are accountable to their constituencies, it is imperative for any regime to minimize criticism and maximize support of its agenda. This is especially true in issues of war and conflict, when national publics are understandably more cautious in their evaluations of policy. Policy must be couched in terms that make it difficult for the public to question the righteousness of the administration’s decisions. The fastest way to end a war (other than an overwhelming display of military force) is to have a mass display of public discontent. However, both media and government gatekeepers understand that all that is necessary to keep a national public on board is to frame issues in particular ways:
“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Although the source of this quote is a former Nazi official, it becomes easy to see how democratic governments can and must employ the same technique when seeking support for their policy agenda.
There are other fringe benefits for governments as well. Leaders’ popularity tends to spike during war, regardless of how the conflict was started, who is winning, and how justifiable the cause is. This phenomenon, sometimes called “rally around the flag,” seems to represent a perceived need for national unity in a time of crisis. George W. Bush’s approval ratings spiked at two points in the past three years- immediately after September 11th, and upon the commencement of the military campaign in Baghdad.
Another benefit of favorable framing of foreign policy is the license granted by citizens to government to make law and policy that would be unthinkable under normal circumstances. For example, the US Congress passed the US Patriot Act in October of 2001, which essentially restricted and in some cases, rescinded, various citizen liberties under the pretence of national security imperatives. Among other things, the Patriot Act includes provisions for targeting people for engaging in classes of political speech that are expressly protected by the US Constitution.
A logical future direction of this research would
be to ask why and how media chooses to frame stories in ways that are consistent
with (or critical of) an administration’s foreign policy agenda. For now
we can say that media framing works and, that the characterization of international
paradigms influences public opinion, and thus, has the ability to legitimize
or undermine the decisions made by policymakers. This has special resonance
for American consumers of media. To paraphrase Rampton and Stauber’s conclusions,
as democratic citizens we should ask ourselves to what degree we have bought
into our own propaganda, and whether we have been advocating a war for
the wrong reasons, against the wrong people, at the wrong time, and with
the wrong weapons.
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