Pub Date : 2022-07-21DOI: 10.1177/17506352221113958
Katy Parry, Jenna Pitchford-Hyde
Over the last two decades of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the media’s attention on military veterans in the UK has been characterized by a series of shifts: from a focus on combat operations; to initiatives to support transition to civilian life; and finally to a largely invisible presence of veteran issues in the mediated public sphere. This article presents findings from an online qualitative survey conducted with British veterans in 2020. The authors’ primary focus is on how veterans express their concerns when asked about varied televised representations of military and post-military experience. How did the respondents perceive differences across television genres (drama, news, reality TV), and how did this affect their engagement? How do they see their veteran identity reflected back at them through popular media culture? There is a growing research interest in ‘veteran studies’ from a range of disciplines, but the relationship between veteran identity and perceptions of (post)-military representations remains largely under-researched, at least in the UK context. One concern is that negative or misleading stereotypes of veterans among publics could hinder their successful reintegration into society, but the authors are interested in how veterans make sense of such representations across popular media culture, how they imagine the ‘general public’ audience in their reflections, and the nature of veteran identity they project within the survey responses. This study finds that anxieties about ‘mad, bad or sad’ stereotypical representations of veterans continue, but the diversity within its findings also reaffirms the importance of not treating veterans as a homogeneous group in research.
{"title":"‘We may have bad days . . . that doesn’t make us killers’: How military veterans perceive contemporary British media representations of military and post-military life","authors":"Katy Parry, Jenna Pitchford-Hyde","doi":"10.1177/17506352221113958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221113958","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last two decades of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the media’s attention on military veterans in the UK has been characterized by a series of shifts: from a focus on combat operations; to initiatives to support transition to civilian life; and finally to a largely invisible presence of veteran issues in the mediated public sphere. This article presents findings from an online qualitative survey conducted with British veterans in 2020. The authors’ primary focus is on how veterans express their concerns when asked about varied televised representations of military and post-military experience. How did the respondents perceive differences across television genres (drama, news, reality TV), and how did this affect their engagement? How do they see their veteran identity reflected back at them through popular media culture? There is a growing research interest in ‘veteran studies’ from a range of disciplines, but the relationship between veteran identity and perceptions of (post)-military representations remains largely under-researched, at least in the UK context. One concern is that negative or misleading stereotypes of veterans among publics could hinder their successful reintegration into society, but the authors are interested in how veterans make sense of such representations across popular media culture, how they imagine the ‘general public’ audience in their reflections, and the nature of veteran identity they project within the survey responses. This study finds that anxieties about ‘mad, bad or sad’ stereotypical representations of veterans continue, but the diversity within its findings also reaffirms the importance of not treating veterans as a homogeneous group in research.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"440 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47278722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-20DOI: 10.1177/17506352221101269
Isaac Blacksin
In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the importance of casualty counts may be less the statistical reality of war such numbers purport to deliver than it is the symbolism these numbers provide. The ongoing conflict in Syria provides a central case study, approached ethnographically through two registers. First, the author examines on-the-ground casualty counting, demonstrating that what cannot be counted of war yet affects those journalists tasked to quantify war. This circumstance throws into doubt the utility of numbers – and the authority of journalism – for distilling war’s reality. Second, he examines how data on total wartime deaths in Syria, collected by monitoring organizations, is acquired and reproduced by journalists. Here journalists must reckon with the translation of statistical uncertainty into symbolic truth. Finally, the author reflects on the particularity of casualty counts as a journalistic convention, and considers how this particularity is hidden behind a journalistic common sense.
{"title":"Death’s common sense: Casualty counts in war reportage from Syria and beyond","authors":"Isaac Blacksin","doi":"10.1177/17506352221101269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221101269","url":null,"abstract":"In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the importance of casualty counts may be less the statistical reality of war such numbers purport to deliver than it is the symbolism these numbers provide. The ongoing conflict in Syria provides a central case study, approached ethnographically through two registers. First, the author examines on-the-ground casualty counting, demonstrating that what cannot be counted of war yet affects those journalists tasked to quantify war. This circumstance throws into doubt the utility of numbers – and the authority of journalism – for distilling war’s reality. Second, he examines how data on total wartime deaths in Syria, collected by monitoring organizations, is acquired and reproduced by journalists. Here journalists must reckon with the translation of statistical uncertainty into symbolic truth. Finally, the author reflects on the particularity of casualty counts as a journalistic convention, and considers how this particularity is hidden behind a journalistic common sense.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"3 11","pages":"401 - 417"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41243578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-20DOI: 10.1177/17506352221103487
Soomin Lee, Lynn Cockburn, J. Nganji
Since October 2016, Cameroon has been involved in a violent conflict known as the Anglophone Crisis. This study examines the impact of the hashtag #MyAnglophoneCrisisStory on Twitter in capturing and amplifying the stories of people affected by the crisis. Using R, the authors extracted and analyzed tweets using this hashtag that were posted between 21 October 2020 and 3 November 2020. Only tweets posted in English and French languages were included. To understand the content of the tweets, the authors inductively coded and manually analyzed a total of 1064 tweets, replies, and comments. A categorical analysis revealed the presence of three different types of tweets: ‘Story’, ‘Response to Story’, and ‘Awareness and Advocacy’. The ‘Story’ category had four distinct themes: (1) Senseless Loss of Life: Shot and Killed; (2) The Disappeared: Lost and Kidnapped; (3) On the Move/Elusive Safety: Escape, Displacement; and (4) Prevention and Trauma, Mental Health, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This study supports the concept that even short tweets can have a significant impact and signals the need for more attention and research on this overlooked conflict. Future work can involve the use of more advanced analysis tools to conduct a more thorough examination of tweets.
{"title":"Exploring the use of #MyAnglophoneCrisisStory on Twitter to understand the impacts of the Cameroon Anglophone Crisis","authors":"Soomin Lee, Lynn Cockburn, J. Nganji","doi":"10.1177/17506352221103487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221103487","url":null,"abstract":"Since October 2016, Cameroon has been involved in a violent conflict known as the Anglophone Crisis. This study examines the impact of the hashtag #MyAnglophoneCrisisStory on Twitter in capturing and amplifying the stories of people affected by the crisis. Using R, the authors extracted and analyzed tweets using this hashtag that were posted between 21 October 2020 and 3 November 2020. Only tweets posted in English and French languages were included. To understand the content of the tweets, the authors inductively coded and manually analyzed a total of 1064 tweets, replies, and comments. A categorical analysis revealed the presence of three different types of tweets: ‘Story’, ‘Response to Story’, and ‘Awareness and Advocacy’. The ‘Story’ category had four distinct themes: (1) Senseless Loss of Life: Shot and Killed; (2) The Disappeared: Lost and Kidnapped; (3) On the Move/Elusive Safety: Escape, Displacement; and (4) Prevention and Trauma, Mental Health, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This study supports the concept that even short tweets can have a significant impact and signals the need for more attention and research on this overlooked conflict. Future work can involve the use of more advanced analysis tools to conduct a more thorough examination of tweets.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"418 - 439"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45184892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-07DOI: 10.1177/17506352221101257
Alessandra Massa, Giuseppe Anzera
Platforms are conditioning the way public communication is conducted while presenting themselves as neutral connectors. Social media logic encompasses norms, strategies, mechanisms and economies acting at the intersection between online platforms and society. Military communication is adapting itself to communicative and socio-technical innovations dictated by online platforms and social network sites. Armies are currently using digital media and online platforms in at least two different ways: a promotional one, based on the ‘normalization’ of militarism, and a conflictual one, based on the display and management of conflicts. In this article, the authors apply qualitative content analysis to investigate the platformed strategy of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Twitter account. Results show how the IDF embraces platformization and uses social media logic to develop a coherent narrative, projecting an attractive image, establishing an international positioning and defining international interlocutors. The institution of communicative formats, the multiplication of themes and representational artefacts, and a re-defined aesthetics of army and violence are enabled by social media logic. Tweets from the IDF follow a dual path: they contribute to normalizing militarism and act on the conflictual display of current affairs.
{"title":"The platformization of military communication: The digital strategy of the Israel Defense Forces on Twitter","authors":"Alessandra Massa, Giuseppe Anzera","doi":"10.1177/17506352221101257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221101257","url":null,"abstract":"Platforms are conditioning the way public communication is conducted while presenting themselves as neutral connectors. Social media logic encompasses norms, strategies, mechanisms and economies acting at the intersection between online platforms and society. Military communication is adapting itself to communicative and socio-technical innovations dictated by online platforms and social network sites. Armies are currently using digital media and online platforms in at least two different ways: a promotional one, based on the ‘normalization’ of militarism, and a conflictual one, based on the display and management of conflicts. In this article, the authors apply qualitative content analysis to investigate the platformed strategy of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Twitter account. Results show how the IDF embraces platformization and uses social media logic to develop a coherent narrative, projecting an attractive image, establishing an international positioning and defining international interlocutors. The institution of communicative formats, the multiplication of themes and representational artefacts, and a re-defined aesthetics of army and violence are enabled by social media logic. Tweets from the IDF follow a dual path: they contribute to normalizing militarism and act on the conflictual display of current affairs.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"364 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49205630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-24DOI: 10.1177/17506352221078014
Federica Ferrari
This study uses a CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies) approach to identify a series of axes around which degrees of persuasion can be mapped in debates about international affairs. The author investigates how US and UK news media reported Obama’s use of the term ‘red line’ to describe the potential transgression if Syrian leader Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, which Assad then did. The article examines the connotational, argumentational and rhetorical behaviour of ‘red line’ across news media in the period 4–28 September 2013. In a corpus-assisted analysis of ‘red line’, six discoursal factors emerged as persuasive axes at work: (1) leader’s image; (2) ideological positioning, even in mutual intervention; (3) persuasion consistency; (4) factual investigation; (5) factual interpretation reporting; and (6) evaluated metaphor development. These axes proactively work at the crossroads of metaphor and narrative as transformative and mutually interactive agents in discoursal change. The analysis also identified other subcategories of research potential, plus correlated lexis and concepts such as ‘weakness’ vs ‘strength’. The study’s significance is to ground reflection on the function of metaphor and narrative in steering sense-making in diplomatic practice and to highlight their pragmatic force and dynamics – here in the news genre.
{"title":"Media reverberations on the ‘red line’: Syria, metaphor and narrative in news media","authors":"Federica Ferrari","doi":"10.1177/17506352221078014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221078014","url":null,"abstract":"This study uses a CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies) approach to identify a series of axes around which degrees of persuasion can be mapped in debates about international affairs. The author investigates how US and UK news media reported Obama’s use of the term ‘red line’ to describe the potential transgression if Syrian leader Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, which Assad then did. The article examines the connotational, argumentational and rhetorical behaviour of ‘red line’ across news media in the period 4–28 September 2013. In a corpus-assisted analysis of ‘red line’, six discoursal factors emerged as persuasive axes at work: (1) leader’s image; (2) ideological positioning, even in mutual intervention; (3) persuasion consistency; (4) factual investigation; (5) factual interpretation reporting; and (6) evaluated metaphor development. These axes proactively work at the crossroads of metaphor and narrative as transformative and mutually interactive agents in discoursal change. The analysis also identified other subcategories of research potential, plus correlated lexis and concepts such as ‘weakness’ vs ‘strength’. The study’s significance is to ground reflection on the function of metaphor and narrative in steering sense-making in diplomatic practice and to highlight their pragmatic force and dynamics – here in the news genre.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"325 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44843349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1177/17506352221082610
Faith Leslie, Laura Roselle
During the Trump administration, official daily newsletters served as an important form of communication between the President and his constituents. These newsletters provided an overview of how the Trump Administration perceived conflict in the international system, the role and characteristics of the United States and other actors, and policy priorities. These newsletters, 1600 Daily, West Wing Reads, and Resolute Reads, provided a unique and important data source for understanding the Trump administration’s strategic narratives on the international system, especially in the realm of conflict. This article analyzes 810 daily newsletters from March 2017 to March 2020 to assess the administration’s narratives about the international system and several areas of conflict including relations with North Korea, Russia, and China. As the past four years of the Trump presidency saw tensions increase in many areas of American foreign policy, it is necessary to understand the narratives that shaped the Trump administration’s combative approach to diplomacy. The authors find that the strategic narratives of the Trump administration took a unilateral, transactional, and zero-sum approach to foreign policy. The newsletters reflected a prioritization of conflict with long-held allies and a focus on competition with enemies who undermine US dominance in the international system, mainly China and Russia. Within this discussion of foreign policy, this research additionally found a significant emphasis on trade policy, set within a conflictual, mercantilist framework. These newsletters set out conflictual strategic narratives that sought to shape the international system.
{"title":"Conflict in the international system in the time of Trump: Strategic narratives in White House daily newsletters","authors":"Faith Leslie, Laura Roselle","doi":"10.1177/17506352221082610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221082610","url":null,"abstract":"During the Trump administration, official daily newsletters served as an important form of communication between the President and his constituents. These newsletters provided an overview of how the Trump Administration perceived conflict in the international system, the role and characteristics of the United States and other actors, and policy priorities. These newsletters, 1600 Daily, West Wing Reads, and Resolute Reads, provided a unique and important data source for understanding the Trump administration’s strategic narratives on the international system, especially in the realm of conflict. This article analyzes 810 daily newsletters from March 2017 to March 2020 to assess the administration’s narratives about the international system and several areas of conflict including relations with North Korea, Russia, and China. As the past four years of the Trump presidency saw tensions increase in many areas of American foreign policy, it is necessary to understand the narratives that shaped the Trump administration’s combative approach to diplomacy. The authors find that the strategic narratives of the Trump administration took a unilateral, transactional, and zero-sum approach to foreign policy. The newsletters reflected a prioritization of conflict with long-held allies and a focus on competition with enemies who undermine US dominance in the international system, mainly China and Russia. Within this discussion of foreign policy, this research additionally found a significant emphasis on trade policy, set within a conflictual, mercantilist framework. These newsletters set out conflictual strategic narratives that sought to shape the international system.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"303 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41972946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-09DOI: 10.1177/17506352221082608
José Manuel Moreno-Mercado, Adolfo Calatrava-García
Operation Guardian of the Walls was the most serious military conflict between the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups since 2014. This article aims to explore the Organized Persuasive Communication (OPC) made by IDF, in English, Spanish and French, during the 11 days of the escalation of the war. For this purpose, it has resorted to techniques typical of computational science, specifically the unsupervised machine learning Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and sentiment analysis (multilingual). The data show that there are no significant differences between a range of official Twitter accounts giving a process of information uniformity. The results of the study allow us to know the scope of IDF’s communication within the framework of the so-called new Israeli diplomacy. In addition, this text attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to strategic studies and international relations.
{"title":"Multilingual public diplomacy: Strategic communication of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Twitter during Operation Guardian of the Walls","authors":"José Manuel Moreno-Mercado, Adolfo Calatrava-García","doi":"10.1177/17506352221082608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221082608","url":null,"abstract":"Operation Guardian of the Walls was the most serious military conflict between the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups since 2014. This article aims to explore the Organized Persuasive Communication (OPC) made by IDF, in English, Spanish and French, during the 11 days of the escalation of the war. For this purpose, it has resorted to techniques typical of computational science, specifically the unsupervised machine learning Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and sentiment analysis (multilingual). The data show that there are no significant differences between a range of official Twitter accounts giving a process of information uniformity. The results of the study allow us to know the scope of IDF’s communication within the framework of the so-called new Israeli diplomacy. In addition, this text attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to strategic studies and international relations.","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"282 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48427725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-21DOI: 10.1177/17506352221081574
W. G. Lovell
{"title":"Book review: Javier Uriarte, The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America","authors":"W. G. Lovell","doi":"10.1177/17506352221081574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221081574","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"15 1","pages":"401 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46913701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-08DOI: 10.1177/17506352221077480
Gretchen Hoak
{"title":"Book review: Amit Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma","authors":"Gretchen Hoak","doi":"10.1177/17506352221077480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352221077480","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"15 1","pages":"399 - 400"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46214453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-04DOI: 10.1177/17506352211073201
C. Bond
This book challenges the narrative that the British media failed to alert the international community to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, analysing coverage in the British broadsheets – The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and The Daily Telegraph, in particular – and mapping it out with data on the frequency and nature of the coverage across four phases: (1) pre-crisis, (2) genocide, (3) refugee crisis, and (4) post-crisis. The book examines the relationship between media coverage, parliamentary debate and political decision making in Britain, and the impact the print and broadcast media did or did not have on the British government and its response to the crisis in Rwanda. Conversely, it examines to what extent parliamentary debate was reflected in the media and the important ‘dual movement’ between the two. Dividing coverage into six types – field reporting, political reporting, editorials, analysis, letters to the editor, and other types of story – leads John Clarke to question commonly held perceptions: one is that there was more British reporting on the exodus of mostly Hutu refugees from Rwanda to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) at the tail end of the genocide in July 1994 than there was during the genocide of the Tutsi minority in April, May and June. In a chart, Clarke shows that the amount of field reporting was almost equal in both phases, while it was political reporting and other types of comment on Rwanda that grew during the refugee crisis to create this impression. Similarly, he points out that past criticism that the evacuation of foreigners, especially of Europeans, received disproportionate media attention at the start of the genocide, does not hold up, with only 13 of the 778 stories published in the British press during this phase focusing on the evacuation (less than 2%). Clarke’s methodology shows us the importance of examining assumptions and the use of quantitative and qualitative analysis in doing so. Other thematic content is analysed and discussed, as well as concepts key to the reporting of the crisis – military intervention, humanitarian intervention and tribalism. Here, another argument is challenged, one held by academic Linda Melvern that, when it came to tribalism, ‘The use of this cliché 1073201 MWC0010.1177/17506352211073201Media, War & ConflictBook review book-review2022
{"title":"Book review: John Nathaniel Clarke, British Media and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda","authors":"C. Bond","doi":"10.1177/17506352211073201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352211073201","url":null,"abstract":"This book challenges the narrative that the British media failed to alert the international community to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, analysing coverage in the British broadsheets – The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and The Daily Telegraph, in particular – and mapping it out with data on the frequency and nature of the coverage across four phases: (1) pre-crisis, (2) genocide, (3) refugee crisis, and (4) post-crisis. The book examines the relationship between media coverage, parliamentary debate and political decision making in Britain, and the impact the print and broadcast media did or did not have on the British government and its response to the crisis in Rwanda. Conversely, it examines to what extent parliamentary debate was reflected in the media and the important ‘dual movement’ between the two. Dividing coverage into six types – field reporting, political reporting, editorials, analysis, letters to the editor, and other types of story – leads John Clarke to question commonly held perceptions: one is that there was more British reporting on the exodus of mostly Hutu refugees from Rwanda to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) at the tail end of the genocide in July 1994 than there was during the genocide of the Tutsi minority in April, May and June. In a chart, Clarke shows that the amount of field reporting was almost equal in both phases, while it was political reporting and other types of comment on Rwanda that grew during the refugee crisis to create this impression. Similarly, he points out that past criticism that the evacuation of foreigners, especially of Europeans, received disproportionate media attention at the start of the genocide, does not hold up, with only 13 of the 778 stories published in the British press during this phase focusing on the evacuation (less than 2%). Clarke’s methodology shows us the importance of examining assumptions and the use of quantitative and qualitative analysis in doing so. Other thematic content is analysed and discussed, as well as concepts key to the reporting of the crisis – military intervention, humanitarian intervention and tribalism. Here, another argument is challenged, one held by academic Linda Melvern that, when it came to tribalism, ‘The use of this cliché 1073201 MWC0010.1177/17506352211073201Media, War & ConflictBook review book-review2022","PeriodicalId":45719,"journal":{"name":"Media War and Conflict","volume":"16 1","pages":"482 - 490"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44034444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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