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The `Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation'US conservatives take aim at the British news media
Abstract
This article assesses the US conservative attack on the BBC during the post 9/11 terrorism wars, finding conservative blogs, print media and think tanks notably hostile. The processes of media criticism taking place within this conservative triad are viewed through the analytical concepts of news repair and boundary maintenance. The findings suggest that the BBC's perceived transgression was that it threatened to reveal the fallacy of an argument that conservatives had long worked to establish: that the US mainstream news media are liberal and harshly critical of conservatives. This conservative triad supported its attempt to repair this paradigm breach in three main ways: suggesting that reporting multiple viewpoints of the war was evidence of bias; magnifying any reporting errors; and warning against the perils of public ownership of news media.
... The professional community discursively tries to repair the damage by collectively closing ranks against perceived or real threats and clearly drawing boundaries between who can be a part of the interpretive community and who cannot, between what is and what is not acceptable practice. This contains the damage and (re)binds the community (Wall and Bicket, 2008;Zelizer, 2004) and enables the professional community to operate as before (Hindman, 2005: 227). Sometimes journalists and news organizations accept responsibility, at least partly, for breaches of journalistic standards. ...
The last season of The Wire drew particular attention from journalists given its setting at a fictional version of the Baltimore Sun, where show creator David Simon once worked. The concept of paradigm repair was used here to explain journalists’ responses to The Wire. Our qualitative analysis of articles from 44 newspapers, as well as radio transcripts, dealing with the 2008 season shows that a fictional challenge can precipitate vigorous efforts by journalists to restore their reputation after what they regard as an attack on their professional identity and credibility. The [real] Baltimore Sun and other papers where Simon’s journalistic nemeses worked were the most likely to call Simon vindictive and obsessed and to use this to marginalize his stinging critique of corporatized newsrooms.
... Mainstream US media outlets play up stereotypes of British hack reporters, apparently in a bid to establish boundary maintenance in terms of protecting their own credibility and authority and, ultimately, market share (Carr, 2005;Inskeep, 2005). Meanwhile, as has been shown elsewhere (Wall and Bicket, 2008), conservative Americans via blogs, right-wing news outlets and think tanks have launched a sustained attack against British news media, especially the BBC. ...
Elite British news media such as the BBC, The Economist and the Guardian have experienced large increases in US audiences in the post-September 11 media environment. This article explores the nature and extent of this new “British invasion,” outlining key institutional, cultural and journalistic factors distinguishing mainstream US media from their UK counterparts. In particular, the British are seen as stepping into a void created by shrinking US international news coverage as well as providing a broader range of liberal political views that may contribute to expanding the US news agenda. The possible perils of the increased flow of their journalism into the United States for UK-based media are also considered.
... In political terms, Tom Burns (1977, p. 173) expresses this as ''the perpetual and insoluble problem of steering a course between a policy of deliberate confrontation with Government and Parliament or of abdicating any claim to be independent of government control''. This has presented particular difficulties in the BBC's war reporting, where the body of critics has extended to include political interests in allied states such as the United States (Wall and Bicket, 2008). As Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1993, p. 157) emphasise, much of the power of the state rests on the successful cultivation of ''a sense of solidarity''. ...
Although the professional activities of the war correspondent have commanded critical attention for much of the last century, discussion has intensified in recent years. This article seeks to place some of these debates within a longer-term perspective, by examining a broadcast by the BBC journalist Kate Adie, reporting on the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986: a broadcast that attracted widespread media and political hostility at the time, as well as prompting the governing Conservative Party to commission a report on perceived bias in BBC news reports. Using Adie's previously unavailable reporters' notebooks, as well as other contemporary material, the article examines the processes of drafting involved in the broadcast, including the discarded elements. The article outlines evidence of the configuration of human interest-driven news values for an environment of civilian injury and destruction, drawing upon a tradition of the war correspondent as “witness”. The article suggests that accusations of a lack of objectivity on Adie's part failed to account for the role of a particular set of interpretive conventions in reporting the bombing's aftermath, and such broadcasts may be more productively assessed within discussions of “contextual objectivity” in war reporting.
This article analyses the evolution of a war and terror blogosphere between 2001 and 2011. It identifies seven areas where blogs and related online genres could provide ‘alternative’ accounts to traditional media narratives of conflict. The article also assesses the challenges and opportunities of blogs in each area from the perspective of the working journalist in order to deepen our understanding of the changing influence of blogs on traditional media narratives of conflict. Parallel accounts and interpretations of conflict will collaborate and compete in a war and terror blogosphere in the future, but it has been significantly influenced by the adoption of blogging by military actors since 2008. The war and terror blogosphere is no longer a relatively unmonitored online space which is having an impact on both the production of ‘alternative’ accounts of conflict and the incorporation of these accounts into traditional journalism.
This article examines current events weblogs or blogs that were particularly active during the second US war with Iraq, in the spring of 2003. Analysis suggests that these blogs are a new genre of journalism that emphasizes personalization, audience participation in content creation and story forms that are fragmented and interdependent with other websites. These characteristics suggest a shift away from traditional journalism’s modern approach toward a new form of journalism infused with postmodern sensibilities.
The newspapermen studied believe they may mitigate such continual pressures as deadlines, possible libel suits, and anticipated reprimands of superiors by being able to claim that their work is "objective." This article examines three factors which help a newsman to define an "objective fact": form, content, and interorganizational relationships. It shows that in discussing content and interorganizational relationships, the newsman can only invoke his news judgment; however, he can claim objectivity by citing procedures he has followed which exemplify the formal attributes of a news history or a newspaper. For instance, the newsman can suggest that he quoted other people instead of offering his own opinions. The article suggests that "objectivity" may be seen as a strategic ritual protecting newspapermen from the risks of their trade. It asks whether other professions might not also use the term "objectivity" in the same way.
Recent evidence suggests that conservative elites' claims of a liberal media are having an impact upon public perceptions of news coverage. With this in mind, we examined two related questions in the context of the 1988, 1992, and 1996 presidential elections. First, what factors may be prompting conservative elites to make allegations of liberal media bias? Second, what factors may influence when news media report these criticisms during presidential campaigns? Findings suggest that these criticisms of news media are at least partly strategic and reflect a dynamic relationship between political elites and journalists during a presidential campaign.
The internet – specifically its graphic interface, the world wide web – has had a major impact on all levels of (information) societies throughout the world. Specifically for journalism as it is practiced online, we can now identify the effect that this has had on the profession and its culture(s). This article defines four particular types of online journalism and discusses them in terms of key characteristics of online publishing – hypertextuality, interactivity, multimediality – and considers the current and potential impacts that these online journalisms can have on the ways in which one can define journalism as it functions in elective democracies worldwide. It is argued that the application of particular online characteristics not only has consequences for the type of journalism produced on the web, but that these characteristics and online journalisms indeed connect to broader and more profound changes and redefinitions of professional journalism and its (news) culture as a whole.
This paper argues that the Internet's role in the publication of this controversial expos created both need and opportunity for repair of institutional boundaries---those violated by the Mercury's use of the new medium and a more general erosion in the ongoing migration of news to the Internet. Although there has always been a certain tension between the electronic and print media, as early as 1983, Ithiel de Sola Pool foresaw that the growth of "digital Mary E. McCoy is a doctoral student at Northwestern University, where she is finishing her dissertation on the role of the media in democratic transitions. A version of this article was presented at the International Communication Association annual conference in Jerusalem in 1998. The author thanks James Ettema, James Schwoch, Susan Herbst, Jack Doppelt, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments. She also thanks Diane Lequar, Karen Frazer, Ronda Oosteroff, and Lisa Be
This case study focuses on The New York Times's reaction to the Jayson Blair plagiarism/fabrication scandal by examining how the Times explained Blair's failures to uphold standards of newsgathering and its own failure of the editing process. The study uses image restoration and paradigm repair theories to explore how the Times attempted to repair its own image and that of journalism generally, and concludes that the Times demonstrated a more nuanced concept of paradigm repair than earlier research had shown. Although it distanced itself from Blair and emphasized the value of journalistic standards, the Times accepted responsibility for violations of those standards and admitted that the very structure of the news paradigm failed in this case.
Since the start of the war in Iraq, much has been made of the fact that a significant number of Americans are turning to British news sources (such as The Guardian and the BBC) for information regarding the conflict, writes Christensen. Figures from The Guardian indicate that approximately 40 per cent of the newspaper's online readers are located in the United States. Similarly, audiences for BBC World News bulletins aired on the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) increased by almost 30 per cent during the first weeks of the war. The BBC website has also seen a dramatic increase in the number of users from the United States. These developments have been cited by media critics as evidence of a broader dissatisfaction on the part of the American public with the state of the press in the United States. The highly commercialised and nationalistic nature of the US news media, so the argument goes, in addition to an uncomfortably close relationship between the press and the military, has made it impossible for the average citizen to get "objective" or "unbiased" information about events in Iraq.
The untimely death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on 31 August 1997 gave journalists from mainstream news organizations a prime opportunity to publicly distance themselves from the freelance photographers, or paparazzi, who allegedly chased Diana's car into a Paris tunnel. Journalists went to great lengths in their coverage of the accident to build boundaries between themselves and the paparazzi (and tabloid publications), boundaries damaged in recent years by the public's purportedly insatiable desire for celebrity news (now a staple of mainstream news) and the willingness of mainstream news organizations to satisfy that desire by borrowing and adapting elements of the tabloid style. This article is a textual analysis of how mainstream journalists built and defended professional boundaries in the week following Diana's death. This research explores the tone of coverage and the theme that emerged as journalists from major daily newspapers, news magazines, commercial television networks, and cable news services struggled to keep their readers and viewers aware that the paparazzi, and British and American tabloids, did not practice journalism with the same level of professionalism. The coverage of Diana's death suggests a change in how journalists show their dedication to ideals like objectivity and balanced reporting. What is revealed is a new, somewhat disingenuous public discourse about the practice of journalism achieved through a boundary maintenance exercise.
This study draws on journalistic discourse about the death of Princess Diana to frame everyday newswork as cultural ritual, and show how some kinds of newswork serve to maintain and restore the core tenets of the culture's beliefs. The study focuses on the ritual of paradigm repair and its particular case employed in what-a-story newswork.
This article suggests that the notion of “profession” may not offer the most fruitful way of examining community among American journalists. It proposes viewing journalists as members of an interpretive community instead, one united by its shared discourse and collective interpretations of key public events. The article applies the frame of the interpretive community to journalistic discourse about two events central for American journalists—Watergate and McCarthyism. Journalists have generated collective interpretations of both events by capitalizing on the double temporal position they occupy in regard to them. This situation of “doing double time” allows journalists to interpret an event at the time of its unfolding as well as at the time of its retelling. This suggests that journalists routinely generate shared meaning about journalism by capitalizing on practices overlooked by the frame of the profession, and underscores the need for alternative frames through which to conceptualize journalism in all its complexities.
Myth is central to a critical understanding of journalism, communication, and culture. This article uses the 2003 movie Shattered Glass as a case study of the free press myth in action: the popular belief that a privately owned, market-driven press is necessary for the functioning of American democracy and the survival of a free people. The movie, which has been called the most significant about journalism since All the President’s Men, tells of how reporter Stephen Glass fictionalized stories for The New Republic magazine before he was found out and fired in 1998. Contrary to the fears of some journalists that writer-director Billy Ray’s film would encourage public skepticism toward the press, Shattered Glass actually does what films about journalism more often do: It underscores the press’s centrality in American life, in particular the notion that self-regulation of the press works.
In 1981 a Pulitzer Prize for journalism was forfeited for the first time in the history of the award. Janet Cooke, a young, black reporter for the Washington Post, returned her prize for feature writing after it was discovered that the subject of her prize‐winning story, an eight‐year‐old heroin‐user, was a fabrication. Journalists used the occasion of the Cooke scandal to reflect on changes that had occurred in their field since the 1960s. Janet Cooke symbolized, on the one hand issues related to the increased presence of minorities in the profession, and, on the other, changes in reporting routines and conventions. She was a vehicle for journalists to consider the contradictions of their own authority, contradictions that since the 1960s have become increasingly visible.
Drawing from normative journalism theory, this textual analysis argues that mainstream journalism weblogs are now occupying a role serving to reify traditional norms even as the j-bloggers shift those standard values. When journalists blog, they engage in postmodern reporting and writing even as they are attempting to reclaim journalism authority online. The j-blog has already begun to evolve traditional notions of the mainstream press. Readers and other non-journalists help craft the story. News format changes. Ultimately, this evolution will affect what we know as the ‘truth’ about our society and ourselves, what we mean by ‘community’, and how we understand reality.
The author shows how, during the 2003 Iraq war, the U.S. broadcasting network provided a conduit for Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda. Whereas the explicit war aims were to shut down Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and thus enforce UN resolutions that mandated that Iraq eliminate its offensive weapons, there were many hidden agendas in the Bush administration offensive against Iraq, such as the promotion of a new doctrine of preemptive strikes, control of Iraqi oil, and producing a major media spectacle that would help Bush win the 2004 presidential election. In this study, the author analyzes the forms of media propaganda promoted by the Bush administration. He argues that the U.S. broadcasting networks helped Bush advance his agenda, but that the media spectacle of a U.S. military triumph is turning into a negative spectacle of a morass that undermines the Bush administration rationale for the invasion.
This frame analysis of blogs active during the second Gulf War found that overall, bloggers worked within existing discourses about the war, primarily employing pro-war and anti-war frames. The blogs also promoted blogging itself as a solution to the problems of reporting on war as some bloggers saw themselves as improvements on mainstream media.
Discusses a case study of how the news media "repaired" an ambiguous story that accidentally became a news story to uncover the boundaries of "what is news and what is not" and to illustrate an underlying logic about how the world should be reported. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This case study focuses on The New York Times's reaction to the Jayson Blair plagiarism/fabrication scandal by examining how the Times explained Blair's failures to uphold standards of newsgathering and its own failure of the editing process. The study uses image restoration and paradigm repair theories to explore how the Times attempted to repair its own image and that of journalism generally, and concludes that the Times demonstrated a more nuanced concept of paradigm repair than earlier research had shown. Although it distanced itself from Blair and emphasized the value of journalistic standards, the Times accepted responsibility for violations of those standards and admitted that the very structure of the news paradigm failed in this case.
Al-Jazeera and War Coverage in Iraq; The Media's Quest for Contextual Objectivity
- A Iskandar
- M El-Nawawy
How British Television News Represented the Case for the War in Iraq
- J Lewis
- R Brookes
Iranians and Media Coverage of the War in Iraq: Rhetoric, Propaganda and Contradiction
- N Badii
The Problem of the Media; US Communication Politics in the 21st Century
- R W Mcchesney
War on Iraq and Media Coverage: A Middle Eastern Perspective
- M E Hashem