I read this The Guardian artcile a few months ago and I found it quite interesting. Although it does not go further in the discussion, it worths taking a few minutes to read it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/24/magazines-media-aniston-jolie-pitt
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Framing a Global Crisis: An Analysis of the Coverage of the Latest Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Al-Jazeera and CNN
This paper analyses the media coverage of the latest conflict between Israel and Palestine which took place between the 27th of December 2008 until the 18th of January 2009[1]. It was chosen as it is a war generally widely reported by the media around the world and therefore it can be quite useful in the discussion of global crisis reporting which is what this paper intend to engage. The main question this study proposes to answer is regarding the global aspect of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which elements seen in media reports and in historical and economical relations make Palestine a global crisis? In addition to that, this paper also does a framing analysis on the discourse used by two (considered) opposite channels, the CNN and the English version of Al-Jazeera, during the coverage of the conflict in order to complement and support the points of view expressed.
Firstly, the paper focus on to the discussion about the role of the media in a globalised world, drawing from literature on the determinants of international news coverage in an attempt to examine the myths surrounding media globalisation
Once understood the discussions surrounding media globalisation, the second part of this paper tries thus to answer the main question by examining what makes a crisis global and hence what is global about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Simon Cottle’s global crisis reporting (2009) analysis is the main source used along with Guy J. Golan’s (2008) examination of newsworthiness and examples taken from the framing analyses to complement and reinforce the arguments proposed.
Lastly, the paper exposes the findings of the framing analyses carried out during the 23 days of the conflict. It thoroughly compared the discourse and elements (image edition, interviews selection, issues framed, etc) utilised as well as the extent of the coverage by the American channel CNN and the English-language version of the Arab network Al-Jazeera. Other networks such as BBC, Euronews and Deutsche Welle were also analysed though in a more quantitative way so that it could be better understood the extent of the attention paid for this particular conflict.
[1]On the last days of 2008, Israel started a series of military attacks in the Gaza Strip that only had an ended 23 days later with both sides declaring unilateral cease-fires and Israel removing its troops. During the conflict, more than one thousand Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed and thousands of Gazans had to flee their homes and were left with no running water and buildings were badly damaged. According to Israelis authorities, the offensive began to stop Hamas throwing rockets into their territory and the smuggling of weapons through the tunnels between Palestine and Egypt. Palestinian authorities as well as the international community condemned such act and in September 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) published a report in which accused both Israel and Palestine of committing war crimes.
[2] Globalisation has been used by many scholars with different backgrounds to describe a certain phenomenon that has been happening to mankind In this paper, we use the term to refer to the increase of interconnectivity and interdependence that not only the media producers have been facing, but also the very media consumer, mainly on television which is our focus.
See the whole article:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AW_d0_v0zsNBZGhodnE5Nm1fNGR3cjhjNWN3&hl=enMonday, October 5, 2009
Aliens and Framing
Like cinema, news also uses narratives to represent reality. Although many journalists claim that they only report a certain fact impartially, many researches revealed that the news are in fact constructed. By selecting the issue to be covered and deciding the form the story will be constructed, journalist are already framing and not only objectively reporting.
Framing thus can be done in relation to its content and to its form. When choosing what to cover and how to cover a certain issue, journalists are automatically influenced by their own experiences, racial, sexual and gender orientation as well as geographic and generational identities. The form this issue is going to be covered is exemplified by Marguerite Moritz. “The prominence given to that coverage in terms of headline size or minutes of airtime, as well as the choice of words, images, audio and video all plays a role in framing a story and thereby in influencing audience perceptions of content and meaning (Moritz, p.322)”.
Similarly, cinema industry also uses different forms of framing. If we watch the film Good Night, Good Luck, for instance, we will notice that the fact of being filmed in black and white, the portray of journalists as the heroes and the insertion of historical texts and archival images, are all elements of the framing work and hence contributed to the categorization of the film as a docudrama and gave some veracity to it.
Another specificity of news framing is denominating and stereotyping “aliens”, or in other words, foreigner cultures and peoples or unknown minorities and groups. These framings vary according to political and historical changes, as Marguerite Moritz has observed in her studies about the changing in the coverage of gay issues throughout the decades in the US media. In the 1980s, the gays were the “aliens” as they “(...) were typically framed as outside the mainstream, formulated routinely as the discursive other (Moritz, p.322). Initially, the reports portrayed gays as “sick, pervert and criminal” and only after several civil rights movements and the formation of many associations, the US media started to discuss other issues, even though not broadly, such as gay marriage and child adoption.
Other example of aliens is the US media and government framing of their enemies that have gone from the communists during the Cold War to the Arabs of the “War on Terror”. Films have also changed the nationality of their aliens throughout the years. While analysing the stereotyping of Arabs, Debra Merskin points out the role of Hollywood in vilification and uses Basinger (Lyman,2001,p.81) quotation to illustrate this. “We’ve had the IRA as villains, we’ve had the international drug dealers, we’ve had the Arabs, and we’ve had vague Asians who weren’t quite sure what country they were from (Merskin, p.164)”.
Furthermore, if we analyse most of the examples of news framing cited above we will notice that they will be most influential in shaping the audience’s perception of the world when the “alien” or the issue in question is unknown. Debra Merskin exemplifies the case of the Arab “aliens”, which there is a historical combination of (mis)information that has worked to construct an enemy image in the popular imagination. This can be similarly seen in Good Night, Good Luck’s portrayal of the communism paranoid by American society. Framing, thus, help us understand how journalists and films display values and judgments in the products they create.
As consequences of framing, voices may not be heard and some crisis and conflicts may be simply ignored by the media, like Darfur and Congo war, as well as some stories may be reported partially according to economical and political interests. Furthermore, it may cause hatred and xenophobism in a territory and may leave the world more troubled as it already is.
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