The Iraq War and the Responsibility to Protect: Uses,Abuses and Consequences for the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Before the 2003 Iraq war, the political leadership of the United States and United Kingdom had to sell the case for war to their people and the world. This was attempted through a number of speeches that employed rhetorical justifications for the war. Two prominent justifications used during this period involved the employment of security and humanitarian narratives. The security narrative focused on claims regarding Iraq's undermining of international law, possession of weapons of mass destruction and threat to the world. The humanitarian narrative revolved around claims about human suffering in Iraq and the need to liberate its people. While it is widely assumed that security is the dominant casus belli in the post-9/11 world, there is much evidence to suggest that the humanitarian justifications that played a critical role in the military interventions of the 1990s were still important after 9/11. The use of humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war clearly has implications for the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement, which has gained prominence since the December 2001 publication of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report. Based on an extensive content analysis of speeches by the US and UK political leadership before the war, this article will quantify the relative importance of each narrative and analyse what the findings mean for the ongoing debates within the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement.     

新媒体环境下地方政府管理的挑战与创新

新媒体的交互性、即时性、海量性、社群性特征使得民意的传递渠道和方式、政府与民众的沟通方式、政府的工作行为方式在新媒体时代发生根本性的变化,从而对政府应对突发事件能力、政府信息的透明度与公开度、政府形象的塑造带来挑战。面对新媒体的挑战,地方政府必须转变观念,提高对新媒体的重视程度;创新政府信息公开制度;提高对新媒体的舆论引导能力;加强对新媒体舆情的监测和危机预警机制建设。     

Special Emphasis: Agenda‐Setting Research—20 Year Birthday

“Special Emphasis: Agenda‐Setting Research—20 Year Birthday,” Journalism Quarterly, 69, 4 (Winter 1992), 813–920.     

Developing terrorism coverage: variances in news framing of the January 2015 attacks in Paris and Borno

Written news coverage of an event influences public perception and understanding of that event. Through agenda setting and news framing, journalists control the importance and substance of readers’ beliefs about the event. While existing research has been conducted on the relationship between media coverage and the geographic location of the country an event took place in, there is limited understanding of this relationship in terms of terrorist events. Utilising an agenda-setting theory and news framing theory lens to compare news coverage of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and Borno, Nigeria revealed significant variances in the overall coverage, headline style and discourse usage based on the event. In particular, the American news coverage positively framed France through detailed, sympathetic coverage and negatively framed Nigeria by overgeneralising and placing blame. Determining the origin and impacts of these variances is integral to forming a more comprehensive understanding of international terrorism and the most effective ways to combat it.     

Framing the IRA: beyond agenda setting and framing towards a model accounting for audience influence

Coverage of Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks and the Northern Irish peace process is affected by both the country a media organisation is located and their format. The coverage of the IRA in 1996 was studied in five newspapers based in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA to reveal similarities and differences in language use, stories reported and general emphasis. The frequency of keywords was examined to show that the location a newspaper is based in affects the stories run by the newspaper. However, the format of a newspaper affects the framing of this coverage more than the location. These results were analysed through the lens of two leading theories pertaining to media–public relations: agenda-setting theory and framing theory. While both are shown to be partially useful in explaining the results, a more holistic view that accounts for public influence on media coverage would be even more useful. As a result of this narrow focus on only one part of media–public relations, the two theories do not exhibit predictive power, and further study should be conducted to expand their scope to encompass the public’s affect on media coverage.     

Death is in the eye of the beholder: a study of casualty count framing in the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict

The 2014 Israel–Gaza war was the third of a string of conflicts to erupt between the State of Israel and Hamas in neighbouring Gaza and quickly became the deadliest for both sides. Even with the extensive media attention this crisis received, calls for more objective reporting were widespread, as locating sources that were not clearly influenced or reflective of political biases seemed near impossible. This paper seeks to explore the role “cultural proximity” plays in informing casualty count reporting in times of conflict. Qualitative content analysis is conducted on news coverage of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict in the American daily newspaper, The New York Times, and the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, to assess whether significant differences exist in the way casualty figures are addressed across varying degrees of political and cultural involvement. This research reveals that variations in casualty count reporting do indeed exist across cultural and national contexts, and deems this subject worthy of further research.     

Framing terror: an experimental framing effects study of the perceived threat of terrorism

An exploratory framing effects experiment was conducted to test whether three controversial news portrayals (or frames) of the terrorist threat increase subjects' perceptions of the danger. A total of 176 subjects were exposed to one of eight different article treatments. The subjects reported higher levels of perceived threat when the danger was associated with ‘radical Islamic groups’ (as compared to homegrown terrorists) and ‘nuclear’ technology (as compared to conventional weapons). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, this study also showed that the term ‘terrorism’ itself did not affect the perceived threat. These results provide support for a theory of framing that explains the precise ways in which a particular set of communicating texts (terrorism news frames) influence human consciousness. Further theoretical details, as well as the social and political implications of this study, are discussed.     

A Review of: “Israeli and Palestinian Postcards: Presentations of National Self”

Recent studies suggest that what the political talk radio hosts say on the air can shape the political orientations of their audiences. Drawing on data from a panel survey conducted in 1996, I examined the "Limbaugh effect" during the GOP presidential nomination campaign. My findings cast doubt on popular assumptions about the power of Limbaugh's words. Despite weeks of listening to Limbaugh criticize Pat Buchanan, members of the audience were no more likely to harbor negative feelings toward the candidate than were nonlisteners.     

Civic Engagement in the Era of Big Stories

Most scholars agree that news coverage of politics is the product of complicated interaction between journalists and politicians. Yet, we know little about how the interaction affects the coverage. Our analysis examines U.S. senators' press events and subsequent national network coverage from 1980–1996. Our evidence suggests that all senators can increase journalists' interest in their press events by carefully choosing the type of event and which politicians attend. In turn, such interest often translates into actual news stories, although that coverage is not guaranteed. Thus, senators can structure press events in order to increase the likelihood of coverage, but reporters understandably resist their attempts to do so. As a result, the most newsworthy press events require senators to give up control over content, creating more potential for revealing unexpected information.