News Media and the Re-Creation of War

• Main Author: Thornton, Mireille
• Published: London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) 2007
• Subjects: 327
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.485701

Elimination of international violent armed-conflict is a founding aim ofthe discipline of International Relations (lR). Within JR, the dominant debate on the question of news media power to affect the re-creation of war, known as the 'CNN-effect', has been severely limited in its conceptualisation of humanitarian intervention, audiences, and imagery and it .has avoided deeper engagement with the question of war. Using t\1eoretical insights from the work of Elaine Scarry, James W. Carey and Wolfgang Jser, this thesis presents alternative methods of news media analysis that offer much wider possibilities for IR's project. This is begun by examining a series of academic analyses of 'prewar' news narratives 'On United StateslUnited Kingdom military intervention in Iraq (2003) through the CNN-effect structure and against a longer background to the conflict. My own theoretical and empirical exploration of UK newspaper texts then builds on and challenges these analyses. I focus on the two areas of neglect within them that correspond with the CNN-effect problematic: firstly on the representation of people and 'the public' in and through news media and secondly on to the consideration of war's harm, concentrating on the representation of the killing and deaths of human-beings in pre-war news texts. The final chapter links these themes in focus on the question of JR's founding purpose, looking at how the process of 'disappearing' of people and .violence may be changing through peace and citizens' journalism and how re-creation of news media is a crucial step in the re-creation ofwar as peace, conflict and non-violent contest.