Cultural Frames
Reporting Conflict in the Middle East: A Visual and Editorial Analysis of English versus Arabic News Channels
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah El Mokadem
The Arab Region suffers from a state of unrest in many of its countries nowadays. In one week, there were church bombings in Egypt, chemical attacks in Syria, continued fighting in Iraq between the international alliance supporting the Iraqi troops and the Islamic State (IS) militants to restore the city of El Mosul, and for the first-time disagreements break between Golf countries. This paper analyzes the editorial and visual frames used to report three of the most significant events that took place in the area in regional and international news channels in both Arabic and English. The events being analyzed are the Palm Sunday church bombing in Egypt, boycotting in Qatar, and the Syrian chemical attacks on civilians. All available Arabic and English reports from international and regional news channels on Youtube concerning these incidents and its consequences are being analyzed. The researcher is interested in investigating how the different ideologies of these channels affect their reports about conflict situations in the Middle East.
The Syrian Conflict in the New York Times Op-Ed Section: How Foreign Policy Influences American Journalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriel S Huland
The Syrian revolution and civil war, which entered its eighth year, is one of the most reported conflicts of the last decades. The quality of this report, however, is still to be verified, as there is not a large number of studies about it. To what degree has the media succeeded in explaining the multiple causes and players involved in this complex war? To what extent has the American media, more specifically the NYT, produced and reproduced frames that reflect the conversation occurring within the American establishment about how to deal with such a humanitarian crisis? This article draws on the analysis of a number of The New York Times Op-Ed articles during March-April 2011 (the beginning of the conflict) and July-August 2014 (the emergence of ISIL) to address these and other questions. The results point out that the media coverage of the Syrian conflict is far from being impartial or objective and that the frames presented reflect the views shared by the American political elite. Likewise, they contain Orientalist misconceptions of the Middle East that are still widely present in the discourses produced in the West about the region. The idea that the US has a distinctive role to play in the democratization of Arab countries or that the conflict is mainly rooted in sectarian divisions, among others, can be found in the pieces analyzed.
State Violence and Civilian Resistance in Social Media in Post-Revolutionary Iran and the Contemporary U.S.
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shabnam Piryaei
This paper primarily considers by what means contemporary social media is employed to enforce and to subvert state violence. I take a comparative approach, drawing correlations between social media use in post-Revolutionary Iran and in the contemporary U.S. At these two unexpectedly linked regions of activity, I focus on points of convergence and divergence in the modes through which media influences the way we exchange information, offer representations, mediate protest, and enforce, chronicle and resist state violence. I use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how people are tracked and surveilled through social media, and how these tools that are utilized for tracking and surveillance are also mobilized for critical interventions in, and collaborations against, policing and state violence. Regarding Iran, I consider Negar Mottahedeh’s reading of Iran’s systematic technological repression, and the role of censorship in Iranian media, which leads citizens to develop new and less direct routes of transmitting news, images and videos—especially of protests and state violence against protestors. In the U.S., I explore the means by which social media operates as a form of propaganda and state-run media and how this intersects with the propaganda and corresponding violence in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I also reflect on how media activism can co-opt, or creatively and indirectly intervene in existing power structures.
