Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2007

To understand the language of journalism in relation to the moments of why and how news is differently structured and patterned, English online stories tackling the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, issued by the BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera, were critically analysed following Fowler and Fairclough's seminal texts. The results of the findings were discussed in interviews with the editors of the three international networks in order to see what links these linguistic features have with the interviewees' social assumptions, ideologies and economic conditions. The article finds first that the discourse within the news pyramid is composed of four major layers: quoting, paraphrasing, background and comment. Second, it demonstrates that there are marked differences in the discourse structures and layers that the three networks employ in the production of the news stories they issue in English. Third, Al-Jazeera English exhibits marked differences in the discursive features and their social implications at the four layers of discourse to report the conflict when compared with both the BBC and CNN. Fourth, the article shows that the differences in linguistic patterns largely reflect and respond to each network's social and political assumptions and practices as well as economic conditions.

This article examines the way in which the popular American television series The West Wing represents the PalestinianIsraeli conflict and the way in which Middle Eastern audiences responded to that depiction. This fictional and highly idealized portrayal of the American presidency has frequently used real storylines that reflect contemporary political discourse to its primary domestic audience. However, the programme is also shown outside the United States where its storylines and the time of broadcast may give an episode an entirely different meaning. This article looks at audience responses to the episode Isaac and Ishmael and the story arc that begins at the end of Season 5 and continues at the beginning of Season 6. This centres on an attempt to settle the PalestinianIsraeli conflict. Placing The West Wing within a broad political and historical framework, the article uses the idea of American exceptionalism as the basis from which to argue that The West Wing presents real as well as idealized American political stances and in that sense has to be read, in certain contexts, as contributing to audience perceptions of the real world. The article questions whether the asynchronous transmissions of the programme in the domestic US and Middle Eastern markets contribute to this perception. Using the responses of audiences of varying ages, education levels and origins, the article concludes that although it sometimes portrays Arabs negatively, it is usually well intentioned and makes genuine, if occasionally clumsy, attempts to portray Arabs in a favourable light. While episodes of The West Wing are the article's main source, I have also drawn heavily on academic and non-academic articles to provide background to mainstream audience reaction and some of the issues religious, political and historical addressed by the series.

In the summer of 2003, a Turkish confectionery and cookie company launched a major television advertising campaign through the Young & Rubicam agency in Istanbul. The goal of the campaign was to compete aggressively with the market leaders, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, by adopting some of the strategies used by those colas in dominating the world's soft-drink sales and reversing those strategies to suit the Turkish consumers. This study combines textual analysis of the primary television advertisements for Cola Turka along with interviews with two of the account managers for the campaign. The analysis is based on the concept of glocalization of the national, gender and sports themes of the campaign. In appealing to potential consumers of the soft drink, the advertisers exploit the local cultural stereotypes to convince the audience that those who adopt the product will achieve the American dream to become Turkish. American actors, including Chevy Chase, are used in that effort as they try to live out that dream by adopting Turkish customs, eating Turkish foods and following Turkish soccer stars. Advertising agency executives denied they created anti-American themes, though one of the commercials suggests that if US soldiers drank Cola Turka, they would abandon their goal to win the war in Iraq. The authors argue that the commoditization of nation-making practices has wide implications and real-world effects on public opinion.

This article examines US mainstream press coverage given to the aftermath of the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, offering a critical perspective on the events and reactions to the failed summit. In doing so the article is able to identify and highlight the detrimental effects of inaccurate reporting of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in the US press. It demonstrates how this misrepresentation of failure at Camp David has contributed to the ever-decreasing prospects for a just and viable solution to the conflict. This important snapshot of the long-standing IsraeliPalestinian conflict, it argues, accurately encapsulates the flawed nature of many dominant truths of the debate over the conflict. Consequently it can provide a critical lens through which to draw broader conclusions about the issues that continue to impede and undermine the prospects for balanced negotiations and peace in the region.

The conclusions reached through the analysis of mainstream US press reactions to the Camp David summit are subsequently contextualized through an exploration of the largely neglected issue of water sharing in the Palestinian Territories. The celebrated water-sharing agreements in the Oslo period are shown to have failed to bring about any meaningful change from the discriminatory water-distribution policies pursued by Israel in the occupied territories between 1967 and 1993.

The article thus demonstrates how US mainstream press reactions to the failed Camp David summit simply reinforced the misleading impression of Israeli cooperation and compromise which masks a historically grounded policy of domination over the Palestinians. It concludes that only an approach grounded in critical theory, emphasizing different conceptions of security in the region, can offer its people a brighter and more peaceful future.

Contemporary Sweden is experiencing an interesting sociocultural phenomenon of redefinition of national identity as a result of the rise of awareness of the everyday reality of discrimination and segregation of first- and second-generation immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa and Africa.

My article examines the formation and manifestations of a new kind of collective consciousness of immigrants living in Sweden called blatte identity, defined by ethnic markers constructed by opposition to the nationalistic ideals of an ethnically pure Swedish identity. More specifically, my article examines the construction and affirmation of a special kind of blatte. identity, called a thought sultan (tankesultan). Briefly, a tankesuktan is a Swede of Arabic descent, proud of his Muslim background, and actively engaging in resisting the assimilative forces within Swedish society. The concept was coined by the author Jonas Hassen Khemiri in his debut novel entitled An Eye Red (Ett ga Rtt) published in 2003. My argument discusses the trajectory of the concept from the artistic and literary realm into public discourse through the help of mass media, as well as the relation to other terms in the official and public discourse, such as immigrant, black skull (svartskalle), or ethnic Swede (svenne). From being an individual marker of ethnic belonging to the community of Arabic-speaking, Muslim immigrants to Sweden, a thought sultan (tankesultan) is used as a common denominator for some of the members of the immigrant community living in Sweden who like to consider their marginal social status and their everyday life marked by ethnic and religious discrimination. An instance of such use can be found in the magazine Gringo that is distributed for free in Sweden's large urban areas, which made use of this concept as a categorizational tool of ethnic otherness for blattar, or immigrants, alongside other stereotyping concepts and images circulating in the public discourse of contemporary Sweden.

New Media and the New Middle East, Philip Seib (ed.), (2007) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 284 pp., Hardcover, ISBNs: 1403979731, 978-1403979735, Price: 42.50.

Reading the Mohammed Cartoons Controversy: An International Analysis of Press Discourses on Free Speech and Political Spin, Risto Kunelius, Elizabeth Eide, Oliver Hahn and Roland Schroeder (eds.), (2007) Germany: Projektverlag, 218 pp., (pbk), ISBN: 978-3-89733-167-9, Price: 35