International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2014

Sunni–Shia relations have become a topic of significant media attention; this attention is largely due to the tendency of these groups to engage in sectarian strife as well as the Islamic Shia sect’s influential rise in world politics. The inter-Islamic sectarian relations are part of extensive reporting on upheaval events currently taking place in the Greater Middle East in the post 9/11 decade. This study analyses ten years of news coverage of the Sunni–Shia relations in the Canadian Globe and Mail and the US-based Washington Post. Results indicate that rather than contextualizing sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia Islam, this media coverage overwhelmingly frames the tensions from the ‘war on terrorism’ perspective. This article argues that ‘neo-Orientalist’ discourses and propagandist perspectives have become routinized and more prevalent in the manner in which Western media represents Islam, privileging dominant discourses and ‘war on terrorism’ frames.

This article examines a couple of Arabic-language songs about the death of the young Muhammad al-Durrah on the second day of the Second Intifada, September 2000. The songs as well as the videos that have been uploaded confirm the iconic status of al-Durrah and demonstrate the significance of the incident as a means for emotional mobilization in anti-Israeli protest. Following the World War I studies by historian George Mosse, I propose in this article to identify the central motif of the songs as a nationalistic myth of the fallen martyr.

Media diversity is an essential policy goal in achieving democracy. This study deals with how the press covered the issue of media cross-ownership which was recently allowed in South Korea. To this end, it analysed 210 news articles from two newspapers that have contrasting political stances, using critical discourse analysis. The analysis compared news discourse between two contrasting newspapers from political, social and economic values that constitute public interest. The results reveal that Joongang, a typical commercial newspaper, advocated cross-ownership based on economic values ignoring social values. On the other hand, Hankyoreh, a representative liberal newspaper, opposed the deregulation of cross-ownership on the basis of social values instead of economic values. In addition, the present study finds that while Joongang highlighted outlet diversity, Hankyoreh deemed content diversity as more important than outlet diversity. The findings also indicate that debate on media cross-ownership can be seriously interrupted when the media put more emphasis on private interest than on public interest. The current research suggests that a desirable goal of media cross-ownership should be pursued on the basis of a solid public interest standard, which is not compromised by political intervention and is supported by political, economic and social values.

Religion is often regarded as posing a distinct challenge to the occupational norms of cultural production and journalism due to its subjectivities and complexities. Based on research with staff involved in the production of content for BBC television and radio, this article explores the occupational context in which they work. In particular, it focuses on the experiences and strategies of the BBC’s Department of Religion and Ethics as it attempts to secure its survival as an autonomous production unit. This group of executives, producers, presenters and production staff are in many ways unique because of the professional and social role that they fulfil, most notably through the close historical and ideological ties between religion and the principles of public service.

This research finds a distinct professional identity built around a fusion of public service logic and commercialism, along with the mobilization of specialist knowledge. This allows the department to symbolically and discursively separate itself from other actors in this field as it attempts to reinforce religious broadcasting’s professional distinctiveness at a crucial time in the survival of the unit and to highlight the uniqueness of religion as a topic within cultural production.

This article analyses the newspaper reporting of the Mick Philpott manslaughter verdict of 2013. Philpott is an unemployed British man who in May 2012 set fire to his house, accidentally killing six children. This article argues that the Philpott verdict provided a valuable propaganda opportunity for British politicians and elements of the British media to link the crime to ‘welfare reform’ at a time when the coalition government had begun to target welfare benefits for cuts. In particular, it is argued that the demonization of Philpott as a member of the white British underclass converged with an intensification of conservative and anti-welfarist arguments about the United Kingdom’s benefits system, reviving and reinforcing the Victorian concept of the ‘undeserving poor’ and the related notion that benefits are a reward for good behaviour rather than a right. Examining articles from national newspapers published in the days following the announcement of a guilty verdict in the trial, this article analyses the discursive framing of the stories in order to discover what kind of ideological messages were at work in the reporting of the Philpott verdict and what sorts of differences existed between these messages. The article concludes with an attempt to set this analysis in a wider socio-political context, considering how the press’s perspectives on the story relate to the ideological (re)framing of public discussion about welfare ‘benefits’ and claimants in the United Kingdom today.