7th Global Conference
|
Monday 5th May - Wednesday 7th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 4: Media and Representations
Chair: Marie-Luise Kohlke
Truth and War Reporting: Journalism in Hostile Environments
Tom Clonan
School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology, DIT, Dublin, Ireland
Many journalists, whether reporting on domestic matters internally or on assignment abroad as foreign or development correspondents, may at some point find themselves reporting on violence and hostilities in a hostile environment.
This paper examines the professional and personal dilemmas that confront journalists when reporting on violence and within hostile environments both at home and abroad
The author of the paper has participated in armed conflict as a professional soldier in Ireland, Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. He has also reported on conflict and hostilities as the Irish Times Security Analyst since October 2001.
In the last two years, the author has formally interviewed dozens of Irish, British and US foreign correspondents including Martin Bell, Orla Guerin of the BBC and Nir Rosen of the New Yorker in order to fully explore the dilemmas confronted by journalists reporting in volatile and dangerous environments.
The paper will draw on the author’s considerable experience as a soldier participating in violent struggle and as a journalist reporting on such events by way of the print and electronic media. The author will demonstrate the manner in which violence and hostilities are mediated by the various political, ideological and practical factors that underpin the news gathering and news making process.
The author will incorporate this analysis within a theoretical frame encompassing the political economy of news production, news values and news agenda.
Representations of Domestic Violence in the Turkish Press
Abdülrezak Altun and Mine Gencel Bek
Faculty of Communication, Ankara University, Turkey.
This study is a part of the project supported by the EU, UNFPA and the Women Directorate in Turkey. It aims to show how domestic violence is reported in the mainstream Turkish newspapers. After giving short information on the situation of domestic violence in Turkey (30 % of Turkish women experience domestic violence), this presentation will mainly focus on the findings of the content analysis of the news. Turkish newspapers increased their awareness and responsibility especially by supporting some social projects against domestic violence, mainly honour killings. However this study shows that even so, there are stil many problems in the representation. The presentation will shortly discuss the results on the basis of these dimesions:
Distribution of the news according to pages (This can show the importance attributed to the issue. In fact, Turkish newspapers consider the issue as the 3. page issue; private, police-crime matter).
Visualisation of domestic violence (How the victims are portrayed is another evidence of rising sensationalism in Turkish press).
Types of violence represented (Pyhsical, sexual, psychological, economic: The news tends to focus on physical violence while ignoring the others. Among the pyhsical violence strories, murder stories have a majority. Women who are not killed are not reported much).
Legitimisation and naturalisation of violence (How do reports build emphaty with killers and try to understand them?).
Sources and actors of news (The analysis of who speaks about the issue, in fact, broadly determines the content)
After these, we will also discuss more discursive elements on the representation of violence in the news and try to show the problems in this representation by analysing the verbal choices. Also, we will question whether the news contextualises domestic violence as a political problem and guide or help readers.
Racist Violence Attacks on Foreigners, Mass-Media and Fear of Crime
Hakan Arikan
Kırıkkale Üniversitesi (Kırıkkale University),
Sosyoloji Bölümü (Dept.of Sociology),
Yahşihan-Kırıkkale Turkey
Racist violence perpetuated against foreigners, immigrants and even citizens is reported to constitute one of the most rapidly growing forms of hate-crimes in the world. People more and more rely on the information they get from the media sources about almost everything including racist violent crime.The more violent and scandalous the hate crime the more likely it is to make the news media. The main thesis statement of this study states that the media’s continual and intense presentation of such criminal acts has lead to contributed to the ‘fear of crime’ (an anticipation of victimization not the actual victimization) in societies. This study will look at the way in which the media portray such crimes and how their portrayals possibly affect the fear of citizens. News media, movies and televison shows inflame the fear of crime in people by depicting both real incidents of such crimes and fictionally created crime cases. However, whether this fact has an effect, especially in relation to fear of crime, remains ambiguous. Thus, this study will include some theoretical and case study elaborations both on the dynamics of racist violence against foreigners and on the assumed relations between media depictions of such violent cases and the fear of crime of citizens in the modern European Union societies. Social constructivist approach will be employed to analyze the sociological aspects of such hate crimes by specifically focusing on the possible impacts of the media re-framings of such cases on the fear of crime of viewers-audiences.
Symbolic and Discursive Violence in Media Representations of Aboriginal Missing and Murdered Women
Yasmin Jiwani
Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
To date, Canada is one of four nations that have refused to ratify the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous peoples. Yet, an Amnesty International Report reveals that over 500 Aboriginal women in Canada have gone missing over the last two decades. More recently, Robert W. Pickton, a serial killer, has been alleged to have murdered at twenty-six of the women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, many of whom were Aboriginal. This presentation draws on examples culled from seven years (2000 to 2007) of press coverage in Canada’s daily newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, to illustrate how symbolic and discursive violence was used to mediate representations of the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. I pay particular attention to historical constructions of Aboriginal women as prostitutes and discuss the legacies of colonialism that have systematically violated their rights and entitlement to land. Drawing from this historical backdrop, I examine how the national press coverage repositions Aboriginal women as criminals, victims of sexual crimes, militant rebels and as inassimilable others. I underscore themes of culpability that were invoked in these accounts to make sense of these women’s lives and realities, thereby pre-empting notions of societal responsibility or intervention. I conclude with an examination of how these representations have enabled the Canadian state to maintain its position of limited involvement in alleviating the conditions of Aboriginal women ‘over here’ all the while attempting to rescue women ‘over there’ in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2008