Fred Vultee

SECURITIZATION: A new approach to the framing of the “war on terror”

To successfully cast an issue as an extraordinary threat requiring a suspension of normal political functions is to “securitize” it (e.g., Buzan et al., 1998). This content analysis uses portrayals of the “war on terror” in three US newspapers from 2001 to 2006 to show how a securitization frame can be invoked or contested and how it changes across time. Results suggest the importance to political figures of being able to invoke security, not only on matters of political violence but on such other issues as immigration or public health.To successfully cast an issue as an extraordinary threat requiring a suspension of normal political functions is to “securitize” it (e.g., Buzan et al., 1998). This content analysis uses portrayals of the “war on terror” in three US newspapers from 2001 to 2006 to show how a securitization frame can be invoked or contested and how it changes across time. Results suggest the importance to political figures of being able to invoke security, not only on matters of political violence but on such other issues as immigration or public health.

Fatwa on the bunny: News language and the creation of meaning about the Middle East

How did fatwa, once an unambiguous, simple term for a ruling on a question of Islamic religious law, come to mean “death sentence” in U.S. news language and popular culture? This article uses content and discourse analyses to trace this newly created meaning through a series of gatekeeping failures to a position from which its more ominous meaning is easily inferred—not simply in references to political violence but in discussions of baseball and literature or in advertisements featuring the ubiquitous “Energizer bunny.” The shared meanings it reflects are the underpinnings of the Orientalism that Said described in the 1970s and 1980s, a “pervasive Western discourse” built around a fundamental “ideology of difference.”

Credibility as a Strategic Ritual: The Times, the Interrogator, and the Duty of Naming

This study examines the use of names in the construction of “credibility” as a journalistic duty. Using the framework set forth by Tuchman (1972) of objectivity as a “strategic ritual,” the study discusses the ethical justifications put forth by the New York Times for the process through which it decided to identify a CIA interrogator who had been involved in questioning 9/11 captives. The examination concludes that the facticity of naming should ultimately be uncoupled from the concept of credibility.

JUMP BACK JACK, MOHAMMED'S HERE

This discourse analysis uses Saids concept of Orientalism to explore the ways in which Fox News uses the tools of news practice to create an ideological clearinghouse for a uniquely menacing image of Islam. As Said (1979) suggested, within this image, Islam is inseparable from what Muslims do, and Muslims are inseparable from each other. The modern image of an irrational, backward East that can never reconcile with the rational, progressive West echoes centuries of Orientalist conventional wisdom. The discourse Fox creates with its audience helps to set a foundation for polarized commentary and to legitimize support for a limitless war on the unknown.

Audience Perceptions of Editing Quality: Assessing traditional news routines in the digital age

The technological and social upheaval that did such damage to the economic structure of professional journalism has had some of its greatest impact on positions that, even if they did not produce original words or pictures, were essential to the smooth functioning of the assembly line of news. If off-the-shelf posting software with a built-in spell-checking function is all that need stand between the audience and a stream of fresh—if unmediated—content, is there a future for the technical, practical or even ethical skills that the copy editor brought to journalism? This study uses a lab experiment to address whether and how traditional editing processes affect audience perceptions of the quality, professionalism, and value of news articles. Articles were presented in a mixed design in which participants saw four articles in the edited condition and four in the unedited condition. Results indicate that standard newsroom editing practices have a significant positive effect on a digital audience’s perceptions of news quality and of whether material is worth paying for.

Public attitudes toward media control and incitement of conflicts in Eastern Africa

Public opinion research in two post-conflict African countries, Ethiopia and Rwanda, offers new insights into how audiences view the trustworthiness and performance of different media and different ownership sectors. This survey examines how citizens of Rwanda and Ethiopia describe the role of mass media in covering conflicts and in stoking the attitudes that can lead to or worsen conflicts. State-owned media are widely used as a source of news, yet are also widely distrusted, particularly when covering conflicts. They are also seen as less reliable than the privately-owned media. Still, different levels of use and confidence in state media suggest that top-down reconciliation efforts can have measurable results. Media can play a role in damping the flames of ethnic conflict, much as they can play a role in fanning those flames.

MAN-CHILD IN THE WHITE HOUSE: The discursive construction of Barack Obama in reader comments at foxnews.com

This study uses fantasy theme analysis to examine reader comments on news articles at foxnews.com in an attempt to unravel the rhetorical vision that Fox readers construct to help them make political and personal sense of Barack Obamas presidency. Results describe the dramatic forms that readers envision and re-enact when articles about the president—favorable, unfavorable, or tangential—are presented.

Finding Porn in the Ruin

the power of human creativity and labor and at the same time warn against the excesses of empire. These are heroic images, romantic depictions capturing the visual friction between elegant plays of light and vast swaths of destruction. There is something culturally hallowed about ruins, places that mark sites of majestic industry, that testify to the creativity of the human spirit, the will of human imagination, the capability of the human hand. Ruin photography presents us with a sublime aesthetic— seemingly unstoppable forces of progress, subjugated by the passive power of destruction. The stunning architecture captured in many of these images is made doubly overwhelming by the vast state of decay, manifesting our powerlessness. These images make us reflect on the human condition. As Marchand and Meffre state (2010), “ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension : : : making us [wonder] about the permanence of things.” Continuing, Marchand and Meffre declare: “Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.” Ruin photography presents us with emotionally complex images, offering a host of opportunities for engagement and exploitation. Photographs, like any representation, are imperfect and incomplete, open to interpretation by those who view them. There is no doubt that images can be used to enforce or overturn cultural narratives, that they can capture our attention and that they can serve as compelling evidence, but images also offer opportunities for engagement, for reflection and human connection. Inasmuch as the ethics of viewing ruin porn may call upon us to turn from it, to renounce the grubby gratification of the voyeur, at the same time ethical responses to the aesthetic call upon us to be transfixed by and open to the tensions between what was, what is, and what could be.

“Spike the Football”: Truth-Telling, the Press and the Bin Laden Photos

This article looks at press interpretations of the role of images—specifically, images of national enemies in death—in constructing various duties of media truth-telling. Discourse about the need, or duty, to publish photos of the Nazi leaders hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 provides a context for examining discourse surrounding a similar decision that the White House faced after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. What was seen largely as a third-person effect seven decades ago is more often seen now as a first-person effect: We no longer need to persuade or daunt the slain enemys die-hard followers, but we have created a set of obligations to persuade or please ourselves.

Duties, Rights and Election-Night Pizza: Toward an agenda of “what journalists are owed”

We’re Fred Vultee and Lee Wilkins (in alphabetical order), your Guest Editors for this special issue. We’re both former journalists, and we’ve been arguing about topics like this one for quite some time—well before we found ourselves working together at Wayne State University. This introduction took shape by email, phone calls and occasionally bursting into each other’s offices waving a freshly printed copy of the latest dead-parrot routine from the genuinely unusual US political cycle of 2015–2016. Indeed, the great challenge of putting together a set of arguments on the topic of “what journalists are owed” has been separating the episodic hilarity and outrage that journalism is heir to from the systemic concerns that inspired our original interest, much as they also inspired the painstaking work of the authors whose attention was caught by fine details of that broad subject. We’ll introduce those authors and their topics as they come up in the conversation, because we do view this as a conversation, and we’d be grateful—as analog journalists now charged with guiding journalism students into a digital age—if you in turn will pick up your end: engage with us, or with the authors whose work we’re fortunate to present here, or with each other. By random selection (F[1,1], p = 0.5), Lee gets to go first.