Gregory McLaughlin

All news is local: covering the war in Iraq in Northern Ireland's daily newspapers

This article examines and analyses how Northern Irelands daily press reported the war in Iraq in 2003. Although much of the coverage relied heavily on news agency copy, the newspapers seized every opportunity to connect their readers to the conflict using local inflections and angles on the story: on occasion these efforts to “localise” the story were strained and at other times bizarre. The authors argue that such coverage diminishes the ability of regional media to provide a distinctive perspective on international news, especially in the era of regional devolution and European integration.

Rules of Engagement: television journalism and NATO'S "faith in bombing" during the Kosovo crisis, 1999

Every war from Crimea to Kosovo has been followed by a post-mortem into the failure of journalism to cover the conflict truthfully and courageously. William Howard Russell, Richard Harding Davis, and most recently Phillip Knightley have in their turn pronounced the profession dead. But these are subjective judgements and while they have some truth they are not always grounded in actual analysis of the evidence. This article looks at British and American television news reporting of NATOs bombing campaign in Serbia and Kosovo. It argues that the quiescent attitude of the NATO media pool in Brussels was not reflected across all sections of the news media and that the presentation of NATO material on news bulletins was in many cases treated with the scepticism expected of the profession. The analysis is based on a sample of British and American television news from 12 to 19 April 1999, and on interviews with a number of journalists present at the briefings and with NATO press secretary, Jamie Shea.

From Belfast to Bamako: Cinema in the Era of Capitalist Realism

All films are ideological, whether they are configured as purely entertainment, or thought to transcend the world of politics to engage with some universal truth. However, typically when we talk about ‘political cinema’, we are referring to films that engage with political issues explicitly, questioning power and/or contesting dominant perceptions of the world. For these films, the ‘triumph’ of global capitalism and free-market theory has presented particular challenges. First of all, cinema audiences are increasingly configured as consumers, pursuing pleasure and untrammelled entertainment. Second, the scope for political films is greatly reduced when ‘capitalist realism’ means that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism (Fisher, 2009: 2).