Henri C. Nickels

DE/CONSTRUCTING “SUSPECT” COMMUNITIES

Irish and Muslim communities in Britain are, or have often been, constructed negatively in public discourse, where they have been associated with terrorism and extremism. Despite similarities in the experiences of these communities, little comparative research has been conducted. We address this gap by implementing a critical discourse analysis of national and diaspora press coverage of events involving Irish and Muslim communities that occurred in Great Britain between 1974 and 2007. We identified a consensus within the press that “law-abiding” Irish and Muslim people must stand up against “extremists” within their ranks and defend what newsmakers perceive are British values; in this way Irish and Muslim communities are constructed as both inside and outside Britishness. We conclude that the construction of these communities as “suspect” happens mostly in the ambiguity of news discourse, which contributes to fostering a socio-political climate that has permitted civil liberties to be violated by the state security apparatus.

Social cohesion and the notion of ‘suspect communities’: a study of the experiences and impacts of being ‘suspect’ for Irish communities and Muslim communities in Britain

In this article, we consider how the practice of conceiving of groups within civil society as ‘communities’ meshes with conceptualisations of certain populations as ‘suspect’ and consider some of the impacts and consequences of this for particular populations and for social cohesion. We examine how Irish and Muslim people in Britain have become aware of and have experienced themselves to be members of ‘suspect communities’ in relation to political violence and counterterrorism policies from 1974 to 2007 and investigate the impacts of these experiences on their everyday lives. The study focuses on two eras of political violence. The first coincides with the Irish Republican Armys (IRA) bombing campaigns in England between 1973 and 1996, when the perpetrators were perceived as ‘Irish terrorists’; and the second since 2001, when, in Britain and elsewhere, the main threat of political violence has been portrayed as stemming from people who are assumed to be motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam and are often labelled as ‘Islamic terrorists’. We outline why the concept of ‘suspect communities’ continues to be analytically useful for examining: the impact of ‘bounded communities’ on community cohesion policies; the development of traumatogenic environments and their ramifications; and for examining how lessons might be learnt from one era of political violence to another, especially as regards the negative impacts of practices of suspectification on Irish communities and Muslim communities. The research methods included discussion groups involving Irish and Muslim people. These demonstrated that with the removal of discourses of suspicion the common ground of Britains urban multiculture was a sufficient basis for sympathetic exchanges.

Constructing ‘suspect’ communities and Britishness: Mapping British press coverage of Irish and Muslim communities, 1974–2007

There exist many parallels between the experiences of Irish communities in Britain in the past and those of Muslim communities today. However, although they have both been the subject of negative stereotyping, intelligence profiling, wrongful arrest and prejudice, little research has been carried out comparing how these communities are represented in the media. This article addresses this gap by mapping British press coverage of events involving Irish and Muslim communities that occurred between 1974 and 2007. The analysis shows that both sets of communities have been represented as ‘suspect’ to different degrees, which the article attributes to varying perceptions within the press as to the nature of the threat Irish and Muslim communities are thought to pose to Britain. The article concludes that a central concern of the press lies with defending its own constructions of Britishness against perceived extremists, and against abuses of power and authority by the state security apparatus.

The Political Context: International and Domestic Security Concerns

The call to a Global War on Terror was logically implausible but rhetorically effective in its propagandistic evocation of a worldwide threat which required a resolute response. It conjured up a binary world of friends and enemies. Who, except the practitioners or sponsors of terror(ism), could eschew the challenge to destroy the sources of this evil? In the real sphere of international politics the concept of a Global War on Terror was as disingenuous as it was simplistic, but as a mobilizing ideological slogan or as a shorthand label it was endlessly reproduced in the Western media, preparing the way for George W. Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war against the rogue states deemed to support terrorism. It set the tone of international relations for the remainder of Bush’s presidency, before the terminology was discarded by Barack Obama’s new administration in 2009, even though many of the associated policies remained in place (Zalman and Clarke, 2009). While it was current, the apparent success of the Global War on Terror as a political watchword also offered other states the opportunity to identify their policies towards troublesome neighbours and/or hostile groups within their own borders as part of the global struggle. The Global War on Terror extended in principle to any source of terrorism. However, the focus of discourse and policy was heavily concentrated on radical, anti-Western Muslim groups and the states which aided them. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ threatened to turn from myth into reality.

Commemorating 9/11: The Struggle for the Universal

Our final chapter unifies the central concerns of the preceding two. On one hand it treats a distinct genre of television terror reporting: the annual 9/11 commemoration report. Following Chapter 6 , it focuses on the role of genre in reconciling the generality of the campaign against the terrorist threat with the specificity of its manifestation in particular national contexts. And like Chapter 6 it refers to the poles of narrative in its approach to the treatment of this tension. But its efforts to locate the tension in the context of the semiotic flow and counterflow across national media spaces, and to interpret the multiplicity of transnational meaning as a function of cross-national divergence in perspective, place it within the orbit of the issues addressed in Chapter 7.

The Ten O’Clock News: Anxious Attention

In the two-year period we studied, the Ten O’Clock News (hereafter the News ) gave extensive coverage to Islam-related news, in terms of both the frequency and the prominence of reports. The cumulative weight of the coverage lay predominantly on security-related events abroad in which British national interests were directly or indirectly at stake. Reporting of domestic Islam-related news was similarly dominated by questions of security. In its newsmaking, as we pointed out in the Introduction, the BBC was bound by a PSB remit with several dimensions. Its reporting was expected to be truthful and accurate, but also to show impartiality. Indeed, the BBC made a fetish of impartiality in its editorial and instructional literature. However, that commitment was qualified by the important caveat that the requirement was for due impartiality, with the stipulation that the code of rules to be drawn up by the BBC Trust must, in particular, indicate that due impartiality did not demand ‘absolute neutrality or detachment from fundamental democratic principles’ (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2006, §44(7)). Thus, by implication, there were circumstances in which impartiality should be attenuated – notably, in cases where democratic values were judged to be under attack. More generally, as we also observed earlier, while journalists were required to abstain from expressing personal political opinions, the corporate output was, in fact, formally obliged to sustain a range of liberal, civic values. The judgement made by Philip Schlesinger (1978, p. 205) more than three decades ago still holds true: ‘the concept of impartiality and its related operational practices are worked out within a framework of socially endowed assumptions about consensus politics, national community and the parliamentary form of conflict-resolution’. Or, as Georgina Born (2005, p. 382) argues, in the light of the inherently selective, interpretative nature of journalism, ‘the [BBC’s] doctrines of objectivity and impartiality continue to operate as performative fictions or “strategic rituals” that bind the professional culture, providing ethical moorings and augmenting its credibility’.

Vremia: Compliance and Complicity

In the period of our study, Russia’s Channel 1, as an N(S)B, showed many similarities with BBC 1 and France 2 in their roles as PSBs, but also a range of distinctive differences. Like the British and French broadcasters, Channel 1 had the duty of representing the nation to itself in terms of values, institutions and practices. However, those values, institutions and practices did not always coincide with the types common to West European democracies. While the BBC and France 2, though not identical to each other, had to balance their respective statutory requirements of impartiality or neutrality, accuracy and fairness against an implicit assumption that they should remain within the conventions and norms of the established political and social order in their respective countries, they were not directly at the service of the government in power at any given time, although they could be subjected to pressure. Channel 1 operated on a somewhat similar basis to the old ORTF in France under De Gaulle. It was not a purely propagandistic operation on Nazi or Soviet lines, but it was closely tied to the state’s direction as a conduit of political communication from the Kremlin to the Russian public.

‘Islamic Extremism’ and the Brokering of Consensus

In Chapter 5 we revisit the theme of Muslims and integration broached in Part I and subject it to more detailed scrutiny. We turn our attention to how post-9/11 news broadcasts on Islam represent, discuss, and participate in changing societal consensuses on inter-ethnic/intercultural cohesion, and to what such changes tell us about shifting power configurations in Europe. In each case, (re)definitions of extremism as a marker of what lies beyond the socially acceptable are key to the dynamics of the shift. And in each case, media systems play a crucial role in driving the process.

The Journal de Vingt Heures: A Degree of Detachment

France 2, as flagship PSB channel within the France Televisions (FT) group, operates under a remit of objectives and obligations, set out in its Charter. The reform of FT in 2009 led to a reformulation of that remit, with some new points of emphasis, notably with regard to coverage of the European Union (Ministere de la Culture et de l’Information, 2009). However, besides the fact that the new remit showed a strong degree of continuity with its predecessor, chronological accuracy requires this chapter to refer to the requirements stated in the previous version of the Charter, which applied at the time we recorded our data (France Televisions, 2005). To a considerable extent, FT’s PSB remit had premises similar to those of the BBC. Although the concept of due impartiality did not figure in the documents, and was not a fetish in the way that it was for the BBC, the notions of neutrality, accuracy and rigour did figure explicitly, and in common with the stricture on the BBC, FT journalists were prohibited from expressing partisan political opinions. The Charter located itself firmly and clearly within the democratic, republican framework. Its preamble was dedicated to the principle of freedom of audio-visual communication, deriving from the fundamental freedoms of thought and expression. The Charter and France 2’s own Cahier des charges (Ministere de la Culture et de l’Information, 2002, 2007) construed the requirements of equity, independence, pluralism of opinion, democratic debate, solidarity and civic involvement in serving the general interest of society. FT was regulated by the Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA) in terms of quotas for representation of government, opposition parties and trades unions, but not for the President of the Republic, who was deemed to be above party. Besides promoting intellectual and artistic creation, France 2 was required to serve an educational role in disseminating civic, economic, social, scientific and technical knowledge.

The War on Terror as Intercultural Flow

Chapter 6 demonstrated how European television news mediates the Islamic terror ‘threat’ through the adaptation of generic forms capable of authenticating that threat’s purportedly universal reach by locating it in the particular contexts in which the various channels operate. We identified for each channel a distinct set of difficulties encountered in the articulation of the particular/universal relationship. They centred primarily on the need to accommodate domestic Muslim populations within national identity projects conforming to European principles of tolerance, whilst sustaining a sense of the covert presence of the global Islamist fundamentalism that places those projects in jeopardy.