Through this study, the research exposed how the media coverage of the Iraq conflict varied by the nation where it was distributed. This particular war has brought new difficulties for various orders: governmental issues, military, diplomacy, universal legislative issues, and media, among others. It included a controversial political debate among nations and areas; it went up against the United States with worldwide and national opinion and political frameworks.
Antiwar dissents increased far and wide and political leaders were losing their nations’ approval in the event that they upheld the United States. Joined together Countries lost specialist and its quality was addressed after the showdown with the Bush Administration and the UN Security Council, which did not enable the United States to invade Iraq under legal terms or international laws.
War is a complex thing and includes distinctive substances from alternate points of view. Iraq war was one of a kind and brought all sort of difficulties for Americans and whatever is left of the globe when a new world request was introduced since an imperative enemy of Americanism feeling developed among various nations and districts.
In hence, media played a very important role during the Iraq war, media were a standout amongst propaganda strategies of the Bush Administration and its allies. Toward the start of the war, American media, supported by its technological advances, made positive outputs to the alliance. Therefore, this study analyzes the news coverage of the Iraq conflict, and how does media shape people perception during the war. The analysis of media coverage of the war in Iraq 2003 includes several factors, like framing news, international framing, and Bush Administration framing.
Framing occurs, when in the course of depicting an issue or event the media’s emphasis on the subset of conceivably applicable concentrations, make people center around these concentrations while building their assessment rather than on others. Fuyuan Shen (2004) says that media frames can have significant consequences on how audiences perceive and understand issues and can alter public opinions on ambivalent and controversial issues. In doing so, the news media can increase the relevance and newsworthiness of issues or events to the audiences.
Among studies about media framing, Adam Simon gives a typical definition of framing. He based his study on the definition of framing that; “the process by which a source defines the essential problem underlying a particular social or political issue and outlines a set of considerations purportedly relevant to that issue.” (2001). As indicated by Simon, to completely see how framing works, it is vital to realize how human memory functions. Memory partners ideas to make thoughts. Subsequently, picking the correct ideas in a story can bring out the correct thought by the relationship of those ideas. The framing process is an internal process for every person, not in connection with the unit of data information its specific circumstance or context.
As the Iraq war included more than one nation and international and national public opinions, for the American government, it was imperative to shape the perception of different nations. Furthermore, the leader to gain support for the United States’ causes. Distinctive experts investigated how media shape the view of outside nations through the framing process. Through an experimental study, Paul Brewer, Joseph Graf and Lars Willnat examined how media affect the standards by which people evaluate foreign countries.
They used three experimental groups and one control group and they pre and post-tested their attitude toward foreign nations. They gave these four groups two different questionnaires, one about drugs and terrorisms and another about their attitude towards some nations. After these questionnaires, they gave to the experimental groups some fake news about the relation of those countries to drugs and terrorism.
Also, they provided to the control group news about computers and the Euro. When they applied the posttest, those groups that read the first news negatively changed their attitudes towards those countries, but the control group did not show any change in their attitudes towards these nations (Willnat: 2003).
Ilija Tomanic Trivundza analyzes how media shape our knowledge of the world. According to her, the media exert a great influence on where public attention is focused and how much importance is attributed to a certain topic. Journalists often resort to frames in order to set particular events within their broader context through their stories and pictures, as visual proof of events (Trivundza: 2004).
She indicates that; in the worldwide media inclusion of the Iraq war, the ideological surrounding depends fundamentally on socially explicit examples of self-recognizable proof with the countries or societies engaged with the contention. According to her, “media frame nations based on antagonism (the good the bad, the inferior-the superior, etc.). Orientalism is a pertinent frame for representing race, nationality, and otherness in media and is established on the basis of contrast to others, serving as an articulation of differences” (Trivundza: 2004).
She also shows that “in order to protect Western civilization and its way of 15 lives and to gain a stronger moral justification for the invasion of Iraq, the western media established the image of Saddam Hussein as the incarnation of the evil, dangerous madman and the new Hitler. American media published pictures of U.S. soldiers inaccessible, familiar mode, talking to groups of Iraqis, securing law and order. In Slovenia and Germany, media published pictures of U.S. soldiers capturing or destroying symbolic markers of the Iraqi regime, or the damage caused to civilian objects by the massive bombings” (Trivundza: 2004).
As indicated by Lehman, the steady utilization of reporters and point of view from different nations and universal associations on German television most likely kept up an increasingly adjusted range of perspectives. Lehman states that “during the period under review, the United States related to international affairs in a crisis mode, fighting the ‘war against terror’ as a consequence of the attacks on 9/11.”
According to the study, “although the alleged links between the perpetrators and Saddam Hussein’s regime were unproven, the U.S. public continued in 2002 and 2003 to make such connections in ‘surprisingly’ large numbers.”As said by the researcher, for most parts, “American journalists uncritically accepted the slogans of the Bush Administration, like “Saddam, the tyrant and madman,” linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attack, and arguing that Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction posed a direct threat to the United States”(Lehman). According to Lehman, in the period between the 9/11 assaults and the war against Iraq, the American media has to a great extent surrendered their functions, a critical function for democratic societies that must be reestablished.
Through this research, I will examine how media perception shaped people opinion during the Iraq war. Additionally, what was the United States responded toward media perspectives’ of the Iraq war? I choose this topic because I think it’s very important to know how media use to affect our thinking and beliefs all through the news. I believe that most newspapers and media channels tended to use coalition sources framing the stories according to coalition interests.
References:
- Haumann, et al. “German Public Opinion on the Iraq Conflict: A Passing Crisis with the USA or a Lasting Departure?” OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, 1 Sept. 2004, academic.oup.com/ijpor/article/16/3/311/857413.
- Lehmann, Ingrid. “Exploring the transatlantic media divide over Iraq: How and why U.S. and German media differed in reporting on UN weapons inspections in Iraq, 2002-2003.” The
- Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics. 10 (2005): 63-89.
- Shen, Fuyuan. “Effects of News Frames and Schemas on Individuals’ Issue Interpretations and Attitudes.” Journal of Extension, Extension Journal, Inc., 1 Jan. 2004, pennstate.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/effects-of-news-frames-and-schemas-on-individuals-issue-interpret.
- Trivundza, Ilija. “Orientalism as news: Pictorial representations of the U.S. attack on Iraq in Delo.” Journalism. 5 (2004): 480-499.
- Simon, Adam. “Unified method for analyzing media framing.” In Communication in U.S. elections: new agendas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2001): 75-89.
