MEDIA WARS: News Media Performance and Media Management During the 2003 Iraq War :

Institution: Leeds University and Liverpool University.
Researchers: Piers Robinson (University of Liverpool), Peter Goddard (University of Liverpool), Robin Brown (University of Leeds), Philip M. Taylor University of Leeds), Craig Murray (University of Liverpool) Katy Parry (University of Liverpool)
Funder: ESRC
Status of Project: ongoing

Research:
The project combines three distinct research agendas: a framing analysis of news media coverage of the war, an analysis of government news management methods and output and, by combining these two research agendas, an analysis of media-state power relations during the war. Specifically the research aims to:

• Identify the contours of framing in British TV and newspaper news of the war, uncovering the range, autonomy and boundaries to debate across media outlets, the extent to which news coverage reflected elite sources and news management strategies as well as dissenting voices, and the relative salience of justifications for the war. Data on the attribution of news sources will also facilitate an assessment of the impact upon mainstream news of content from new media such as satellite phones, the Internet, 24-hour news and Al Jazeera.
• Identify the key government information management strategies and actual outputs (press briefings, etc.) over the course of the war, including strategic attempts to develop common framings over time, tactical activities designed to minimise damaging coverage and/or to discredit counter-narratives, the techniques used to co-ordinate US and UK information management strategies and the involvement of embedded journalists. In order to facilitate comparison between government information and media output, our analyses of government information and media content will use compatible variables and methods.
• Assess the relative salience of media, state and dissenting voices in determining media agendas during the conflict. In particular, we seek to identify variations in this powerbalance across the course of the war as government information management strategies responded to the uncertainties of war and unexpected events, media outlets sought to maintain autonomy under the difficult circumstances of war and dissenting voices attempted to influence the media agenda.

research outline

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Shifting Securities: News Cultures before and after the Iraq War 2003

Institution: Oxford University.
Researchers: Ben O'Loughlin
Funder: ESRC
Status of Project: Ongoing

Research:
This research uses the Iraq War 2003 as a trigger to investigate how new security challenges are represented and interpreted in the intersections between government and military actors, news producers, and increasingly fragmented news audiences-publics. Developing informed policy options requires being responsive to the changing dynamics of these relationships. The research will contribute directly to both security and cultural/media policy. It will examine, test and challenge certain standard assumptions about the Information Economy and Network Society, the making and shaping of news, the ideological content of news, the effects of news content on audiences, and the consequences of new media for democratic debate, informed citizenship, and decision-making regarding military conflicts, terrorism and security issues. It will map old? and new? media strategies of political communication and propaganda through the interplay of three mutually shaping methodological strands: (A) an ethnography of news consumption in multi-lingual news publics, (B) an analysis of (TV and internet) news narratives and iconographies of war and conflict, (C) a qualitative study of policy makers, news producers and experts? attitudes, beliefs and value regarding the media-security nexus. Crucially, this involves a reflexive use of the data under analysis. Each of the data sets will help direct and focus the other in a spiralling, iterative manner. This will enable a flexible but rigorous framework for addressing policy, propaganda and public diplomacy issues adequate to understanding our intensively and extensively networked information society. The project would provide rich and robust data and analyses, reliable and relevant knowledge that would contribute much to tackling the challenges and opportunities of social integration and cultural cohesion in multicultural states like the UK .

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Women and the Military: Women and the British Army 1908-1948:

Institution: University of Portsmouth.
Researchers: Lucy Noakes
Funder: AHRB
Status of Project: Ongoing

Research:
This project examines the history of women working with and in the British Army between 1908, when the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), the first women's volunteer paramilitary organisation to work with the army, was established and 1948, when the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS)became a permanent feature of the armed forces as the WRAC. The research focuses particularly on the ways in which women in military uniform were seen as threatening established codes of masculinity and femininity, and the ways in which this threat was managed in times of both peace and war.

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Humanitarianism and Human Rights in UK Press Coverage of Post-Cold War Conflicts and Interventions

Institution: London South Bank University, London.
Researchers: Phil Hammond
Funder: AHRC
Status of Project: Completed

Research:
This project investigates the explanatory frameworks used in media reporting of post-Cold War conflicts. It examines how conflicts are explained, investigates how far Western military action is represented as legitimate, and assesses the importance of humanitarian and human rights discourse in securing legitimacy. The research aims to establish which have been the dominant themes in explaining a range of conflicts and the international responses to them; to investigate the origins of news frames by examining news sourcing; and to discover whether the patterns established prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks have subsequently changed.

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Radical Mass Media Criticism in Europe and America. A Cultural Genealogy from 1850 to the Present.

Institution: Southampton Institute.
Researchers: John Theobald
Funder: AHRB Research Leave
Status of Project: Ongoing

Research:
The project involves the completion of the book 'Radical Mass Media Criticism. A Cultural Genealogy',and the setting up of a related website www.fifth-estate-online.co.uk. Building on my book 'The Media and the Making of History' (2004), and on David Berry's 'Ethics and Media Culture'(2000), the project shows a 150 year continuity of radical media-critical ideas demonstrating a robust tradition of resistance to mainstream mass media distortions of the historical process. Representations of war are clearly central to this.

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Spanish Public Opinion toward Security and Defense Policy: Armed Forces and Use of Force in Comparative Perspective, 1991-2003.

Institution: Spanish Open University, Madrid
Researchers: Jose Olmeda
Funder: UNED, Instituto Universitario General Gutiérrez Mellado,
Status of Project: Ongoing

Research:
The purpose of this Project is to investigate the state of the art about public opinion on the use of force in a comparative perspective and the gap between the military and civilian elites in Spanish society: its extent, whether it is growing or narrowing, and the implications for military effectiveness and civil-military cooperation. Our Project will advance public deliberation of these issues by providing objective, dispassionate, but focused scholarship and policy analysis, including new data in the form of opinion surveys of military and civilian elites, and military and civilian general populations.

The Project will address a set of questions like the following: Do American attitudes, opinions, and perspectives on the use of force diverge from European ones? Do military attitudes, opinions, and perspectives diverge from those in Spanish society, and if so, why? Is this divergence, if it exists, growing and if so why? How does the culture gap affect policy in the areas of strategy, operations, and force structure? Does a widening gap lead to civilian ignorance of, or insensitivity to, military culture and ultimately to policies, directives that undermine the military? How does, or might in the future, a divergence or gap affect civil-military relationships?

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Unspeakable Acts: The cultural politics of torture in the war on terror

Institution: Monash University
Researchers: Dr Nina Philadelphoff-Puren
Funder: Research as a tenured academic.
Status of Project: Ongoing

Research:
I am investigating the politics of torture in the War on terror. In particular, the relationship between torture and language (internal to the current practice of torture) and also as it obtains in the new torture archive. I am also researching the fate of testimony about torture, and the cultural politics that can be identified in the moment that a political community 'listens' (or fails to listen) to such testimony. My specific research focus is Australia, and the testimony of Mamdouh Habib, Jack Thomas and David Hicks, who have all made allegations of torture.                

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