British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2005

University of York, March 21-23.

The Shifting Securities team held a panel to present our preliminary findings on perceptions of security among different socio-cultural groups. We will examine whether the heightened sense of insecurity among certain social groups, in the aftermath of September 11 2001 and the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, is perceived as a product of a new and enduring state of affairs or a media amplified panic that serves the interests of security-driven states.  

The papers present ‘work-in-progress’ on the changing relationships between government, media and multicultural publics in the UK. The war on/in Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequent events, not least the Hutton and Butler Reports, raise important questions about public perceptions of risk and trust, security and civil liberties. Why has there been a significant erosion of trust between politicians, journalists and news publics? How are new challenges to security framed by news media? How do different social and cultural groups interpret news about threats to security? How are ideas about risk, fragmentation and social cohesion understood by different groups at different life stages: for example, young minority ethnic groups or senior citizens who have experienced previous and threats to security?  

Twenty-first century armed conflict is probably the most visually-driven in the history of warfare. With the low-cost and portability of audio-visual recording technologies, some have attributed a new ‘transparency’ to the media. Some even claim that ‘we are all media producers now”. Yet only a very tiny proportion of images of events that are recorded are ever widely disseminated. In our multi-media and multi-channel world, do the same stock narratives and imagery of the enemy ‘other’ still dominate? Do the internet and satellite TV filter and frame very different versions of events to very different audiences? What possibilities exist for dialogue and exchange across these different news media publics? To what extent is the ‘public sphere’ fragmenting and democratic debate being weakened? Do dichotomous discourses on the ‘war on terror’, and the iconic images that underpin ‘ideologies of difference’, support tendencies towards fragmentation and conflict?

Abstracts:

1. Explaining today’s news culture: the battle for legitimacy through discursive ordering

Ben O’Loughlin, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

If we are to understand how ‘security’ might be presented/ represented, produced/reproduced in today’s news culture, we must consider how this news culture has come to be the way it is. A news culture is understood here as an effect of the relations between media, state and public (and other interest groups). These relations form an ongoing and incomplete process in which certain ‘frames’ emerge allowing news audiences and producers to comprehend events through common prisms (of memories and ideological assumptions). Framing is never fully totalising because of disparate experiences and ideologies, hence continual disagreement about the nature of events we are all ‘witness’ to. But the legitimacy of state policy depends on public consent to the accepted version of events. Hence, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the formation of news cultures today and the framing processes therein constitute a battleground for political supremacy.

At the same time, a new mode of political ordering has emerged since the 1980s in which Western states, to an unprecedented extent, make policy – i.e. try to order the world – by using language and images to tell stories. Rather than winning agreement for courses of action through reasoned debate and rational plans, Western states make policy through ‘manipulated emergence’. Key terms are placed into defined contexts, be they national news cultures or local hospitals, in order to redefined actors’ understandings in a manner that re-orients them towards states’ goals.

In the context of these new tendencies, this paper addresses the conditions for the discursive ordering of global security. Indeed, at the very moment that new technologies allow for a proliferation of news sources and anyone can be a news producer, so political players in global security – nation-states, al-Qaeda and other counter-insurgent groups – are finding new ways to control the production of news. In Iraq, CNN and al-Jazeera each provide embedded journalists to report their ‘truth’. Channels frame events by situating them within prior discourses of, respectively, liberation or occupation. Each deploys a method of ‘journalism of attachment’, focusing on individuals’ tragedies to capture public emotion rather providing information and contextual knowledge so that citizens can form reasoned judgements. Yet this new dynamic does not ‘just happen’. This paper also examines the trends that make such desperate developments possible, e.g. the cycle of mistrust-exaggeration-mistrust that has gripped the UK government and public, the competition for market share of audiences, the demands of 24/7 news coverage, and innovative discourses which again negate reasoned debate, e.g. Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns’ and Blair’s ‘regular guy facing tough choices’ communicative style.

2. War Without End: Television and ‘New Memory’

Andrew Hoskins, Swansea University

Project Co-ordinator ESRC New Challenges to Security Research Programme

This paper addresses the relationship between warfare, media and memory. Television is a medium of historical contradictions.  It simultaneously embraces the past through the repetition of key images and sounds, whilst discarding a great deal of the rest.  Personal memory works selectively by matching the here-and-now with an intelligible there-and-then, shifting contexts and re-framing meaning.  Television memory operates through the frequent repetition and re-framing of key TV images. It extends the past into the present in new ways, creating templates which impose ‘ways of seeing’ the world today through a televisual prism. Television as a global memory bank is both liberating and lethal.

Individual and social memories appear to be increasingly intertwined with and reliant on media data (language, image, sound) what we might refer to as ‘new memory’ (Hoskins 2001, 2004).  On the one hand, the media overpower human memory, or diminish the need for memory, through potentially unlimited and increasingly complex documentation, storage, and instant retrieval and re-assemblage of our past(s).  On the other, the media weaken the past, erasing it, diffusing it, arguably rendering it ‘painless’ or even ‘neutral’.  In these circumstances, some advocate the pursuit of a ‘living’ representation and memory of warfare that is wounding and partisan, but potentially redemptive.

This paper explores some of the possibilities and limitations ‘new memory’ for the comprehension of conflict and security in a mediated age. In an environment where on-location reporting is the norm, journalists are increasingly central to the construction of media templates as co-present witnesses to events, emerging as authentic ‘tellers’ and ‘keepers’ of history.  Drawing upon data from the Western television coverage of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq Wars  (re-circulated and re-mediated  in print and other media), I examine the media’s role in perpetuating an appropriately sanitised vision of warfare, that simultaneously appears ‘up close and personal’, but nonetheless, remains safely distant and remote.

3. News, Security and the Imperatives of Identity

Karen Qureshi, The Open University

This paper reports on preliminary findings and analysis from ethnographic interviews and observations multilingual news audiences in Edinburgh and shifting senses of security in the aftermath of September 11^th 2001 and the Iraq War 2003. The paper examines viewers’ interpretations of news events identified as ‘security salient’. It examines how different audiences use multilingual news sources, and how they perceive and discuss hegemonic discourses about security in mainstream and alternative news media. Responses to news among ‘Scottish Pakistani Muslims’, for example, suggest complex identifications are being negotiated on a daily basis via consumption of multilingual news sources. ‘Security events’ and how these are represented are perceived by some viewers as having significant implications for their lives. Such viewers show high levels of involvement with news. Others distance themselves from mainstream news and its presentation and are more detached and speculative in their assessments of security threats and how they are represented by different news sources.

4.  Going global in East London: Multi-ethnic youth responses to television news

Ammar Al-Ghabban, ESRC New Challenges to Security Programme

This paper explores responses to ‘security’-related news by an ethnically and linguistically diverse cross-section of East London youth using the 2003 ‘war’ in Iraq as a trigger for discussions. It analyses young viewers´ perceptions of the neutrality and bias, credibility and reliability of different news sources in the context of their nascent or pre-existing political loyalties. It looks at how class, race and religion impact on their interpretations of news coverage of America’s occupation of Iraq, and how notions of ‘threat’, ‘anxiety’ ‘personal’ and ‘national security’ are discussed and perceived. The paper highlights the divergences between the agendas of news providers and the priorities of young British news viewers. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the political significance and the social impact of news discourses about ‘terrorism’, ‘liberty’ and ‘security’. Such discourses resonate in particular ways for East London viewers from different ethnic and linguistic groups. The news media’s presentation of Western government security policies elicits a range of responses: confusing some young viewers, alienating others and making some – especially those who have strong pre-existing political frameworks – extremely angry and frustrated.

5. Perceptions of Risk, Diversity and Fragmentation: A Collaborative Ethnography of News Audiences

Marie Gillespie, Open University & Project Co-ordinator ESRC New Challenges to Security Programme

The interconnectedness of television audiences around global media events is often characterised as unifying and liberating. However, the availability of transnational news channels and internet news sources in hundreds of different languages mean that audiences can, if they wish, choose to watch news in the language of their choice. They may also choose to watch news that offers the security of confirming a particular world view or political perspective. Is this diversification of news audiences fragmenting news publics and weakening democratic debate or is it a sign of pluralisation (of voices and views) and democratisation? This paper will draw selectively on the larger body of data gathered on this project to address the themes of risk, fragmentation and diversity. It will outline some of the distinctive patterns of response to news representations of threats to security. It hopes to encourage debate about the initial findings of our ‘collaborative ethnography’ of news audiences.