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Country-Bashing in Media in Context of Global Terrorism: A case study of British newspapers’ reporting of terrorist attacks in London and Paris

par Chen, Wenqin
Président du jury Baygert, Nicolas
Promoteur Heinderyckx, François ;Chang, Liu
Publication Non publié, 2018-06-05

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

Media construction of major terrorist attacks has received much attention ever since the 1970s in the field of Communication Sciences. Recently, investigations of media participation in the framing process of terrorist attacks have highlighted media’s role in the meaning-making of the attacks and the construction of identity, opposition and confrontation after the attack, indicating the relations of media to the attacked country, the authorities, the readership and terrorism. This thesis tries to analyze a specific discursive phenomenon “country-bashing” in a relational way with other discourses in terms of identity construction and value conflicts in media construction of the terrorist attacks in London (2005) and Paris (November 2015). The aim is to investigate how country-bashing is related to the core idea of media framing of the terrorist attacks. We start from identifying the emphasized frames with quantitative thematic analysis and cluster analysis on four British national daily newspapers, and the case studies of two terrorist attacks are conducted with a discursive approach of framing analysis.In this thesis, eight emphasized frames are identified, which consist a schematic model of media construction of terrorist attacks. The case study on London attacks reveals that country-bashing is focused on political actors and religious minority (suspected community), which facilitates the problem definition and responsibility attribution and finally promote the framing of “war provokes revenge”. In the case of the Paris attacks, France-bashing is a dynamic discursive system which contains an interplay of different types of bashing, shifting with the interpretative framework of event construction (from local context to European context).The thesis concluds that the phenomenon of “country-bashing” is a dynamic (re)construction of relations among the people, the country and the “other”. We summarize 4 types bashing within this discursive system, which are actor country- bashing, policy-bashing, negative branding (places) and systematic bashing. While the first two types of bashing can lead to a complete causality to terror attacks, the latter two provides a fragmented reading and open to further meaning-making. The results of the schematic model of media construction and the types of country-bashing can be used as an aid for further empirical investigation.