Taliban takeover: Charlotte Bellis faces perils outside ‘enemy territory’

New Zealand-born Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Peter Arnett was one of a handful of journalists allowed to stay in Baghdad as the American offensive against Iraq began in 1991. Reporting first from the rooftop of the Al-Rashid Hotel, he chronicled—quite literally – the impact of the bombing campaign. But on Day Four he was taken to a bombed-out building in a suburb that was then an infant milk formula factory would later gain notoriety thanks to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—Abu Ghraib. His report was accurate. In 2003, Arnett was once again in ‘enemy territory’ and (by his own later admission, unwisely) gave an interview to Iraqi television during the Second Iraq War. In the interview, he stated that the civilian casualties inflicted by the Coalition forces were counterproductive. In August 2021, it was the turn of another New Zealand journalist, Charlotte Bellis reporting for Al Jazeera English, to tell us what she sees. And much of the world has now seen her. The author examines the pitfalls that she may face.

Moving people: Proper distance and global news coverage of migration in 2019

Moving people comprise both a subject of news reports (of refugees, migrants and other people-on-the-move) and a way of reporting on the issues involved. Viewers can be moved and placed in a discursive relation to the displaced when news stories construct what Arendt called ‘proper distance’. This possibility is explored in the article, which compares coverage of migration issues in 2019 on four global television news channels: Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International and RT. The results provide evidence of approaches that differ in striking and thought-provoking ways, giving global television news consumers different resources for making sense of a complicated global crisis.

What’s Happened to Global News?

Scholarship on “global journalism” – to the extent that the phenomenon is explored empirically – is often based on the analysis of national media. This article considers, instead, how the global fares in global newsrooms, and what has happened to global news since the early years of the millennium. It is argued that, while much has changed in world politics and scholarly agendas, global news is characterized more by continuity than change, and that the interesting differences are not between “then” and “now,” but between news outlets. The results of the analysis of 2189 newscasts, 7591 headlines and 5379 news items broadcast over a period of 13 years by four global news organizations (Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International, and RT) call into question assumptions about the cosmopolitan nature of channels said to speak to the world. They show that only a small percentage of their news can be considered “global” in terms of topic and geographical scope, although there are thought-provoking differences in how the global is narrated. Taken together, they provide occasion to revisit the scholarly debate on global journalism.

Understanding the ideological construction of the Gulf crisis in Arab media discourse: A critical discourse analytic study of the headlines of Al Arabiya English and Al Jazeera English

This article investigates the ideologisation of Arab media discourse and takes as a case in point the ideological construction of the Gulf crisis in the headlines of Al Arabiya English and Al Jazeera English. A corpus of 515 headlines produced between May and June 2017 is examined using an interdisciplinary critical discourse analytic framework. Analysis is conducted at two levels: a textual level concerned with the analysis of the semantic and syntactic aspects of headlines and a socio-cognitive level informed by insights from Van Dijk’s ideological square concept and his mental model theory and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Findings indicate that both platforms are ideologically biased toward the political perspectives of their host states, although in a lesser degree in Al Jazeera English, and also reveal the various discursive strategies used to construct subjective mental models and reference frames to guide readers understanding of the crisis.

Transnational news media coverage of distant suffering in the Syrian civil war: An analysis of CNN, Al-Jazeera English and Sputnik online news

This study analyzed news stories published on the online sites of CNN, Al-Jazeera English, and Sputnik to investigate how the transnational news outlets framed the human suffering associated with the Syrian war. Unlike prior studies that have tended to be based on traditional nation-state paradigms, this research approached the analysis from a cosmopolitan perspective. The findings revealed that in concert with standard journalistic routines and news values, all three news outlets commonly employed a mass death and displacement frame to depict human suffering inside Syria. The adoption of this frame suggests that in telling the story of human suffering, the three media outlets focused on brief facts and shocking statistics without detailed depictions of the human suffering. The meager presence of a cosmopolitan outlook in the news coverage indicates that although transnational media target a global audience with English as Lingua Franca, they cannot be completely independent of geopolitics.

Protest in the Photo Essay: Following Tradition or Breaking New Ground?

The photo essay, a form of visual journalism that arose during the era of the picture magazines, has reemerged as a regular feature of global news channels, including CNN, BBC World, and, notably, Al Jazeera English, recognized for its live reporting of political unrest. In 2017, a year marked by protest around the world, AJE published over 200 photo-series, including 37 on public protest. An analysis based in a four-year study of protest on screen, revealed that these photo essays share characteristics that in turn distinguish them from video broadcasts of public protests. The photo-reportage on screen, like its classic forerunner in print, employs a variety of visual perspectives and focuses on participants who are often quoted and identified by name. Scenes of public protest are complemented by visual and textual reporting from the private/domestic sphere. This visual strategy, in contrast to the immediacy of video coverage from the streets, supports knowledge of the protest issue and engagement with its participants. Keywords: Al Jazeera English, global television news, news galleries, photo essay, photojournalism, public protest

A comparison of the visual and story frames Al Jazeera English and CNN employed during the 2011 Egyptian revolution

This study examines a month of cable news coverage of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. Specifically it examines how Al Jazeera English and CNN differ in their use of story and visual frames. The quantitative content analysis ( N = 503) found significant differences between the two networks. Al Jazeera English employs more frames about Egyptian history, political strategies, public engagement, public opinion, economy and the impact on the future of the country more frequently than CNN. When examining visual frames of conflict, Al Jazeera English was more likely to employ conflict frame–not violent than CNN. CNN was more likely than Al Jazeera English to employ the conflict frame–latent violence.

Is there a Qatari–Al-Jazeera nexus? Coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup controversy by Al-Jazeera versus Sky News, CNNI and ITV

The Al-Jazeera–Qatari nexus is debatable and hard to examine because Qatari affairs are rarely in the news. Recently, Qatar made global headlines in connection with an alleged bribe to win the 2022 World Cup bid, which creates a rare opportunity to examine Al-Jazeera’s coverage of this as well as other Qatari affairs. We compared coverage by Al-Jazeera Arabic, Al-Jazeera English and Al-Jazeera America with coverage of international networks (Sky News, CNN International and ITV). The analysis reveals that while Al-Jazeera English and America maintained high journalistic norms when reporting on the 2022 World Cup controversy, Al-Jazeera Arabic almost never criticizes its Qatari sponsor. The study highlights the dramatic differences between Al-Jazeera’s English and Arabic versions, looking at journalistic values in general and Qatari affairs coverage in particular.