Pockets of Resistance: Theorising media-state relations and the case of British media and the 2003 Iraq Invasion
Keywords: media, war, field theory, issue type, new institutionalism
Dr Piers Robinson
Senior Lecturer
Politics, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, March 2011; Panel Media, War and Accountability Thursday March 17th, 2011.
This paper is an initial draft of working ideas to be developed in on-going research; comments are welcome.
Researching the relationship between media and the state during times of war and crisis has been a dominant concern for scholars of political communication. On the one hand, the significance of war as the most serious and consequential policy that a state can pursue, coupled with democratic expectations regarding media and public scrutiny, has naturally driven scholars to research this topic (e.g. Aday et al, 2005; Tumber and Palmer 2004; Lewis et al, 2006 and more). At the same time, and for similar reasons, the topic of media and war has often been a focal point for attempts to theorize the relationship between media and the state (Bennett, 1990; Entman, 2004; Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Wolfsfeld, 1997 and more). At the heart of this research agenda lies the question of whether or not media successfully maintain their independence from political power. The prevailing opinion (of course) is that, at least in times of war and crisis media independence is severely limited with media supporting the state; in this paper we refer to media deference to state as the elite-driven model (see for example Bennett, 1990; Hallin, 2986; Herman and Chomsky). At the same time, more recently there have emerged a number of bold claims regarding the radical transformation of media-state relations due to rapid pluralization of power enabled by digital Internet-based communication (e.g. Castells, 2010; Gowing, 2009; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). Speaking to all these concerns, this paper presents research[1] on British media coverage of the 2003 Iraq invasion, and discusses its implications for our theoretical understanding of media-state relations, both in war-time and more generally. The paper proceeds in three sections. The first section provides an overview of the key descriptive empirical findings from a two-year study which analysed how UK TV news and newspapers covered the 2003 Iraq invasion: here we describe the extent to which UK media variously conformed to, or deviated from, official perspectives on the war. In the second section, these descriptive findings are expanded upon in order to identify key variables that are understood to have shaped the patterns of independence from, and dependence on, official perspectives. In the third section, these findings are drawn upon in order to reassess existing theoretical frameworks that aim to account for media-state relations and, in turn, develop a new approach to understanding media-state relations.
In broadest, I will argue that the key accounts which dominate the political communication scholarship on media and war (e.g. Bennett, 1990; Entman, 2004; Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Wolfsfeld, 1997), have paid insufficient attention to journalistic professionalism, media system characteristics and the importance of issue-type in terms of shaping the dynamics of media-state relations. As a way forward, the paper sets out the case for deploying concepts related to field theory (Bourdieu), new institutionalism (e.g. Benson, 2006) and issue-type as a way of theoretically underpinning, in terms of both describing and explaining, a nuanced and dynamic theoretical framework of media-state relations.
Section One: UK TV News and Press Coverage of the 2003 Iraq Invasion: Patterns of Support, Negotiation and Opposition
What follows in this section is a brief overview of our empirical findings and fuller details can be found elsewhere.[2] Our research involved a detailed content and framing analysis of the major UK television news outlets, involving the BBC, ITV and Channel Four evening news broadcasts as well as a segment of the non-terrestrial 24-hour channel Sky News. We also examined seven major national newspapers: The Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and the Sun, together with their Sunday equivalents. Building upon a range of existing frameworks designed to measure media autonomy and bias (drawing, most notably, on Hallin 1986 and Semetko et al. 1991), we documented a wide variety of indicators reacting to media autonomy, from the variety of sources used by media through to the prevalence of particular pro- and anti-coalition frames. In general terms, our coding schema was designed to identify whether news reports were supportive of the coalition (consistent with predictions of the elite-driven model), or whether they adopted a more negotiated or oppositional stance with news reports either standing apart from government narratives or openly challenging the government. The period of analysis ran from 17 March 2003 to 18 April 2003, beginning three days before the invasion, continuing through the ‘major combat’ phase of the war, and ending four days after the fall of Tikrit.
Elite-driven reporting
At an aggregate level, our findings failed to offer strong evidence of media coverage that was autonomous in its approach to covering the war. Coalition sources dominated media reports whilst the subject area of battle dominated news reporting, with most of these stories reflecting coalition narratives regarding upbeat and steady progress of the invasion. Regarding official narratives and justifications for the war in Iraq, most reports (54% TV and 61% press) making substantial reference to the WMD rationale for war reflected and reinforced coalition arguments - for example, by relaying the coalition’s claims regarding Iraq’s WMD capability in unproblematic terms. Less than 15% actually challenged official narratives in this respect. In referencing the humanitarian argument for war, coverage overwhelmingly reflected official narratives concerning the moral case for war. Over 80% of TV and press stories mirrored the government position and less than 12% challenged it (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Framing of WMD and humanitarian justification themes (all TV channels; as percentages)
Negotiated and Oppositional Reporting
There were, however, some importance deviations from the predictions of the elite-driven model: in specific subjects areas, specific newspapers and one television news channel, there was far more evidence of negotiated and oppositional coverage. First, a different picture emerges from that of our aggregate level findings when we consider the subjects of civilian casualties, humanitarian issues, and coalition military casualties (see figure 2). For civilian casualties, less than 11% of reports played positively for the coalition whilst 49% of TV coverage and 68% of press coverage was coded as negative: Plate 1 shows the graphic image of Ali Abbas, a child wounded in a coalition airstrike and one that was widely used in the UK press, often as a vehicle for critical coverage. With respect to humanitarian issues, most reports were critical of coalition attempts to manage humanitarian operations, with a balance of 48% of TV coverage and 40% of press coverage being coded as critical whilst only 20% of TV coverage and 25% of press coverage gave more positive assessments. The subject of coalition military casualties was also problematic for the coalition. 26% of TV coverage was coded as negative for the coalition here and only 5% of reports were reinforcing.
Second, our comparative analysis of the British press revealed a significant diversity of approaches with some titles opposed to the invasion altogether, while others publicly advocated it. Figure 3 sets out one aspect of this comparative analysis in which we focused on the editorial stance of the newspapers. For the anti-war press, editorials in the Guardian and Independent were negotiated for just under a third of editorials (32.1% and 30.3% respectively) and oppositional for an even higher proportion (38.5% and 49.4%). Few editorial subjects in these papers could be coded as supportive (16.7% and 5.6%), reflecting their disagreement with the policy of war in Iraq. The Mirror’s opposition to war is plain from these figures too with more than half (60.9%) of its editorial subjects coded as oppositional. For example, its editorial attitude was unequivocal: ‘The Daily Mirror’s view of this conflict could not be clearer – we believe it is wrong, wrong, wrong’ (‘Heroes led by man of real principle’, 20 March 2003: 6). At the same time, whilst making clear their opposition to the policy of war, the anti-war press were careful to make clear their support for British troops in action, and this reflected the powerful influence of patriotism, an issue that will be returned to in the next section.
Third and finally, among television news programmes, Channel 4 News came closest to adopting a negotiated stance. It was the only channel for which the majority (51%) of its battle coverage was coded as negotiated, and it also had the lowest proportion of supportive battle stories (43%, compared with 49% (BBC), 60% (ITV) and 76% (Sky News)). Also, regarding substantive issues, Channel 4 was uniquely sceptical towards the official justifications for the war. Its coverage of the WMD justification was entirely negotiated and almost half of its coverage of the humanitarian justification was either negotiated (19%) or oppositional (24%). The few Channel 4 reports during the invasion phase that referred to the ‘war on terror’ justification were oppositional.
Figure 2: Framing of civilian and military casualties and humanitarian themes (all TV channels; as percentages)
Note. A small number of Humanitarian Issues stories coded as ‘other’ (2 stories in all) are excluded.
Figure 3: Subject framing in newspaper editorial subjects by newspaper (as percentages)
Plate 1: The ‘iconic’ photograph of Ali Abbas (Reuters/ Faleh Kheiber).
Section two: Explanatory factors
If our findings established the dominance of elite reporting, but with significant and interesting patterns of exceptions, how can we explain this picture? We can think about the explanatory implications of the empirical findings in two ways. First what do the findings tell us about the elite-driven model? Second, what do they tell us about factors that can enable greater autonomy and independence than is granted by elite-driven accounts? I shall deal with each in turn.
Explaining Elite-driven reporting
Regarding the elite-driven reporting, our findings are perhaps of less surprise, at least to the extent that they confirm the wealth of research that highlights media deference to the state when it comes to matters of high foreign policy. After all, the prevailing orthodoxy, as articulated in seminal studies such as those by Hallin (1986), Bennett (1990), Herman and Chomsky (1988) is to a very great degree substantiated and confirmed by numerous empirical studies (e.g. Mermin, 1997; Zaller and Chui, 1997) and, in general, it is hard to find a scholar who is willing to challenge outright the validity of the elite-driven paradigm. At the same time, three aspects of the findings are of note. The first concerns the significance of ideological imperatives, the second is the significance of journalists reliance on official sources vis-à-vis media output (i.e. the indexing hypothesis, Bennett; 1990), and the third concerns the importance of patriotism in shaping reporting.
First, the findings regarding the humanitarian argument for war point to the continued significance of ideological imperatives in shaping media performance. Here, journalists uncritically reflected dubious coalition narratives about the humanitarian nature of British involvement, even though the war could not be justified as a humanitarian intervention. For example, the British attorney general made this clear in his legal advice whilst the humanitarian situation in Iraq did not meet the criteria normally associated with humanitarian intervention being justified. [3] The prevalence of this dynamic, even across the anti-war press and the ‘exceptional’ CH4 news, highlights the extent to which such discourses (or ideologies) play an important role in determining the limits to which media are able to maintain independence from political elites. So, whilst some scholars (e.g. Entman, 2000) have pointed to the dissipation of Cold Wart specific ideological mechanisms following the end of Soviet-US bi-polar stand-off, this does not mean that ideological mechanisms are now analytically insignificant. New narratives have emerged which, left un-interrogated, have inhibited the ability of journalists to maintain independence from official narratives. Quite where these narratives should be understood reside and/or to emerge from is open to question; in this case, a combination of British prime minister Tony Blair’s humanitarian intervention policy (1999) and a much broader liberal/left-of-centre community of politicians, commentators and journalists, who had previously been inspired by interventions during 1990s humanitarian crises in countries such as Bosnia and Kosovo, appears to have underpinned the humanitarian warfare narrative we identified.
Second, although we found an association between official sources and supportive coverage (most coverage was supportive and heavily reliant upon military and political sources), we also found that every news media outlet surveyed relied on official sources to a substantial degree, even though some of them produced significant levels of negotiated and oppositional reporting. For example, even on Channel 4 News, coalition sources represented more than half of those quoted, while no other category of source provided more than 15%. Similarly, 43.3% of quotes used by the anti-war Mirror came from the coalition, with the next most significant category – Iraqi civilians – reaching only 14%. So despite the dominance of coalition sources in the reporting of each news media outlet, we found significant variations between them in the extent of their negotiated and supportive coverage. It follows, therefore, that reliance on official sources and opinions (i.e. the indexing hypothesis) is not a variable that is capable of explaining these variations in coverage by itself.
Zaller and Chiu’s (1999) study of indexing and the co-variation between the US press and political elite (as represented by congressional debate) also raises the possibility that the process of indexing may be more complicated than is generally thought. In their discussion, they note the possibility that a third exogenous factor might be acting on both political elites and the news media, causing each of them to adopt a similar perspective on events (Zaller and Chiu, 1999: 10). They go on to suggest that this ‘third factor’ might be a common culture which leads both public officials and journalists to perceive events in the same manner. In our study, the evidence that emerged for the explanatory relevance of patriotism is significant here. The role of patriotism could be identified in the positive focus on the progress of British troops and in the rally effect (Mueller, 1973) that we observed as troops went into action and again, briefly, when Baghdad fell to the coalition. At both of these points, coverage was overwhelmingly supportive of the coalition with very few instances of oppositional battle coverage. Another notable example of the pre-eminence of the national perspective was the Jessica Lynch rescue in which much of the British news media highlighted the role played by a single British marine commando during the rescue, even though the operation was otherwise wholly conducted by the US military. But perhaps the most telling evidence regarding the influence of patriotism lies in the behavior of the anti-war newspapers – particularly, as noted earlier, our finding that the anti-war press felt obliged to provide support to British troops once the war got underway. In this unprecedented case, where several national news media outlets chose to oppose a major war that had gained the approval of British parliament, the newspapers that opposed the decision to go to war remained committed to expressing support for the troops (‘our boys’) in their coverage despite their challenge to the policy of war. As a consequence of this patriotic support for British troops, the anti-war press still generated a considerable proportion of supportive coverage (we found the anti-war press not to be as critical as the pro-war press was supportive). The logical inference from this is that, in the context of war, patriotism acts as a more fundamental driver of supportive coverage than does the indexing hypothesis and reliance on official sources. So even when a newspaper adopts an overtly oppositional stance toward government war policy (a situation that is itself at odds with the predictions of the indexing hypothesis), the need to show patriotic support for the nation’s troops in action overrides this. We suggest here, then, that our findings provide support for Zaller and Chiu’s claim that there is more to the explanation of news media support for political elites than simply journalists’ reliance on official sources: culture, and in this case patriotism, is more important.