Hoskins & O'Loughlin: new Journalism article on gatekeeping and translation

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

 

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.



New MSc programme, Transnational Security Studies

A new MSc programme in Transnational Security Studies has been launched by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. The one-year MSc will run from September 2011.

The programme includes the course Media, War & Conflict as well as several options courses covering issues of global security and political communication.

For further details, including how to apply, see: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/News-and-Events/New-MSc-Programme.html

New journal article by Andrew Chadwick: "Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables"

Andrew Chadwick (2011) “Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 8 (1): 21-40.

Abstract
This article presents an exploratory case study based on fieldwork consisting of in-depth, semistructured interviews and group discussions with administrative, legal, political, and technology staff involved in an online citizen engagement initiative in “TechCounty,” a pseudonymous U.S. local government authority operating in one of the most favorable sociodemographic and technological contexts imaginable. In contrast with many of the dominant approaches in the literature, the article reveals how a rich, complex, and sometimes surprising array of internal institutional variables explains the initiative’s failure. The article highlights the fragile and uncertain adoption of online engagement by public organizations and the significance of this study’s method for building theory and guiding future research.

Keywords: Citizen engagement; democracy; e-democracy; governance; Internet; online consultation; online forums; organizations; public services.

Link.

Email me or direct message me on Twitter if you would like a free PDF copy of this journal article.

India’s soft power is unclear

India has soft power to the extent that its values, its way of managing its affairs and its vision for the international system are so attractive to other nations that the latter start doing what India wants without India having to use the sticks and carrots of traditional international relations. By achieving relatively stable democracy in such a geographically large and religiously diverse polity, for instance, India may inspire others to emulate its political institutions. Nevertheless, to understand Indian soft power, we must first ask how others see India. Indian soft power is a function of others’ perceptions of India. Hence it was a surprise that a conference held in London this week, India as a Soft Power, concentrated almost exclusively on India itself.

It was certainly interesting to hear what Shashi Tharoor and other leading Indian political and cultural figures think about what story India should tell the world. As a nuclear power with tricky relations to regional neighbours like China and Pakistan, how India balances its use of military and economic resources against the softer methods of diplomacy or intangible cultural “influence” is important, both for local problems (Burma, Afghanistan) and the broader transition this century to a multipolar or non-polar order. How the Indian story is told through global media around breaking events and crises may also contain lessons for other states about controlling or letting go of “the message”. All governments try to manage opinion; can India avoid the sin of being seen to do so? 

But the success of India’s story depends on others. Indian soft power becomes significant if it has effects on the behaviour of other states or on public opinion towards India outside its borders. Have there been any effects or signs of effects? How would those in the Indian government be able to tell? First, we need to examine the foreign policy decisions of those India is trying to affect. Is there any evidence that China, the EU or the US have modified their actions because they have bought into an Indian narrative? Second, we need to see whether India’s story is indeed viewed positively. State departments in the US, UK and Canada have tools to measure the impact of their public diplomacy initiatives using a variety of digital, survey and face-to-face methods. While embryonic, these tools allow governments to track public responses around the world to its statements at summits, treaty negotiations and so on. This makes it possible to begin to evaluate not just whether “other people like us” but also why. If India is spending money on projecting its soft power, we might expect the Indian government to have a way to find out whether its efforts are having any impact.

The popularity outside India of Bollywood movies, Tata cars or Indian IT services does not mean India’s rivals will alter their foreign policies to align more closely with Indian strategic interests. The export of Coca-Cola and HBO box sets has not created US allies or persuaded non-US publics of the virtues of US foreign policy. To realise its interests, India will have to upset others at some point, and it will have to use at least the threat of hard power. And if India is to become a leading power, it will face the same dilemmas others face. Should it use soft power to put an attractive face on the use of hard power? Can its actions match its positive narrative or, as with every other leading power, will India eventually be accused of hypocrisy? Either way, India will need to find a way to understand how it is perceived. Until then, little certain will be known about Indian soft power. 

2011-02-17 Twenty20 Cricket as a Media Event? One day workshop

Nick Anstead (LSE) and Ben O’Loughlin will tomorrow present at an event, Twenty20 and the Future of Cricket at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their paper, entitled, ‘Media, identity, and the co-escalation of political and cricket controversies’, examines how media framing of Twenty20 cricket provides a framework for players, administrators and audiences to think through the political controversies associated with two shifts in balances of power. The first shift is one of format, from test match cricket to T20 as ‘the future of cricket’. The second is one of power, as the game’s administration gravitates from England and Australia to the emerging geopolitical power that is India. Based on analysis of Indian, UK and Australian media, they ask whether each nation’s media frame T20 as a different kind of media event (in Dayan and Katz’s terms) – of potential sporting contest, political conquest, or tradition-affirming coronation – and how this impedes or enables a sense of shared destiny among cricket-playing nations.

With the Cricket World Cup beginning in India on Saturday, this should be a lively and timely discussion of globalisation, sport and media, with participants from the BBC, Cricinfo and the International Herald Tribune amongst others. Thanks to Prof. Chris Rumford for organising the event.

Obama and Egypt: The Power of Inception?

On 4 June 2009 US President Obama went to Cairo to make a speech to the Muslim world, where, among other things, he addressed the question of political reform and democracy in the Middle East. In February 2011 one Al-Jazeera columnist has associated the tumultuous changes in Egypt and Tunisia to the persuasive technique Inception, the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant ideas in individuals’ minds by infiltrating their dreams. Larbi Sadiki writes, ‘A precedent has been set in Tunisia, and Egypt is on the move. Whilst the challenges are awesome, the seeds for planting democratic dreams have begun by the display of people's power in Tunisia.’

For political communication analysts eager to evaluate the impact of Obama-type speeches, public diplomacy campaigns, American movies and TV as cultural exports, or other methods through which ideas may be planted in the minds of foreign publics, can we isolate the impact of those efforts when so many other factors come into play? Did Obama successfully use the power of inception, or would the last few weeks’ changes have happened anyway? This raises the larger problem of explaining outcomes whose causes may be extremely long term and difficult to identify – political scientists still struggle to explain revolutions. Certainly, in the coming weeks, months and years it will be interesting to see whether US public diplomacy teams claim any credit for incepting change.

New book: Radicalisation & Media - out now

Routledge has published Radicalisation and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology, co-authored by Akil Awan, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin. The book presents results from our two-year ESRC-funded project on Radicalisation & Violence, which was awarded the maximum ‘Outstanding’ grade by the ESRC in 2010.

Our chief finding, in a nutshell, is that despite the potential connectivity between radicalising networks like Al-Qaeda and ‘vulnerable’ youth and ‘terrorised’ publics, there is in fact a profound and structural disconnection. Security policymakers, journalists and audiences have little agreed understanding of what ‘radicalisation’ might mean, but a residual sense of anxiety that there is something threatening out there, possibly close to home. That diffuse threat is often spoken about as radicalisation through the internet, over the web, which could happen anywhere, to anyone, "at the click of a button". Such statements do not aid public understanding of how individual opinions are shaped by on- and offline experiences, nor any evidence base of how and why individuals have turned to violence. Caught in the middle of this confusion are mainstream Security Journalists who deliver to audiences spasmodic episodes of bombings, arrests and warnings, the occasional, subtitled glimpse of an angry jihadist, but little insight or explanation of how political and religious violence is generated or prevented. Such news contributes to assumptions about an enduring social mainstream and radical margin which may indeed feed back into potential disaffection by those identified as potentially radical. In short, we suggest that discourse about radicalisation may be as significant for Western societies as discourses of radicalisation, i.e. actual jihadist propaganda.

The study offers a cross-section of global (un)connectivities across a series of critical security events since 2006 by integrating three strands of data: audience research from the UK, France, Denmark and Australia, an ethnography of jihadist culture, and analysis of English and Arabic-language news.

Please contact Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk if you require further information or wish to receive a review copy from Routledge.

PhD Scholarships for 2011 Entry

PIR Strategic Priorities for 2011 PhD Studentships

 

The College will soon be deciding its allocation and deadline for research studentships, including internal College awards and those allocated to RHUL from its successful collaborative application for ESRC Doctoral Training Centre status. The Department of Politics and International Relations has now established its strategic priorities for these upcoming studentships. Potential applicants who fit these broad priorities should contact the Director of Graduate Study, Dr Alister Miskimmon, to discuss further. Strong applicants with proposals from other areas of the disciplines of politics and international relations are also encouraged to apply, and if they are very strong, the Department will also consider them for nomination for one of the studentships.

The New Political Communication Unit's strategic priorities are as follows: political mobilization and campaigning; media and security challenges; and the role of the hybrid media system—the interactions between old, new, and renewed media—in political life.

It is likely that the College will call on departments to provide nominees for studentships sometime in March, so applicants who are interested in being considered for studentships should act quickly.

PIR has had great success in securing studentships in previous years, and the Department's track record in producing excellent PhD students is demonstrated in the success of our graduates in the current competitive job market. In the past 12 months graduates have gone on to the following: Secretariat General, European Commission; Lecturer in Japanese Studies, Edinburgh; Lecturer in Media and Communications, the LSE; Lecturer in European Studies, King’s College London; MacArthur Foundation Post-Doctoral Scholarship, University of Sydney; Post-Doctoral Scholarship Vrije University Brussels; Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Edinburgh.

How Political Negotiations can be Un-mediated but Mediatized

When delicate political negotiations are needed, perhaps journalists need to get out of the way. Gadi Wolfsfeld’s studies of peace processes have shown how journalistic discretion in Northern Ireland created space for political leaders to make individual compromises. Such compromises would probably each have been unacceptable to their constituencies if lit up by a media spotlight, but only became public once the full package of a peace treaty was reached (Bono had to wait). Past negotiations between Israeli leaders with their Jordanian or Palestinian counterparts have been less successful in part because journalists in the region have tended more towards the sensationalist and the partisan.

At the LSE tonight, Nick Anstead presented an analysis of media coverage of the 2010 UK General Elections, particularly the period between 7 May and 12 May when the three major parties were involved in behind-the-scenes negotiations to form a government following inconclusive results. This was another instance in which journalists were denied access. Nevertheless, this occurred in a mediatized political environment, i.e. one in which media logics determine how processes work more than political logics. Following a political logic - principally, how the UK constitutional system works - if no party failed to produce a governing majority, then no party ‘won’, and a range of outcomes became possible. However, the prevailing media logic in the UK media ecology was that any election needs a winner. Further, in an ecology in which politics has been presidentialised, the winner has to be an individual: in this case David Cameron must be Prime Minister. That the office holder, Gordon Brown, was constitutionally entitled to remain in office until a governing coalition could be formed escaped many journalists. That the Labour Party could possibly be part of a new coalition government was almost as tricky to grasp, for hadn’t Labour’s man lost? Anstead illustrated these media meltdowns with some amusingly flustered questions from reporters of various TV channels.

Conceptually, this process was un-mediated but very mediatized. It was un-mediated because media could not provide a channel between the negotiations and the public, since reporters were barred from the political negotiations. But the event as a whole was mediatized, Anstead argues, because the range of potential outcomes was constrained by what the media system could find intelligible. As discussant, I was granted the chance to add a further point: it was surprising that UK political reporters were caught off guard to such an extent given the close nature of the polls. Surely they should have provided a guide to how the constitution works and mapped the various permutations of possible coalition governments? Central to a mediatized system is premediation, the logic of mapping all likely scenarios for audiences before events happen, even if they never happen (Richard Grusin’s idea). Journalists form cultures marked by fallible expectations: in 2001 no US journalists saw another attack on the WTC coming, and in 2010 UK journalists had reached a consensus that Cameron would win outright. Consequently, the coalitions negotiations were not as mediatized as they could have been.

But what Anstead’s paper seems to suggest is this: Even if journalists are excluded from an event, the media ecology inhabited by political leaders, reporters and publics will shape what is thought possible, intelligible and legitimate, whether in domestic or international politics - an indirect but inescapable effect. Political processes can be un-mediated yet mediatized. He will present a more developed draft of his paper at the PSA Annual Convention in London in April, but if you are interested in receiving a copy please email N.M.Anstead@lse.ac.uk