Israel’s latest war against Gaza that began in October 2023 has exposed existing contradictions and limitations in mainly Western legacy media’s role as purveyors of facts and their relationship to news elites as sources for news of somewhere else. These contradictions have been exacerbated by the excessive mediation of the Gaza war, the explosion in user-generated content related to the war, the weaponisation of journalistic objectivity, the ‘newsification’ of social media platforms and the strategic use of artificial intelligence and propaganda warfare by Israel to justify its actions.
While acknowledging all these factors, this talk addresses two long-standing and interlocking news practices – the ‘first framing’ of events and the elite news sources that produce these frames. In order to do so, I use empirical research based on comparative analysis of the first week of news coverage of the war by the BBC as one of the most important Western legacy media institutions and the Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera English (AJE) as the foremost media institution in the Global South covering issues related to Palestine-Israel.
The comparative frame analysis is necessary to underline the interlocking dynamic between first framing of news and news elites uttering them and how this dynamic sets the agenda for news coverage and reorients the intended audiences to think about issues in a way that reinforces the main ideological intentions of the news elite. The comparison is also important to reflect on the continued and persistent anti-Palestinian bias in the Western legacy media, which has been noted in previous studies.
Speaker: Professor Dina Matar
Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at SOAS. Her research and teaching are focused on the intersection of politics and communication; media and conflict; cultural politics; diasporas; activist cultures and media and memory studies, focusing on the Middle East. She is co-founder of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (MEJCC).
She worked as an editor with the Media, War and Conflict Journal (2021-2023) and has just joined Communication, Culture and Critique Journal. She is the author of What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (2010); co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (2012); co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (2013); Gaza as Metaphor (2016) and Producing Palestine (2024) and editor of She (forthcoming).
She is co-editor of Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa series and the SOAS Palestine Studies series. Matar has published widely in books and journals. Before joining academia in 2005, Matar worked as a foreign correspondent and editor with international news organizations in the Middle East, London and Hong Kong.
Time: 2.30pm London, 5.30pm Amman
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