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2010 72: 151International Communication GazetteDianne M. Garyantes and Priscilla J. Murphy

National ElectionsSuccess or Chaos? : Framing and Ideology in News Coverage of the Iraqi

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SUCCESS OR CHAOS?Framing and Ideology in News Coverage of the Iraqi National Elections

Dianne M. Garyantes and Priscilla J. Murphy

Abstract / This study used computer-assisted textual analysis of frames as ideological cues in newscoverage of the Iraqi 2005 elections by CNN.com and Aljazeera.net. CNN’s reporting revealed anideology of a cultural conquest, framing the elections with sentimental patriotism toward western-style democracy. Al Jazeera’s texts revealed distrust and suspicion toward the US, framing the elec-tions with skepticism, a lack of legitimacy and chaos. Despite claims of journalistic objectivity, theanalysis found a divisive ideology expressed by both news organizations. The study bears out theimportance of ‘global objectivity’ to provide critical, cross-cultural perspectives in an age of expand-ing media globalization.

Keywords / Al Jazeera / centering resonance analysis / CNN / culture / elections / framing / ideology/ objectivity

The growth of media globalization, international terrorism and political interdepen-dence has intensified both the need and the opportunity for understanding amongcultures. Yet this opportunity remains largely unmet, as exemplified by the riftbetween the Arab Muslim and western worlds following the terrorist attacks of 11September 2001, and the subsequent US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.This study explores the nature of this rift between the two cultures in terms of ideo-logically influenced media coverage of Iraq that affects the way Arab and westerncultures portray themselves and comment on the other.

Globalization has increased the ability of news media with a worldwide reachto sway cultural understanding, given their long-recognized role as disseminatorsof information about other nations and cultures (Allen, 1955; Appadurai, 1996;Lippmann, 1922; Said, 1978). Particularly with respect to international news, ‘eventstake place beyond the realm of personal experience – if we learn about these events,it is almost surely the product of media coverage’ (Soroka, 2003: 43). Informationtransmitted about other cultures through international news coverage can alsoinfluence public opinion and ultimately public policy (Robinson, 2001; Seaver, 1998;Soroka, 2003). Additionally, globalization, as a process of complex interconnectionsworldwide, has generated a new decentered network of economic and culturalpower in which ‘the patterns of distribution of power are unstable and shifting and,indeed . . . power is in some ways diffused rather than concentrated’ (Tomlinson,

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1997: 185). From an international communication perspective, the new media spacesthat are emerging due to globalization and technology ‘are not only changingpatterns of international communication flows, but also . . . creating contemporarycultures pregnant with new meanings and experiences’ (Chalaby, 2007: 70). Theseexperiences include a new cosmopolitanization where the national dimensions ofmedia systems become less dominant, allowing for a ‘remapping of communica-tion flows’ and creating media systems that are ‘more balanced, flexible, open anddiverse than they [have] ever been’ (Chalaby, 2007: 79). This optimistic view hasbeen countered by other research findings that journalists continue to defer to theagenda of elites (Bennett et al., 2004), that the internet is not necessarily a demo-cratic medium, but is subject to market forces (Khiabany, 2003) and that, despiteglobalization, nationalistic attitudes continue to be uncovered in news coverage(Demertzis et al., 1999).

Given our current context of expanding globalization and the large-scale conse-quences of the transmission of content to distant audiences, the ideological contentof media coverage, expressed through the framing of news events, is worthy ofclose scrutiny. This article examines the presence of ideology in news frames bycomparing the coverage of two international news organizations that claim toadhere to the journalistic norm of objectivity, CNN and Al Jazeera. In order to doso, it examines an event of great significance to both Arab Muslim and westernworlds: the Iraqi national elections in January 2005. The elections were widelycovered by both the western and Arab media. They occurred against the backdropof the September 11 attacks in the US by Arab Muslim extremists and the subse-quent US military invasion of Iraq that led to the overthrow of Iraqi PresidentSaddam Hussein. At the time of the elections, US military troops were occupyingIraq and a US-established government was operating in Baghdad. The elections thusoffer an intense, brief period of time in which ideological views jockeyed withprofessional journalistic norms in two very different cultures.

Ideology vs the Objective Approach

The concept of ideology – the ‘theory of ideas’ – addresses the way groups of peoplethink, produce and process ideas and information (Althusser, 1971; Mannheim,1936; van Dijk, 1998; Williams, 1977). Historically, the concept has signaled distrustof adversaries, particularly if the adversaries’ ideas appear founded on social factorsrather than on individual understanding (Mannheim, 1936). More recently, ideologyhas been linked to social and class distinctions. Hence Williams (1977) saw ideol-ogy as a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group. Similarly,Shoemaker and Reese (1996: 221–2) defined ideology as an overarching, societal-level phenomenon operating as a ‘symbolic mechanism that serves as a cohesiveand integrating force in society’. They differentiated ideology from other forms oftransmitting meaning about the world, such as culture, by arguing that that ideol-ogy is ‘meaning tied to interests – class and otherwise’.

Ideology also functions as a sense-making system. For example, Hall (1985: 99)defined ideologies as ‘frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world –

152 THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION GAZETTE VOL. 72 NO. 2



the “ideas” which people use to figure out how the social world works, what theirplace is in it and what they ought to do’. Van Dijk (1998) viewed ideologies as beliefsthat apply to events, processes, groups, group relations and other situations andfacts, arguing that ideologies control not only knowledge, but also opinions aboutevents. In addition, van Dijk (1998: 65) viewed ideologies as differentiating betweengroups, helping to manage social representations of groups and group relations inways that ‘reflect how groups and their members view a specific issue or domainof society’. These views of ideology in terms of group boundaries and expectationssuggest that important social cues regarding how people should behave andperceive the world are rooted in ideologies; they are expressed both overtly and inthe exclusion of certain ideas from analysis or discussion.

Many other scholars, however, have seen ideology in the news media as morecomplex and problematical (Althusser, 1971; Fowler, 1991; Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980;Gorham, 2006; Hackett, 1984; Hall, 1985; Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Shoemakerand Reese, 1996; Tuchman, 1978; van Dijk, 1998). In particular, media scholars havelinked ideology to political and economic power. For example, Hall (1985: 101) wrotethat ideology is embedded in the news media, although it often remains unac-knowledged or even unnoticed by journalists, who can be ‘inscribed by an ideologyto which they do not consciously commit themselves, and which, instead, “writesthem”’. Althusser (1971) and Thompson (1990: 7) also linked ideology to power,arguing that ideology refers to the ways in which accepted meanings sustain rela-tions of power that are systematically asymmetrical – what Thompson called ‘relationsof domination’, so that ideology becomes ‘meaning in the service of power’. Othermedia scholars (Hackett, 1984; Robinson, 2005) have related ideology in newsreports specifically to collaborative efforts by governments and journalists to confronta common enemy, as manifested by media coverage during the Cold War.

In her discussion of ideology in news writing, Tuchman (1978) cited the argu-ment of sociologist Dorothy Smith that news organizations reflect ideology in whatthey do not say, or, as Smith called it, ideology as a ‘means not to know’. Forexample, Tuchman wrote, the way in which news stories are framed will excludecertain information and analyses, preventing them from being defined and dissem-inated as news. As a result, the public does not gain access to the absent informa-tion. In theory, Tuchman’s argument should now be outdated as a full range ofinformation should be available to people via the internet. In practice, even withaccess to online news, most Americans do not have increased knowledge of publicissues (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2007).

Thus, ideology has been found to be embedded in news coverage, with thecoverage tending toward the dominant or hegemonic perspective. The media offeran important means through which ideology may be expressed, amplified and dis-seminated. Yet this role appears to collide with the central journalistic norm of anobjective approach to the news. Like the concept of ideology, the norm of objectivenews reporting contains multiple dimensions; this study uses Ryan’s (2001: 3) straight-forward characterization of journalistic objectivity as the effort to report news in away ‘that describes reality as accurately as possible’. That effort at accuracy comprisessuch attributes as completeness, precision and clarity; receptivity to new evidence

GARYANTES AND MURPHY: FRAMING IN IRAQI ELECTIONS 153



and alternatives; skepticism; initiative in finding ways to research difficult topics; andfairness, impartiality and disinterestedness (Ryan, 2001).

Scholars and practitioners generally support journalistic objectivity as a normof the profession. Hence Schudson (2001: 149) wrote that objectivity remains the‘chief occupational value of American journalism’ that ‘still today distinguishes USjournalism from the dominant model of continental European journalism’. Gauthier(1993: 1) defended the concept of objectivity because ‘the end of objectivity in jour-nalism would spell the end of journalism itself’. Journalists themselves still tend tohold onto the constructs of objectivity, whether they specifically use the term or not.For example, the American Society of Newspaper Editors continues to name ‘impar-tiality’ as part of its ‘Canons of Journalism’ (ASNE, 2006: 1). More recently, newsorganizations have been setting guidelines for staff members who also write personalblogs in order to avoid confusion between editorializing and reporting the news.

The concept of journalistic objectivity in journalism has become far more con-tested in recent years, particularly as the idea of scientific objectivity in general hasdeclined (Gauthier, 1993; Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2006; Ryan, 2006; Streckfuss,1990). Some scholars and practitioners have argued that this ideal is simply notpossible – perhaps not even desirable (Hackett and Zhao, 1996; Kinsley, 2006; Kitch,1999; Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2006; Merrill, 1984). For example, Hackett and Zhao(1996: 49) outlined multiple reasons why journalists cannot adhere to strict objec-tivity, including powerful external and internal pressures in news production, framingin news stories, unintentional biases in the use of language (e.g. ‘terrorist’ vs ‘free-dom fighter’), and the myth that journalists can be detached observers when ‘mediaare active participants in the social and political world’. Other scholars have assailedthe unintentional distortions caused by journalistic practices designed to encourageobjectivity, such as the use of credible sources for information, which can favor anelite perspective, or an attempt to balance perspectives, which can artificially enhancemarginal viewpoints (Gans, 1979; Fox and Park, 2006; Jamieson and Waldman,2003; McChesney and Nichols, 2002; Tuchman, 1978).

Faced with such a problematical norm, many scholars have called for a reinter-pretation of the concept of objectivity that reflects the environment in which thereporting takes place. Hence Ryan (2001) examined alternatives to strict objectivity,including existential journalism, standpoint epistemology and public or civic jour-nalism. El-Nawawy and Iskandar (2002) distinguished between current standards ofjournalistic objectivity and ‘contextual objectivity’, which presents various perspec-tives on an issue while maintaining the values of its audience. Going further, Ward(2005: 16) has advocated for a new ethic in journalism, one that encompasses‘global objectivity’. He wrote: ‘Objective reports, to be accurate and balanced, mustcontain all relevant international sources and cross-cultural skills perspectives. Inaddition, global journalism asks journalists to be more conscious of how they framethe global public’s perspective on major stories and how they set the internationalnews agenda’ (Ward, 2005: 17). The Iraq war offers a particularly rich laboratory inwhich to study the tension between ideology and claims of objectivity, includingglobal and contextual objectivity. For example, Fox and Park’s discussion of CNNreporting on the Iraq war argued that objectivity should be considered more broadly,




along a continuum of general standards of objectivity, such as pursuit of the truthand a careful weighing of all evidence, including contradictory evidence. Alongsimilar lines, a cross-cultural analysis of Iraq war coverage by Aday et al. (2005: 14),involving several US news networks and Al Jazeera, found that most stories wereobjective in that they were neutral in tone and balanced. However, they also foundevidence of culture influencing a network’s objectivity. Put simply, when the networks‘erred’, they usually did so in the direction one would predict based on their countryof origin. American networks ran very few if any stories that were critical of thewar. By contrast, whenever Al Jazeera ran an imbalanced story, it fell on the criticalside of neutrality.

Media Framing, Public Opinion and Public Policy

One way objectivity and ideology are expressed in a news story is through framing(Gitlin, 1980; Hackett, 1984; Tuchman, 1978). Entman’s (1993: 52) widely cited defi-nition of framing leaves ample room for ideology by emphasizing the effort ‘to selectsome aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicatingtext, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpre-tation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’. Scholars from theGlasgow University Media Group (1980: 402) likewise found connections betweenframing and ideology, arguing that a society’s ideologies can be uncovered by exam-ining ‘the connecting link between the so-called “facts” of the news and the back-ground assumptions which enable us, the audience, to understand those “facts”’.From this standpoint, both framing and ideology operate by selecting certain ideasand excluding others in ways that provide meaning and context for mass audiences.

Conscious of the directive effect of frames, Iyengar (1991) argued that framescan ‘profoundly’ influence how decisions are made. Similarly, Iyengar and Simon’s(1993) analysis of newscasts about the Gulf crisis in 1990 and 1991 concluded thatnews media framing helped to legitimize the administration’s perspective on thecrisis. This nexus of media, public opinion and public policy has been examined bycommunication scholars and political scientists for decades (Gilboa, 2005; Holsti,1992; Norris et al., 2003; Pan and Kosicki, 1993; Soroka, 2003). Recently, Entman(2003: 415) conceptualized framing in the news media through a ‘cascading activa-tion’ model, in which interpretive frames promulgated by top-level governmentalofficials spread to networks of non-administration elites, then to news organizationsand their texts, and then to the public, which feeds interpretations of the framesback to the news media and other elites.

As these studies and conceptual models show, the news media, media framingand public opinion have important implications for policy, journalists, policy-makers,audiences and other stakeholders affected by the interpretation of events and issues.Journalists use a variety of framing mechanisms in the news they cover, includingtheir words and images to describe an event or issue, which can attach widely differ-ent meanings to the topic. By the same token, messages also appear in the type ofstories and story emphasis, such the emphasis on military affairs in the coverage ofthe first Gulf war. Following this line of inquiry, this study compared the implied




ideologies of two worldwide media networks – CNN and Al Jazeera – through asemantic network analysis of their coverage of the Iraq elections in January 2005.

CNN and Al Jazeera

Given their structural similarities, CNN and Al Jazeera are promising subjects forcomparing the presence of ideology in news coverage. Both news organizationshave a global reach. Both are based in regions closely involved with the elections inIraq. Both claim to adhere to standards of objectivity. In both organizations, newsis gathered and written on a continuous, real-time basis. Their news broadcasts arewritten under tight deadlines and across media platforms, including television andthe web, on which both post stories in English. CNN is a commercial US-based newsorganization that employs more than 4000 news professionals worldwide (CNN.com,2007a). CNN’s website claimed an average of more than 22 million users per monthin 2005, the last year for which such data are available (CNN.com, 2007b). Simi-larly, Qatar-based Al Jazeera supports bureaus worldwide (Aljazeera.net, 2007a). Areaders’ choice survey by Brandchannel.com placed Al Jazeera among the top five2004 global brands selected by readers (Brandchannel.com, 2004).

Both CNN and Al Jazeera have argued that their news coverage is neutral,objective and credible. A Code of Ethics posted on Al Jazeera’s website states thatit will ‘adhere to the journalistic values of honesty, courage, fairness, balance, inde-pendence, credibility and diversity, giving no priority to commercial or politicalconsiderations over professional ones’ (Aljazeera.net, 2007b). The code also statesthat Al Jazeera will ‘present diverse points of view and opinions without bias orpartiality’ (Aljazeera.net, 2007b). For its part, CNN also has established itself as anobjective, credible news source. CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, makes a claimof CNN’s credibility on its website. Under the heading ‘Values’, the site states: ‘Werigorously uphold editorial independence and artistic expression, earning the trustof our readers, viewers, listeners, members and subscribers’ (Time Warner, 2007).

Despite these claims of objectivity or adherence to the constructs of objectivity,the prior studies already cited have made it clear that, in practice, news coverage isoften swayed by ideology. The ideologies expressed in news frames are especiallyimportant since previous research has established that news coverage influencesboth audience opinions and political or policy decisions.

This nexus between ideology, professional norms, framing and policy was thefocus of the first research question in this study. In order to establish the basic termsof the framing, the first research question asked: What types of frames wereembedded in each organization’s coverage of the Iraqi national elections? Buildingon the frames found, the second research question sought to establish a linkbetween these news frames and ideology in the Al Jazeera and CNN articles, asking:Did the frames reflect an ideology? If so, how?

Finally, the time period of the study was chosen for its coverage of events thatwere both seminal and turbulent: an experiment in western-style democracy setamid the shifting political landscape of military conflict. In response to the journal-istic challenges posed by the unstable political and military situation, the third




research question looked for the emergence of a consistent point of view, or a signof a hardening ideological position, by examining the evolution of news frames inthe election coverage during the course of the study. Specifically, the third researchquestion asked: How did the frames play out over time? The following sectiondiscusses the method used to answer these three questions.

Method

As a first step, CNN’s and Al Jazeera’s news text was retrieved through the English-language versions of both organizations’ websites: CNN.com and Aljazeera.net.Articles from both news organizations were collected from 30 January 2005, theday of the national elections in Iraq, until 14 February 2005, the day after the finalelection results were announced. Keywords used in the search for the articles were:‘Iraq’, ‘election’, ‘Iraq vote’ and ‘Iraq January elections’. Only articles substantiallyrelated to the election were included in the analysis; topics included voting, ballot-ing, vote counting, announcement of the results, discussion of the political ramifi-cations of the elections, reaction in Iraq and abroad and violence directly related tothe elections and candidates. A total of 30 articles were collected from CNN.comand 33 articles were collected from Aljazeera.net. To compare overall coverage forthe election period, we first aggregated all the stories into two large files: onecontaining all Al Jazeera coverage and one containing all CNN coverage. We thenput each news organization’s aggregated stories through semantic network analysisaccording to the principles of centering resonance analysis as described below.

In examining media bias, it is particularly important for the investigators toavoid imposing their own interpretational biases. We therefore conducted ouranalysis using a computer-assisted form of semantic analysis whereby the mostimportant words in the news coverage were organized into conceptual networks;in turn, these networks were organized into clusters that suggested particularframes shared by individual news stories. This technique not only controlled againstinvestigator bias in selecting frames; it also allowed us to establish quantitativelythe extent to which the two news organizations shared frames and their corollaryworldviews.

Each organization’s news coverage was analyzed using centering resonanceanalysis (CRA), a computer-assisted, network-based text analysis approach (Cormanet al., 2002). CRA is built on centering theory, which assumes that texts achievecoherence through conversation ‘centers’ that consist of nouns or noun phrases.Links among these centers form a network of semantic meaning that offers a funda-mental representation of the underlying text. Within this network, some words havemore influence than others, as measured by their betweenness centrality in thenetwork – that is, the degree to which they connect words and concepts that other-wise would not be connected (Dooley and Corman, 2004). CRA thereby not onlyrepresents an underlying text; it also shows which words and concepts are mostinfluential in structuring its meaning. As such, CRA is an apt methodologicalplatform for the theoretical concept of a frame, which similarly draws together someideas and excludes others in order to structure the meaning of a news story.




CRA analysis yields several useful products. One product of CRA analysis is aset of influence scores for the words with the highest betweenness centrality in atext. These scores can be used for further analysis such as hierarchical clustering inorder to group similar texts. Another is a conceptual map of influential words thatshows spatially how the words in the network are co-located and related (Dooleyand Corman, 2004).

In addition, CRA also incorporates procedures for comparing network matrices,so that it is possible to see the extent to which two documents are similar, includingshared and unique noun phrases. This is where the concept of ‘resonance’ comes in.As described by Corman et al. (2002: 178), ‘The more two texts frequently use thesame words in influential positions, the more word resonance they have. The moreword resonance they have, the more the communicators used the same words, andthe more those words were prominent in structuring the text’s coherence.’ In otherwords, the higher the resonance, the more the texts show similar thought patterns.This ability to quantitatively compare concepts, expressed as word networks, wasparticularly important in the Al Jazeera/CNN analysis, enabling us to compareconcept clusters involving frames and their underlying ideologies.

Findings

The analysis showed substantial differences – in emphases, source choices andselection of facts – between the Iraq election coverage by Al Jazeera and CNN. Thedifferences revealed that the two organizations’ coverage of the elections was atcross-purposes even when the ostensible subject matter – voting, violence andfairness – was the same. As shown in Figure 1, the semantic networks of each over-lapped mainly in the most basic and generic facts: the election results, security forces,the various factions (Sunni Arabs, Kurdish Party), the resulting apparatus of a newgovernment (e.g. a National Assembly).

However, moving beyond the basic facts of the election events, aspects of thestories that involved values – word choice, sources, focal events – differed strikingly,as shown in each news organization’s unique word centers. For example, Al Jazeerafeatured conflicting regional factions like the AMS (pro-Sunni Alliance of MuslimScholars), the Turkmen in the Kurdish north, the nervous Turkish state across theborder, the Shia alliance. In contrast, CNN concentrated on two topics central toAmerican audiences: first, the US troops (troops, soldiers and US military forcesimposing security in the face of insurgency); and second, the success of western-style democratic processes (the percent of the population voting, the transitionalnational government, the interim prime minister). These contrasting word centerssuggest that the two news organizations were looking at precisely the same factualcircumstances, but interpreting them through the lens of separate, often conflict-ing, ideologies.

Overall, three frames guided Al Jazeera’s coverage of the elections: chaos, lackof legitimacy and regional anxieties about burgeoning Kurdish power in northernIraq. In contrast, the dominant CNN frame was driven by sentimental patriotism forthe US-style democratic election process, with two additional themes: the success of




the elections and speculation, with a mix of hope and anxiety, regarding the futureof Iraq. Further analysis produced a subtler picture of the values and assumptionsimpelling these broad ideological contrasts.

To look more closely at evolving coverage, we applied the network analysistechniques to each of the 63 individual news story files. This process resulted in asquare word-by-word similarities matrix for the most central words in each newsstory. We then cluster-analyzed all 63 of these news story matrices in one analysis.This procedure yielded a six-cluster solution in which each cluster expounded aspecific frame for the elections, and stories by the two news organizations occupieddiscrete clusters with almost no overlap. Thus, the frames through which the elec-tions were seen depicted divided camps with almost no shared vision from the start.The six clusters are summarized in Table 1.


FIGURE 1

Comparison of Aggregated Al Jazeera and CNN Coverage

Notes: Unlinked words listed at the bottom of each group have high betweenness centrality;

they should not be interpreted as less important than the connected words above them.

Rather, they are not connected to words with high enough centrality to appear in the chart.

Certain words, such as ‘Iraqi’, appear as ‘unique’ words in each group because their rela-

tionship with other words, shown by their links, is unique to that group.

Words shared by Al Jazeera and CNN

Unique words for Al Jazeera

Unique words for CNN



Cluster 1: Violence at Elections

As Table 1 indicates, Election Day itself (30 January 2005) was covered partly by acluster of four stories, three of them from Al Jazeera and all focusing on the violencethat accompanied the polling. The Al Jazeera stories displayed vivid writing thatemphasized the number of Iraqi voters – not soldiers – killed, and described salvosby mortars, bombs and American soldiers. Indeed, one story concluded that theattacks were a ‘plague’ that ‘marred’ the elections – a premonition of the discon-tent about legitimacy that emerged in subsequent coverage.

Overall, Al Jazeera’s Election Day cluster emphasized chaos surrounding the elec-tions, with articles about violence and security issues at the polls, confusion overvoter turnout numbers, charges of fraud and delays in the announcement of electionresults due to vote recounts. For example, in one story from 30 January 2005(‘Attacks Plague Iraqi Election Day’), the most influential words linked station,attack, bomber, city, polling and Baghdad. Other important words included people,United States, military, mortar and civilian, implying a connection between civiliansuffering and US military presence. In contrast, the lone CNN story in this clusterabout Election Day violence merely listed, without comment or quotes, all the attacksthat occurred during the polling period.

Cluster 2: Voters Score a Victory for Democracy

In fact, most of the CNN Election Day coverage occupied a separate cluster sharedby no Al Jazeera stories. The theme of all five CNN stories in this cluster was thevictory of democracy; and by implication, victory for the West and western values.In this cluster, voting became a symbol of defeating terrorism. Each story tended torepeat a formulaic compilation of inspirational quotations and praise for ‘resolute’Iraqi voters with such quotes as, ‘This is the happiest day of my life’, ‘This is thegreatest day in the history of this country’, ‘We are defeating the terrorists as we


TABLE 1

Summary of Clusters

Cluster No. of Al Jazeera stories No. of CNN stories

Cluster 1: Violence at elections 3 1

Cluster 2: Voters score a 0 5

victory for democracy

Cluster 3: Public commentary 3 13

on the elections

Cluster 4: Problems with the 25 1

elections

Cluster 5: Sunnis should unite to 2 0

oppose illegitimate elections

Cluster 6: Negative aftermath of 0 7

the elections



are coming here’ (‘Iraq’s Mark of Freedom: Ink Stains’, 30 January 2005). One CNNstory started out: ‘Iraq finds itself rapt in the euphoria of democracy’ (‘Our Pride,by First Iraqis to Vote’, 31 January 2005). Other CNN.com articles called the elec-tions a ‘milestone’ and ‘historic’ (‘Milestone Elections Begin in Iraq’, 30 January2005). CNN’s coverage also began looking ahead and speculating about the futureafter the elections in a way that emphasized a US-style horse race: wondering whowould win and anticipating the writing of the constitution.

Peripheral, but still present, was a disturbing note of concern about violence,but this was far less prevalent than the Al Jazeera-dominated cluster’s focus onElection Day violence. The few articles that noted Election Day violence referred toit as ‘sporadic’ (‘Sporadic Violence Doesn’t Deter Iraqi Voters’, 31 January 2005). Ofmore interest were the ink-stained fingers of Iraqis who had voted (as in the storycited earlier, ‘Iraq’s Mark of Freedom: Ink Stains’, 30 January 2005).

The spirit of this cluster was best captured by a CRA-generated network maprepresenting CNN’s transcript of President Bush’s speech late on Iraq’s Election Day(Figure 2). The network representation shows the terms most responsible for creatingcoherence in the speech by linking other terms together. The most influential (central)words have the darkest boxes; boxes around words with slightly lesser influence arepaler; and words with still less influence are unboxed. Lines indicate associationsbetween words; the heavier the line, the stronger the link.

In President Bush’s speech, the most influential words were Iraqi, people, today,poll, peace, election and Iraq, indicating the president’s emphasis on the peopleand voters in Iraq. Other important words included democracy, American, freedom,attack, terror and terrorist. The speech thereby emphasized the freedom and peacethe elections could bring to Iraq, contrasting this vision with the anti-democratic


FIGURE 2

Network Map of Speech by President George W. Bush, 30 January 2005

Source: ‘Transcript of Bush Address’ CNN.com, 30 January 2005).



force of terrorism and in doing so, taking a different position from the emphasis onviolence and chaos in the Al Jazeera articles.

Framing the success of the elections, CNN.com posted numerous articles toutingthe high voter turnout, the start of the transition process for a new Iraqi govern-ment and even the boost to the Bush administration provided by the successful elec-tions. Two of CNN’s stories called the voter turnout ‘higher than expected’ (‘IraqisVote Amid Violence; Bush Calls Election a “Resounding Success”’, 30 January 2005;‘Counting Begins after Historic Iraq Vote; Bush, Other World Leaders Hail Election’,31 January 2005).

Cluster 3: Public Commentary on the Elections

Election Day coverage also included a third cluster whose main theme was publiccommentary about the success of the elections from outside Iraq. Of the 16 storieshere, all but three came from CNN, and the sources chosen for comment lined upin opposite ideological corners to those in the few Al Jazeera stories. The CNNstories focused on world leaders like Bush and Tony Blair; leaders of countries thatsupport the US, such as Jordan; and some CNN correspondents and members ofthe US public. ‘Jubilant’ Iraqi expatriates were featured in one CNN story celebratingthe democratic process (‘Our Pride, by First Iraqis to Vote; Official Tells of “Jubilant”Mood among Iraqi Ex-pats’, 31 January 2005). CNN leavened this pro-western slantwith a single story that quoted election coverage by various Arab media – but thiswas merely a roundup of secondary sources rather than an effort to seek out exten-sive Arab sources (‘Arab Reaction to Iraq Elections’, 30 January 2005).

In contrast, the three Al Jazeera stories in this public commentary cluster deliv-ered scorching opinions from anti-western sources. In one story, Palestinians arguedthat Iraqis should be able to develop their own future without being clients of theUS (‘Palestinians Ambivalent over Iraq Poll’, 1 February 2005). In another, formerSoviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev denounced the elections (‘GorbachevCalls Iraq Elections Fake’, 1 February 2005). In the third story, Saddam Hussein’sformer UN ambassador dismissed the elections merely as part of the US politicalstrategy (‘Iraq Elections, Democratic Practice But . . .’, 2 February 2005). The frameof illegitimacy of the elections came through strongly in this choice of sources.

Cluster 4: Problems with the Elections

In fact, the next two clusters of stories – with almost no CNN members – presentedan increasingly somber view of the elections. The largest cluster of 26 stories wasunified by a focus on problems with the elections. Not surprisingly, all but one ofthese stories came from Al Jazeera and this group mainly showed the flowering ofdiscontents about the election already noted, in terms of three major frames in AlJazeera’s coverage of the elections: first, chaos surrounding the elections; second,the elections’ lack of legitimacy; and third, the potential regional problem of IraqiKurdish power, fostered by fraudulent election practices. Al Jazeera’s coverage setthese problems in the context of low voter turnout, especially among Sunni voters;




a lack of real choice among candidates; and the unwanted influence of the US onthe elections.

Stories in this cluster gave particular attention to Al Jazeera’s strong regionalconcerns. In contrast to CNN, which seldom focused on Kurdish issues, multiple AlJazeera stories centered on the potential problem of Kurdish power and possibleautonomy in northern Iraq. Al Jazeera’s framing of the issue emphasized allegedrigging of Kurdish voting in northern Iraq, problems stemming from growingKurdish power and the struggle for control among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen overthe northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk. A number of stories implied that US behaviorexacerbated the problems. For example, Al Jazeera posted a story headlined, ‘TurkeySlams US’ (31 January 2005), in which Turkish Prime Minster Tayyip Erdogan criti-cized the US for failing to intervene in Kurdish attempts to control Kirkuk.

The critical subject matter, polemical tone and activist bent of this large clusterof 26 Al Jazeera stories deeply divided it from the CNN election coverage. The latterwas mainly self-congratulatory in tone; it implied the Bush administration’s frameof defeat of terrorism through democracy and thus the defeat of a backward politicsby more evolved western values. However, the Al Jazeera coverage took a moreactivist stance, typically by focusing on groups and individuals who questioned thefairness and lawfulness of the elections and using quotations with loaded, polem-ical language that implicitly suggested ways people should react to and deal withthe US ‘occupation’ and illegitimacy of the elections. Along these lines, one AlJazeera story quoted Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as saying the West was responsi-ble for the deaths of the Iraqi civilians killed on Election Day (‘Al-Sadr Demands Datefor US Pullout’, 4 February 2005), while another headline on Election Day read,‘Confusion Surrounds Iraq Poll Turnout’ (30 January 2005).

Cluster 5: Sunnis Should Unite to Oppose IllegitimateElections

The final cluster in which Al Jazeera stories appeared consisted of only two storiestoward the end of the coverage period (13 February 2005), and showed the mostactivist coverage of all. Both stories focused on the AMS, or Association of MuslimScholars, a religious umbrella group representing the Sunnis. In one story, the AMScalled for all Sunnis to unite and ‘extend a hand’ to all Iraqis (‘AMS Calls for UnitedSunni Front’, 13 February 2005); in the other, the AMS declared it would not partic-ipate in writing the new constitution because the US ‘occupation army’ was still inIraq (‘AMS Rejects Writing Constitution’, 13 February 2005). Again, the emphasiswas on specific actions that sources were recommending to counter US influence.

Cluster 6: Negative Aftermath of the Elections

In fact, the final cluster, entirely comprised of 10 CNN stories, expressed the under-lying doubt that has since come to typify US coverage of the Iraq war. Stories in thiscluster spanned the entire two-week period and were dominated by two ideas:growing violence and Iraqi allegations of unfairness. Nonetheless, this CNN cluster




typically expressed a mix of hope and anxiety regarding the future of Iraq. Thearticles included reports of ongoing sectarian violence, warnings from US officialsabout the need to maintain troops in Iraq and the challenges of forming a new Iraqigovernment. Hope appeared in articles about the opportunities of the new govern-ment, including its ability to allow the minority voices of the Sunnis and Kurds to beheard. However, what chiefly distinguished this cluster from the other, more positiveCNN representations of the elections is the space given to cautionary commentsand complaints, not just hyperbole about the voting. Typical of this cluster’s tone isa comment by then-deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz: ‘As impressive as thatelection was, Iraq still faces a difficult road ahead. . . . This is not a time to sit onour hands and congratulate ourselves’ (‘Pentagon Official Sees “Difficult Road” inIraq’, 3 February 2005).

Discussion

The first research question asked: What types of frames were embedded in eachorganization’s coverage of the Iraqi national elections? Overall, the analysis showedthat the dominant frames expressed in CNN’s and Al Jazeera’s coverage of the elec-tions were at cross-purposes even when the ostensible subject matter – voting,violence, fairness – was the same. The dominant CNN frame expressed sentimentalpatriotism for the US-style democratic election process. Al Jazeera’s dominant framesfor the elections indicated chaos, a lack of legitimacy and the regional problem ofburgeoning Kurdish power in northern Iraq.

Cluster analysis, coupled with semantic network analysis, highlighted the dom-inant frames and showed very little overlap between the two news organizations.Al Jazeera’s coverage clustered in three ways. First, the elections were chaotic andviolent, and that violence was aimed primarily at Iraqi civilians and associated withthe US military. Second, the elections posed problems of parity and legitimacy: non-Sunnis were favored and the process mainly reflected the political aims of theAmerican occupier. Third, because the elections were imposed by a foreign occupierand lacked legitimacy, they were open to criticism and opposition. Looking at theidentical circumstances, CNN coverage grouped into three clusters of stories thatdiffered strikingly from the Al Jazeera version. A first cluster of news stories registereda triumph of western-style democracy over terrorism. A second cluster describedworld approval: most world leaders and citizens outside Iraq applauded the electionprocess and results. Doubts and worries that subsequently have come to dominatenews coverage were relegated to a third cluster in which rising violence and insur-gency, and the desire to leave Iraq, dominated.

The second research question asked: Did the frames reflect an ideology? If so,how? Despite the news organizations’ claims of journalistic objectivity, their framesreflected different underlying ideologies and provided different social cues for thenews organizations’ audiences. On the one hand, the online statements by the newsorganizations cited earlier in this article suggest that there was an attempt to reporton the election in a way ‘that describes reality as accurately as possible’ (Ryan, 2001:3), and to achieve objectivity through accuracy, skepticism, initiative, fairness and




impartiality. Nonetheless, the presence of underlying ideologies bears out the pointmade by multiple media scholars that ideology is unconsciously embedded in thenews texts (Gitlin, 1980; Hall, 1985; McQuail, 1992; Shoemaker and Reese, 1996).CNN.com’s news texts were imbued with a hegemonic ideology that implied culturalconquering by the US of an Arab nation, while Aljazeera.net’s news texts conveyedan underlying ideology of distrust and suspicion of the West.

To some extent, the differing content of the news coverage shows the appar-atus of ideology as sense-making noted by other media scholars. For example, CNN’spatriotic ideology would help a western audience to make sense of events in acountry whose sensibility could seem as far away as its geography. According to theCNN framing, the elections were successful, allowed the ‘people’ and ‘minorityvoices’ to be heard and were modeled after a process that ‘works’ – precisely thesocial cues that other members of the western world would expect and need inorder to make sense of the elections, and to champion the military initiative. Accord-ing to CNN, the elections were legitimized by high voter turnout, valid results andsupport from leaders worldwide. For its part, Al Jazeera’s media frames wouldprovide different social cues for its primary readers, other members of the Arabcommunity worldwide: to be skeptical of the voting and to see the elections as ille-gitimate, with negative impacts for Iraq and the region.

On balance, this study’s findings support the contention that the concept ofobjectivity should not be abandoned, but it should be revised to reflect the unde-niable presence of ideology. Coverage of the Iraqi elections is most aptly describedin terms of ‘contextual objectivity’ proposed by el-Nawawy and Iskandar (2002), inwhich journalists present various perspectives on an issue while maintaining thevalues of their primary audience. In this sense, the Iraqi election coverage bears outthe argument by Aday et al. (2005) that when the news networks ‘err’, they usuallydo so in the direction one would predict based on their country of origin. Theauthors argued that the news organizations in the case of the elections should havestrived for ‘global objectivity’, that is, containing all relevant international sourcesand cross-cultural skills perspectives (Ward, 2005). Such global objectivity is partic-ularly important in a transnational media arena in which news organizations areheadquartered in a particular country with a particular ideology, but diffuse theirproducts to multiple other societies. In this way, transnational media such as CNN.comand Aljazeera.net could more successfully achieve the laudable goal of ‘cosmopoli-tanization’ envisioned by Chalaby.

No matter what the country of origin, this analysis confirmed that an elite pointof view serves as ideological anchor. It supports Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) viewthat ideology is related to powerful interests in society, in that the ideologiesexpressed by both CNN and Al Jazeera reflected elite positions within their respec-tive societies. Each news organization tended to reinforce the values and beliefs oftheir respective societies, to encourage bonding against a common enemy (Hackett,1984; Robinson, 2005), and to define the other’s constituency inimically. The studyalso offers more evidence that ideology is related to asymmetrical power relations. Inthis case, the dominant power of the US was reinforced by the ‘cultural conquering’ideology embedded in the CNN.com news texts and countered with the subaltern




‘distrust and suspicion of the West’ ideology embedded in Aljazeera.net’s newstexts. As Mannheim long ago (1936) observed, ideology has a great deal to do withdistrust of adversaries on both sides.

Our findings also bore out the observation that ideology functions to definedistinct groups and keep them apart (van Dijk, 1998), and thereby addressed ourthird research question: How did the frames play out over time? While neither mediaorganization’s frames shifted radically during the two-week time period, perspec-tives appeared to harden as time went by. In the case of Al Jazeera, story after storyaccumulated evidence of flawed elections. For its part, CNN’s hyperbolic rhetoricabout ‘heroic’ Iraqi voters steeply declined after Election Day, while the chastenedtone that acknowledged remaining difficulties persisted. In fact, the frames thatappeared in this two-week microcosm of election coverage still characterize bothIraq coverage and policy more than three years later, reflecting the depth of theideological divide. On the CNN side, the 2005 depiction of Iraq elections expressedconfidence in the eventual success of western-style democracy as its major frame.However, the frame of success has since been increasingly challenged by a view ofIraq’s democracy as failed: a frame of doubt that formed only one cluster in the2005 CNN election coverage. On the Al Jazeera side, frames invoking the illegiti-macy of elections and violence of the US occupier in 2005 became the precursorsfor full-blown civil war and insurgency over the course of time – again, not so mucha shift in content as in balance. The continuity of frames suggests how difficult itis to break framing patterns once they are formed; future actions are incipient inyesterday’s frames.

As news media coverage reflects mass audience and elite values, the distinctlydivergent frames for the Iraqi elections suggest similar ideological rifts between theArab and western worlds. The incompatibility between the CNN and Al Jazeeraframes is reminiscent of Dorothy Smith’s concept of ideology used as a ‘means notto know’ (cited in Tuchman, 1978). By framing the elections as sentimental patrio-tism for US-style democracy, the American public and elites were unprepared forthe civil war that came on the heels of the elections. Although in hindsight, AlJazeera’s framing of the elections as chaotic, illegitimate and a potential regionalproblem seems closer to the reality in Iraq, that framing cast the democratic elec-tions in Iraq in a negative light from the start. It thereby became a means for theIraqi people and the rest of the Arab world ‘not to know’ whether the democraticeffort could be made to work.

While the two-week time frame was selected for its significance as a criticalevent, ongoing analysis of news coverage after the 2005 elections could reveal pointsat which coverage changed and index these points to policy decisions or politicalevents. Given the regional basis for the ideology, the language of the news storiesmay also be a limitation, since the English-based texts could have been posted bythe news organizations with an English-speaking audience in mind. Future researchcould compare English and Arabic versions of coverage to see if ideology had beenadjusted for the audience. In addition, journalists’ reliance on official sources, whichhas been associated with embedded ideology in news, presented particular problemswith coverage of the Iraqi elections. In the case of Al Jazeera, the organization had




to rely on independent freelance journalists, having been asked to leave the countryin fall 2004. Both news organizations’ coverage was handicapped by ongoing streetviolence, kidnappings of journalists and reporters’ restricted mobility in Iraq. Thusfuture research could consider the effect on coverage of source inaccessibility. Lastly,future research could explore the specific effects of the election coverage on publicopinion and public policy in Iraq and the Arab world in general.

The rapid pace of globalization makes it increasingly important to uncover mediaframes imbued with divisive ideology, to determine their origins and potentialremedies and to advocate for a more cosmopolitan perspective. Sharper awarenessof ideological influences might achieve two aims. First, it might enable journaliststo revise restrictive norms of objectivity and achieve a new ‘global objectivity’ thatfits more easily into a multicultural, globalized world. Journalists using such a revisedprofessional norm might be encouraged to include multiple cross-cultural perspec-tives in their news coverage, rather than focusing only on a dominant one. Second,even though news media framing exposes the rifts between elite adversaries, framesalso point toward solutions. This analysis showed the extent to which frames andtheir underlying ideologies were not shared between media, reflecting the dis-putants’ worldviews. However, ongoing analysis of such controversies might exposeframes with more potential for common ground. In this way, journalistic expressionsof ideology might offer genuine advantages to policy-makers rather than appearingsolely as a violation of professional norms.

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Dianne M. Garyantes is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Rider Univer-sity in Lawrenceville, NJ. Prior to earning her doctorate at Temple University, shespent 14 years working as a print journalist and as a writer and producer fornational broadcast television.

Address Department of Communication and Journalism, Rider University, 2083Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, USA. [email: [email protected]]

Priscilla J. Murphy is a Professor of Communication at Temple University. Shepublishes in the areas of semantic and social network analysis, strategic mediarelations and reputation. Her research involves complex systems as models forcrisis communication and reputation management, most recently concerningissues management strategies of the tobacco industry, CEO leadership duringcrises and executive reputations in the media.

Address Department of Strategic and Organizational Communication, 216 WeissHall, Temple University, 1701 N. Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19122 6085, USA.[email: [email protected]]




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