European Foreign Conflict Reporting

Book excerpt: This book explores the state of European foreign conflict reporting by public-sector broadcasters, post-Cold war and post-9/11. It compares the values of three television news providers from differing public systems: BBC’s News at 10, Russia’s Vremya and France 2’s 20 Heures. The book examines how these three news providers have reported and broadcast the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which pre-dates both the change in East-West relations and the events of 9/11. In doing so, the work identifies and analyses the role of public and state-aligned broadcasters and illustrates how certain news values are consistently prioritised by the broadcasters and the effect this has on how news stories are portrayed. The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on 2006 to 2008 and provides a detailed quantitative overview of the broadcasters’ news values. Part II provides an update of the analysis by examining coverage of the war in Gaza 2014 and discusses the findings from audience research into perceptions of this latter war. This book explains that not only do hierarchies in news values exist in foreign conflict reporting but that they are never arbitrary and can be explained, in part, by the structure of the broadcasters and by events occurring within, or associated with, the reporting country, resulting in nationally differentiated perceptions of conflict throughout the world. This book will be of much interest to students of media studies, war and conflict studies, Middle East politics and international relations in general.