Based on longitudinal research on the media coverage of terrorist attacks, this article suggests a model of how the coverage of these attacks may be conceptualized as a media event and explores the function this serves within society. The main assumption of the model is that journalists change their ritual of news coverage when dealing with exceptional terrorist attacks; they abandon their usual normative professional frame that encompasses such activities as critical scrutiny of governmental actions, and assume a national-patriotic coverage frame that seeks to reestablish normality and restore order. The model can be useful in clarifying the media's role following terror event. While media run the risk of reinforcing the terror event by giving it the public stage its perpetrators seek, by acting as patriots and not as professionals, journalists subvert the message of the terrorists, so that instead of passing on a message of terror, dread, and alarm, the media give the attacked country and society a message of solidarity, partnership, and stubborn endurance against the terrorist threat. The model may also be useful for understanding media coverage of other crisis situations apart from massive terror attacks.
The theoretical assumption of this paper is that when a foreign news item is defined as ‘ours’, then journalists’ professional practices become subordinate to national loyalty; when an item is ‘theirs’, journalistic professionalism comes into its own. Thus, the article argues that there is an inverse relation between professional news values and the national identity of the journalist and the journal’s editors. Expressed as a rule, we would say that the more ‘national’ the report is, the less ‘professional’ it will be, i.e. the closer the reporters/editors are to a given news event in terms of national interest, the further they are from applying professional news values. This claim is presented in the form of a flow diagram and is investigated using qualitative content analysis of the coverage of four events in three different countries (the USA, Britain and Israel). The four events, which were all presented as foreign news, were defined as political violence based on an observational definition. The theory which is empirically tested and presented in this article can help us to understand the coverage of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and further our understanding of how events were, and still are, covered as foreign news in general, and, in particular, how political violence is covered as foreign news.
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