This paper focuses on the interaction between a rapidly changing media and the policy responses of UK governments, faced with terrorist violence which has evolved in form and intent. New Labour's final term in office was dominated by the tension between the competing claims of liberty and security, expressed in Tony Blair's declaration after the 7/7 attacks, 'Let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.' We argue that insofar as crime, justice and civil rights are governed by a normative set of rules, they were subverted by New Labour in the mid-1990s for party political reasons. Thus, after 9/11, they needed little reshaping to meet the challenge of 21st-century terrorism. Our thesis is based partly on primary interviews and partly on analyses of media coverage, parliamentary debates and government responses in the form of press releases and speeches. The purpose of the interviews-with 'insider' figures from the world of politics, the police and civil society-was to triangulate the known policy responses to 9/11 with the views and perceptions of these figures to assess whether some of the assumptions about the impact of that event on the UK need to be rethought.
The global symbol of the Palestinian liberation movement for over four decades, the death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat from sudden multiple organ failure in a military hospital near Paris on 11 November 2004 generated extensive, and at times conflicting, international media coverage. Arafat's state funeral began with a French presidential ceremony near Paris, followed by a funeral procession that took place in Cairo on 12 November 2004. Later that day, Arafat's coffin was returned to Ramallah in the West Bank for interment. This article analyses representations of Arafat's funeral in ten British national newspapers, all of which were published on 13 November 2004. Located within the wider paradigm of orientalist interpretations of Middle Eastern socio-political events, and taking British press coverage of Arafat's funeral as an example, this study reveals how the media discourse serves positively to reinforce 'familiar' British cultural norms and values, whilst negatively devaluing and demonizing Palestinians and/or Arabs and Muslims. Moreover, it contends that the predominantly unfavourable coverage of Arafat's funeral in the majority of British newspapers led to no subsequent change in the framing of Palestinians, and was arguably a continuity of the conventionally negative representation of the Palestinian narrative in the British media.
In the light of the findings of the BBC's 2006 impartiality review of their coverage of the Arab—Israeli conflict, and the fact that most of the accusations of bias against the BBC continue to come from pro-Israel lobbyists, this research sought to investigate whether their claims of anti-Israel bias during the BBC's reporting of the 2006 Israeli— Hezbollah war could be validated. Using ITV News as a control group, these claims were measured against the BBC's revised editorial guidelines for covering the Middle East. The article demonstrates that, whilst certain aspects of the coverage were problematic, BBC journalists broadly adhered to the Governors' revised editorial guidelines, and covered the conflict more or less impartially — if there was any bias it was towards, rather than against, Israel. ITV News coverage was more problematic but still achieved a significant degree of impartiality.
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