Uplifting Manhood to Wonderful Heights? News Coverage of the Human Costs of Military Conflict From World War I to Gulf War Two

Althaus, Scott L.; Swigger, Nathaniel; Chernykh, Svitlana; Hendry, David J.; Wals, Sergio C.; Tiwald, Christopher

doi:10.1080/10584609.2014.894159

Cited by 27 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(49 reference statements)

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“…Future research along those lines could usefully follow the example of Althaus et al (2014) and incorporate the extent and prominence of civilian casualty reporting as additional independent variables.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Johns

Davies

2017

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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(RES-062-23-1952) as part of a project to investigate 'Foreign policy attitudes and support for war among the British public'. We gratefully acknowledge the support from both funders, and the guidance we received from colleagues in designing the surveys. The research in this article has been presented at the 2012 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association and at seminars at Nuffield College, the University of Essex and the University of Lancaster. In all cases, we thank participants for comments and suggestions. 2At the height of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, civilians risked being the forgotten casualties. They received much less attention from the same American media which give extensive and sympathetic coverage to the deaths, repatriation and funerals of military casualties (Althaus et al., 2014). They were downplayed by the same British leaders who solemnly read out tributes to fallen service personnel in Parliament. And military strategists in both countries favored a doctrine of air strikes which, despite advances in precision munitions, still risks foreign civilian lives in significant numbers in order to minimize the risks to their own troops.In more recent years, however, civilian casualties have begun to receive more attention. This is partly due to the strategic choice mentioned above: with action increasingly taken via unmanned drones, military casualties have become much rarer while civilian death tolls continue to mount. The need to protect civilians has also become central to the case for military action in a context like Syria (e.g. Landay et al., 2015;Wright, 2015), even if the risks to US and British military remain equally central to the case against intervention.Given the earlier imbalance, it is not surprising that civilian casualties were largely overlooked in research -much of it triggered by Iraq and Afghanistan -on the drivers of public support for war. Since military casualties were more conspicuous in public debate, it made sense that they would have a greater influence on citizens' reactions, and in turn that researchers would focus on military casualty aversion. Now that civilian casualties are becoming more prominent in media coverage of conflict, however, a question arises about public reactions. Would we expect reporting of foreign civilian deaths to have a dampening effect on public support for military action? Or did media and academic focus on military casualties reflect the public's own preoccupation with its own servicemen and women over foreign civilians? Answering this question would make both an empirical and a normative contribution. It would improve our understanding of the conditions under which citizens are prepared to support military action. It would also tell us whether support for force is systematically higher than it would be if civilian deaths become a more central presence in elite discussion and media coverage of military action. 3The scant existing evidence makes it hard to assess the strength of public reactions to civilian casualt...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They received much less attention from the same American media which give extensive and sympathetic coverage to the deaths, repatriation and funerals of military casualties (Althaus et al, 2014). They were downplayed by the same British leaders who solemnly read out tributes to fallen service personnel in Parliament.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Johns

Davies

2017

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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“…Persistent scholarly interest in media war coverage (e.g. Althaus et al, 2014) attests to the continued prominence of conflict as a news value.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configuring terrorism in the age of ISIS: The New York Times’ coverage of the 2015 Beirut and Paris attacks

Ismail

Mishra

2019

Global Media and Communication

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This study inquires whether cultural proximity may explain how media handle terrorism in a global village era where cultural proximity may have given way to cosmopolitanism in news-making. Findings indicate that although loss of life is not culture-bound, cultural proximity persists, as comes through in the sheer contrast in the amount of coverage devoted to Paris versus Beirut. This distinction ought to be qualified, for even with Paris, the self-interest of the nation-state was prioritized, meaning that national security and welfare come first, followed by those of culturally proximate locales. Sensational violence was emphasized for both Lebanese and French victims.

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“…By partly adhering to the strategy that has been recently adopted by Althaus et al . (2014), inter-coder reliability was calculated for these four variables. Prior to carrying out the analysis, the authors (who also acted in the capacity of exclusive coders during the process of data collection) analysed every tenth unit of analysis per each newspaper (the reliability test was therefore conducted on 298 units).…”

Section: Methodology and Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of the people in the characterization of populism. Evidence from the press coverage of the 2014 European Parliament election campaign in Italy

Luca

Ciaglia

2016

Riv. ital. sci. polit.

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Populism is being increasingly studied by political and social scientists. This article pays particular attention to the way in which ‘people’ can be approached and appealed to by their leaders. In particular, by undertaking a content analysis of the two most read daily newspapers in Italy, and by relying on the technique of correspondence analysis, this article shows that to fully understand the phenomenon of populism, the way in which ‘the people’ are approached by their leaders cannot be left aside. In doing so, this article empirically analyses and discusses three dimension of populism and contributes to a more granular understanding of this phenomenon in established democracies.

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Uplifting Manhood to Wonderful Heights? News Coverage of the Human Costs of Military Conflict From World War I to Gulf War Two

Cited by 27 publications

References 71 publications

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Civilian Casualties and Public Support for Military Action: Experimental Evidence

Configuring terrorism in the age of ISIS: The New York Times’ coverage of the 2015 Beirut and Paris attacks

The role of the people in the characterization of populism. Evidence from the press coverage of the 2014 European Parliament election campaign in Italy

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