Framing Terrorism: Good versus Evil?

Abstract

Media have the potential to provide multiple sides to every story, and in this research television news and weblogs are assessed – by means of a Habermasian informed perspective – on the realization of this potential in the news framing of what has been labeled as ‘Jihadist’ terrorism. More specifically, the framing of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and attackers by CNN USA and Al-Jazeera are compared with the framing of these attacks and their attackers in the blogosphere of the North-American and ‘Arab’ world. Throughout the analysis, I will demonstrate that processes of ‘Othering’ are at play in both TV and online news. The impact on the global flow of news as a result of the establishment of Al-Jazeera as a new dialogue partner for ‘Western’ mainstream news media will be analyzed. Subsequently, the understudied (war)-blogosphere will be theoretically examined by taking into account its institutional nexuses and actual user-generated (war)blogging content on the topic of ‘9/11’.