Irish Media, Iraq and the Charge of Anti-Americanism

Chapter 13 Irish Media, Iraq and the Charge of Anti-Americanism Sean Phelan The charge of anti-Americanism is, in short, an essentialising device to regu- late political difference. It seeks to deny the possibility of a hybrid political identity, to propagate the myth of a unified America, and to fix public discourse on a closed range of positions. The enduring symbolic power and authority of the anti-American trope, what Said (1991) might describe as its false universalism, have been lamented by many. Yet, in accordance with the propagandised imperatives of wartime (Nohrstedt, Kaitatzi-Whitlock, Ottosen and Riegert, 2000: 384), some commentators predictably sought to reduce international media and political discourse about the 2003 Iraq war to the terms of this emotive label. This chapter considers the charge of anti-Americanism as part of a gen- eral investigation of how the Iraq war and diplomatic crisis were represented in a specific sample of Irish1 media texts. It is not arrogating itself as a chronicle of all the interesting Irish media coverage; nor is it claiming to be a compre- hensive discourse analysis of the selected texts. Instead, the focus is on those aspects of the texts – within the particular sample – that help illuminate the constructivist grounds of the anti-American charge. This chapter addresses three interrelated concerns: how the selected Irish media texts represent the Iraq war and diplomatic crisis; how the selected media texts represent the spectrum of anti-war/pro-war stances; and what characteristics of the media coverage leave some Irish media open to the charge of anti-Americanism from other media actors. The current articulation of the anti-American charge in an Irish media context can be seen as part of the fallout of a post-September 11 shift in US journalistic culture that seeks to align – more transparently than before – ‘certain preferred discourses of “patriotism” and “professionalism”’ (Zelizer and Allan, 2002: 15), renounce the ‘pretence’ of journalistic ‘objectivity’ (or at least a particular interpretation of the objectivity principle)2, and brand any resistance to elite propaganda discourse as an elite discourse in its own right. It is exemplified by the Sunday Independent journalism of Eoghan Harris (see below), who indicts both The Irish Times and RTE3 for their ‘consistent 275 SEAN PHELAN hostility [sic] to this war’, accusing ‘RTE in particular …[of being] so partisan as to be propagandist’. Sunday Times columnist, David Quinn, likewise re- proaches The Irish Times and the ‘especially bad’ RTE for ‘getting it wrong on Iraq’ and for their ‘blind [sic]…anti-Americanism’ (Quinn, 2003). And The Irish Times’ regular columnist Kevin Myers criticises the brand identity of his own paper when he suggests ‘the war for Iraqi freedom occasioned much posturing fatuity in this country, a great deal from readers of this newspaper’ (Myers, 2003).4 This analysis is interested in how the selected media texts could be de- coded as privileging either anti-American/anti-war or pro-American/pro-war readings. Through the loose application of a critical discourse analysis theo- retical framework (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999), it examines how the ‘foregrounding’ of particular discourses, news actors, sources and discourse categorisations shape and structure the interpretative ‘frames’ (Entman, 2002) produced by the selected media texts. It emphasises the particular importance of headlines and leads – what Van Dijk calls the ‘macrostructures’ of news media texts (Nohrstedt et al., 2000). And it focuses on the importance of both television and front-page images as news framing devices and signifiers of ideological discourse (Perlmutter, 1998). The Irish Media and Cultural Context The sample is largely structured around media content from two of the institutional opinion leaders in the Irish ‘media field’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 103): The Irish Times newspaper and RTE, the national television and radio broadcaster. The Irish Times is the country’s second biggest selling weekly newspaper, culturally valorised as the national paper of historical record, and is independently owned by The Irish Times Trust. RTE is state owned, but largely dependent on commercial income through advertising (Flynn, 2002). These two institutional actors are chosen, first because of their symbolic standing, and second because they are, as suggested already, the mainstream media organisations most likely to be censured for their left-lib- eral, anti-American (Quinn, 2003) leanings.5 Their representation of events is contrasted in turn with the coverage of the Sunday Independent, the biggest selling Sunday newspaper, which has since the 1980s cultivated an ideological identity grounded in a mix of conservative and libertarian polemic (Horgan, 2001). The basic supposition, therefore, is that The Irish Times and RTE framing of events will invite a more critical reading of ‘America’ and American foreign policy (this analysis focuses on the commonalities between both media), while the Sunday Independent will assume more of a closed and uncritical pro-American stance. The sample is organised around what are posited as five key moments in the unfolding of the Iraq war narrative: (a) Colin Powell’s submission to the 276 IRISH MEDIA, IRAQ AND THE CHARGE OF ANTI-AMERICANISM UN Security Council on February;6 (b) Hans Blix’s report to the Security Council on February 14;7 (c) the start of the military attack on March 20;8 (d) the ‘fall’ of Baghdad on April 10;9 and (e) George Bush’s declaration of the end of major military combat on May 2.10 The sample in each of these sec- tions – unless otherwise stated – is strictly limited to: •RTE’s main 9.00pm news bulletin. • The Irish Times’ front-page coverage. (The front page is treated as a distinct text in its own right). • The Sunday Independent’s front-page coverage. (The Sunday Independ- ent sample is taken from the edition immediately following each of the five key dates outlined above). Since the Irish state was not officially part of the American-led military coali- tion, Irish media were under no obvious pressure to feel part of a patriotic, cheer-leading bandwagon (Hammond and Herman, 2000) and could thus assume a certain critical distance from the heavily ‘media-ized’ (Louw, 2003: 211) war discourses circulating, for instance, in the US and Britain. That said, the Iraq crisis accentuated tensions that have been latent in Irish political culture ever since the September 11 attacks, tensions culturally informed by, on the one hand, Ireland’s historical valorisation of its military neutrality and commitment to the United Nations (Kenny, 2001) and, on the other, its recent economic indebtedness to American multinational investment (Kirby, 2002). This unease was exemplified by the Irish Government’s decision to continue allowing American military use of Shannon airport as part of the build-up to war, despite the widespread criticism of the decision as a breach of Irish military neutrality. (The issue of American military use of Shannon had been a contentious public issue ever since the use of the airport to help coordinate the American-led military assault against Afghanistan in October 2001. The high media profile of the issue in February 2003 was a direct consequence of the estimated €20,000 worth of damage inflicted on a US military plane by an individual peace protester in January). The official Irish position on the war therefore was both paradoxical and furtive: indeed, while the Government seemed to indicate its tacit support for the war in March 2003, this was not to preclude Taoiseach11 Bertie Ahern from attempting to reinvent his Govern- ment’s stance as an oppositional one in December 2003 (Beesley, 2003). Powell Submission to the Security Council: February 5 to 7 The Security Council deliberations of February 5 are framed from a perspec- tive that foregrounds the ‘US case for… war’ (The Irish Times headline, Feb- ruary 6). The contents of the Powell presentation are summarised in Carole Coleman’s RTE report of February 5, which is immediately followed by a 277 SEAN PHELAN Cathy Milner report summarising the responses of other Council members. Emphasising the ‘mixed reaction’ to the US evidence, Milner predictably casts Britain as ‘the only other member with a veto to appear completely con- vinced’ and lists – over video close-ups of the respective Foreign Ministers – the particular reservations of France, Russia and China, the other three permanent members of the Security Council. The framing of the Council’s response as unimpressed is later internalised by Coleman in a subsequent live interview with RTE news anchor Anne Doyle, where, in response to Doyle’s question ‘how successful was Colin Powell today?’ Coleman replies, ‘well, it’s hard to say…he didn’t look quite as elated on the way out as he did on the way in’, adding that what ‘everyone thought’ was an impressive start turned into ‘a lot of…old stuff we had heard before’. The UN diplomatic process dominates the news agenda. The US challenge to the UN’s authority is foregrounded (‘Bush challenges UN to pass new resolution for Iraq war’, The Irish Times headline, February 7), though the prospects of US diplomatic success are regarded with some scepticism (‘George Bush is having little success in trying to convince the world it is time to attack Iraq’, asserts the start of one RTE report on February 7, ‘his threat to Saddam that the game was over was met with French derision’). The concerns of UN weapons inspectors are foregrounded in The Irish Times front page of February 8 (‘Inspectors fear concessions by Iraq may not avert war’), while the anti-war (or what is also described as the ‘more time’) stances of the other, non-permanent Security Council members – Germany, Mexico, Angola, Guinea, Syria and Cameroon – are explicitly cited in The Irish Times reports of February 6 and 7.

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