The Localisation of International News Agency Reports in English Newspapers in the Middle East

Author Mohamed, Ali

Published 2014

Thesis Type Thesis (PhD Doctorate)

School School of Languages and Linguistics

DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/1462

Copyright Statement The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.

Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/367979

Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au

The Localisation of International News Agency Reports in English Newspapers

in the Middle East

Ali Mohamed

BA, English Language and Literature, University of Bahrain 2003

MA, Applied English Language Studies, University of Bahrain 2007

School of Languages and Linguistics

Arts, Education and Law

Griffith University

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy

August 2013 Statement of Originality

This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.

______Ali Mohamed Abstract

This thesis investigates the process of producing localised news reports by English newspapers in the Middle East instead of them using the actual news articles that they obtain from the international news agencies. The production of English news in the

Middle East is a subject that has hardly been studied so far and this study is an attempt to shed light into how English news is produced and received in this part of the world. Since most news articles about international events reach the Middle East through the various international news agencies, news editors in the English newspapers in the region are faced with the task of fending off the ideologies that contradict with the local interest. In doing so, they end up injecting the reports with their own ideologies that might represent the local ideologies, and this process of producing the new news report is what is referred to in this thesis as the localisation process. The thesis aims to find out how and why this process is undertaken. News reports on a number of topics from both the international news agencies and an

English newspaper in the Middle East are analysed using a multidisciplinary analytical framework that is based mainly on aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatics. The analysis of the news reports shows a number of strategies employed by the English newspaper to walk around the ideologies of the international news agencies and produce its own versions of news reports. Combining ethnography with the analytical framework in order to interview news producers and readers from the Middle East reveals various reasons for English newspapers producing their localised versions.

iii Acknowledgment

First and foremost, my thanks should be to Allah for all His blessings. Special and endless thanks go to my principal supervisor, Dr. Michael Haugh for all he has done for me throughout my journey in completing this PhD thesis. From the day he read my proposal until writing the last words of this thesis, his words of encouragement and support have helped me gain confidence in myself and continue to work as hard as I could to get things done. Special thanks are also due to my associate supervisor,

Dr. Ben Fenton-Smith for his invaluable comments and feedback that helped me throughout the various stages of this thesis. I should also thank them both again for spending hours of their time in reading and rereading the various drafts of the thesis. I will always be indebted to both of them for everything they have done for me throughout my PhD candidature. Warm thanks are also extended to Dr. Susana

Eisenchlas for all her support when she was part of the advisory team.

Doing the PhD would not have been accomplished without the financial support of the University of Bahrain and I should thank them for granting me the scholarship that helped me achieve my dream. Many thanks go to all the people who accepted my invitations to participate in the interviews. Their input was of great importance to the completion of this thesis.

Special thanks go to Ms. Diane Josey for copyediting the thesis according to the

Australian Standards for Editing Practice (ASEP).

iv I should also thank my wife here for being by my side and supporting me, as well as sharing all the moments I went through to complete the thesis. Warm thanks to my parents and my parents-in-law for their endless support and love. Last but not least, this thesis grew up at the same time as I was seeing my son grow up, so I dedicate this thesis to him.

v Table of contents

Statement of Originality ii

Abstract iii

Acknowledgment iv

Table of Contents vi

List of Tables ix

List of Figures xi

Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1.1 Topic overview 1 1.2 Significance of the study 3 1.3 Structure of the thesis 4

Chapter 2: Media in the Middle East 8 2.1 Introduction 8 2.2 Newspapers in the Middle East 11 2.2.1 The mobilising press 15 2.2.2 The loyalist press 18 2.2.3 The diverse press 22 2.2.4 The transitional press 25 2.3 Radio in the Middle East 30 2.4 Television in the Middle East and the phenomenon of Al Jazeera 31 2.5 Internet and online censorship in the Middle East 35 2.6 Politics and media in Bahrain 43 2.6.1 Bahrain’s foreign relationships 45 2.6.2 Media in Bahrain 51 2.7 Concluding remarks: media in the Middle East between globalisation and localisation 56

Chapter 3: Literature Review 58 3.1 Media Discourse 58 3.1.1 The genre of newspaper news reports 60 3.2 Discourse analytic methods for studying media discourse 62 3.2.1 Text linguistics and SFG 63 3.2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 65 3.2.2.1 The roots of CDA 66 3.2.2.2 Critiques of CDA 74 3.2.2.3 Attempts to broaden the scope of CDA 77 3.2.2.4 Studies analysing media discourse using multidisciplinary approaches 82 3.3 Media discourse analysis and ethnography 85

vi 3.3.1 What is ethnography? 87 3.3.2 The emic – etic distinction 90 3.3.3 Combining CDA and ethnography 91 3.3.4 Studies combining discourse analysis and ethnography to analyse media discourse 93 3.4 Media discourse and ideology 96 3.4.1 Thompson’s concept of ideology 97 3.4.2 Fairclough’s concept of ideology 98 3.4.3 Van Dijk’s concept of ideology 101 3.4.4 Ideology in the current thesis 103 3.5 The localisation of news media 104 3.6 Research questions 110

Chapter 4: Methodology 112 4.1 Data 112 4.1.1 News sources 112 4.1.2 News topics 115 4.2 The multidisciplinary approach 118 4.2.1 Overview of the preliminary study 119 4.2.2 The discourse analytical framework 120 4.2.2.1 Word frequency analysis 121 4.2.2.2 Naming analysis 121 4.2.2.3 Quotation analysis 121 4.2.2.4 Participation analysis 124 4.2.2.5 Grounding and Theme 125 4.2.3 Interviews: why localisation is done 126 4.3 Concluding remarks 129

Chapter 5 Localisation of News Reports 130 5.1 Case study 1: Gaza flotilla raid 130 5.2 Case study 2: Obama’s speech in Cairo 152 5.3 Case study 3: Bush shoed at in Iraq 175 5.4 The three case studies: interpreting the results of the analysis 189 5.5 Hidden ideologies exposed 190 5.6 Localisation strategies 195 5.6.1 Holistic localisation strategies 195 5.6.2 Sentence-level localisation strategies 201 5.6.3 Word-level localisation strategies 204 5.7 A framework for analysing the localisation of English news in the Middle East 206 5.7.1 Ideologies 206 5.7.2 Business aims 207 5.7.3 Editorial lines 208 5.7.4 Societal discourses 209 5.7.5 Government policy line 210 5.7.6 Local common knowledge 211

Chapter 6: Globalisation of news reports: (Mis)reporting the Events in Bahrain in the Arab Spring 213

vii 6.1 Introduction 213 6.2 A history of division leading to the 2011 uprisings 216 6.3 The events of the 2011 uprising in Bahrain: peaceful protests or terrorist acts? 219 6.4 Reporting the 2012 Formula One in Bahrain: biased reporting? 225 6.4.1 The Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix race: a background 225 6.4.2 Analysing the reports on the 2012 Bahrain Formula One race 226 6.5 Concluding remarks 236

Chapter 7 Conclusions 239 7.1 Summary of the thesis 239 7.2 Research questions revisited 241 7.3 Limitations of study and suggestions for future research 243

Appendix 1: Preliminary study: a case study of the Pope’s 2006 controversy 245

Appendix 2: News reports on the flotilla event 280

Appendix 3: News reports on the Obama’s speech in Cairo 293

Appendix 4: News reports on the Bush shoe event in Iraq 306

Appendix 5: Interviews with news editors and reporters 314

Appendix 6: Readers’ response interviews 326

Appendix 7: News reports on the 2012 Formula One race in Bahrain 333

References 342

viii List of Tables

Table 2-1: Arab world population and GDP 11

Table 3-1: Describing/attributing positive action 103

Table 5-1: Total number of words of each news reports 131

Table 5-2: Top 10 words in the news reports 132

Table 5-3: Quotations percentage in each news report 136

Table 5-4: Types of quoting used in each news report 136

Table 5-5: Incidence and percentage of the quoting verbs in all the news reports 138

Table 5-6: Incidence of the quoting verbs in each of the news reports 139

Table 5-7: Quoting verbs used in the news reports 142

Table 5-8: Types of attribution in the news reports 144

Table 5-9: The sources of quotes used in the news reports 146

Table 5-10: Total number of words of each news reports 153

Table 5-11: Top 10 words in the news report 154

Table 5-12: Quotations percentage in each news report 160

Table 5-13: Types of quoting used in each news report 161

Table 5-14: Incidence and percentage of the quoting verbs in all the news reports 163

Table 5-15: Incidence of the quoting verbs in each of the news reports 164

Table 5-16: Quoting verbs used in the news reports 165

Table 5-17: Total number of words of each news reports 175

Table 5-18: Top 10 words in the news reports 176

Table 5-19: Quotations percentage in each news report 180

Table 5-20: Types of quotes used in each news report 181

Table 5-21: Quoting verbs in the news reports 181

ix Table 6-1: Top 10 words in the news reports 227

Table 6-2: Quotations percentage in each news report 233

Table 6-3: Types of quoting used in each news report 234

x List of Figures

Figure 2-1: Map of the Arab world 9

Figure 2-2: Illustration of Rugh's categorisation of the Press in the Middle East 14

Figure 2-3: Map of Bahrain 44

Figure 3-1: Dimensions of discourse and discourse analysis 68

Figure 6-1: A framework for the localisation of news reports 212

xi Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1. Topic overview:

The media in any country is a reflection of its social, cultural and political environment. This thesis looks at the media in the Middle East, and in particular at the language of the English newspapers, and how society, culture and politics play a role in the linguistic choices made by these newspapers. It focuses on how such English newspapers develop localised versions of news reports from the original news reports produced and broadcast by the major international news agencies: Reuters, the

Associated Press, and Agence France Presse.

Rugh (2004) claims that the English newspapers in the Middle East are intended for non-Arabs living there and that their news and editorial content are quite different from the Arabic media which most Arabs are exposed to every day. However, this claim does not accurately reflect the current situation in the Middle East, as English newspapers in the region, and especially in Bahrain, are no longer intended exclusively for foreigners or expatriates living there. English language is becoming the second language in most countries in the Middle East (Al-Issa, 2009) and English newspapers in the region attract an increasing number of Arab readers for varying reasons, such as maintaining or improving their English language proficiency or looking for news articles that are not available in the Arabic newspapers. However, this growing demand for English newspapers in the Middle East has increased the responsibilities of news reporters and editors for these newspapers as they are

1 expected to produce news articles that conform with the social, cultural and political norms of their countries.

Rugh (2004) claims that the flow of information between the US or the foreign world and the Arab world is overwhelmingly one way: West to East. Mass media – including newspapers and news agencies – are ideological and carry certain messages and worldviews (Croteau and Hoynes, 2002). Ideologies are not stated explicitly, but tend to be rather hidden (Paltridge, 2006) and it is through the fact that they are hidden that they become more powerful (Fairclough, 1989). Media make use of such power (in determining what is included and excluded and how events are represented) to produce the news reports. They have a specific, ideal reader in mind who is capable of understanding these hidden ideologies (Fairclough, 1989).

In the current globalisation age, most international news reaches the Middle East through the news reports of the major international news agencies and since they are repositories of particular ideologies that sometimes contradict with the Arab or

Muslim cultures, they are seen as a threat to Arab cultural identity by most of the local English newspapers in the Middle East. In order to manage the negative effects of such hidden ideologies, English newspapers in the Middle East tend to produce localised versions of the international agencies’ news reports. This study will examine the strategies used by reporters and editors of an English newspaper in Bahrain, The

Gulf Daily News, to produce localised versions of the news agencies’ news articles and tease out the motivations for the use of such strategies.

2 The topic of the study was based on the researcher’s experience while working at an

English newspaper in Bahrain, at the Bahrain Daily Tribune. The newspaper was the second largest English newspaper in Bahrain and used to cover local as well as international events, business and sports news. However, due to financial reasons, the newspaper has recently been turned into the Daily Tribune, which covers only local news in Bahrain. The researcher worked at the Bahrain Daily Tribune for three years as a translator, where he mainly translated Arabic press releases into English for publishing. As part of his job, he was also involved in page editing and selection of news for the local news pages. In addition, he also worked closely with the chief editor and noticed that the news reports acquired from the international news agencies underwent various changes before they were approved for printing. These changes represent the localisation process, which is of central importance in this study.

In order to find out how the process of localisation is carried out by this particular newspaper, the thesis employs a methodological framework that combines a number of approaches, including Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatics. The framework is also extended to include ethnography studies in order to find out the various reasons that lead English newspapers in the Middle East to localise news reports. The reasons will reflect the point of view of both the text producers as well as readers of

English newspapers.

1.2. Significance of the study:

This study is significant because it tackles the issue of how news articles in the

English newspapers in the Middle East are localised and how implicit ideologies are managed in ways that are sensitive to local concerns and ideologies, a topic that has

3 been dealt with only briefly so far by media scholars and researchers. This study appears to be the first of its kind to study the news production of an English newspaper in Bahrain. This is significant, given Bahrain’s status as an economically successful and moderate Islamic country in the Middle East. The study is also somewhat innovative in that it not only depends on the analysis of news reports, but also involves interviewing reporters and editors from English newspapers in the

Middle East as well as readers of English newspapers to further support the findings resulting from the analysis and to explore the nature behind the news making and editing; that is, the localisation process, in these newspapers. This makes the study one of the very few that combines discourse analysis with ethnographic study in the analysis of media discourse.

1.3. Structure of the thesis:

Following the brief introduction in this chapter, the thesis provides an in-depth overview of the media in the Middle East in Chapter 2. The chapter serves as the backbone for the whole thesis as it provides the reader with a general understanding of how the media in general, and the press in particular, operate in many Middle

Eastern countries. A special focus is given to politics and the media in Bahrain to further provide the reader with a clear picture of the environment in which The Gulf

Daily News is produced.

Chapter 3 provides a detailed review of relevant literature. It begins by highlighting the various reasons and methods for studying media discourse. A special focus on the

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach is given in this chapter, as it is one of the main approaches used in the analytical framework. The work of two of the most

4 prominent CDA scholars is reviewed, and this is followed by a discussion of the main critiques these approaches have received. This is followed by a review of the various methods used to overcome such criticisms. The importance of supplementing CDA with ethnography studies is discussed in detail, focusing in particular on reviewing studies that combine discourse analysis and ethnography to analyse media discourse.

The notion of ideology is also given proper focus in this chapter, with a review of some of the ways in which the term has been defined by a number of scholars in order to clarify how ideology is approached in the current thesis. A detailed review of recent studies on localisation of news and studies using multidisciplinary approaches is then provided. The chapter ends by providing the research questions that this thesis aims to answer.

Chapter 4 explains the methodology of the thesis. It begins by identifying the data used for analysis and then it describes in detail the multidisciplinary analytical framework used in the analysis of the data. The analytical framework combines discourse analysis with ethnography. Therefore, the chapter first explains the discourse analytical framework utilised and then explains the interviews that form the ethnographical contribution to the analysis of localisation processes in this thesis.

Chapter 5 offers a systematic analysis of the discourse of the news reports. This analysis focuses on identifying the various localisation strategies employed by the

Bahraini English newspaper, with these strategies being discussed in greater detail in the second part of the chapter. The chapter ends by providing the results of the interviews with text producers and readers of English newspapers in the Middle East.

The results are presented as a framework that helps in understanding the production

5 and reception of English news not only in Bahrain, but also in the Middle East more broadly. This chapter thus collectively presents a focus on how English newspapers in

Bahrain “emicise” what is fundamentally an etic perspective on news events, namely, that of international news agencies. In this thesis to “emicise” an etic perspective is conceptualised as transforming the representations and underpinning ideologies of those whose perspective is located as an outsider looking in, (that is, international news agencies who are observing but not participating in those events), into representations of an insider (or localised understanding), that is, of those who are not only observing but also participating in the specific events in socially consequential ways. This process of emicisation whereby localised concerns and understandings are oriented to by the English newspapers in Bahrain, is often subtle, but nevertheless held to be consequential from the perspective of those concerned. The social consequentiality of such events for readers in Bahrain involves the way in which members of society align themselves or not with such events, in some cases leading to protests as is discussed in the penultimate chapter of this thesis.

Chapter 6 is an attempt to link the analysis with the current situation in the Middle

East following the recent Arab Spring events. It investigates the uprising events in

Bahrain and provides a detailed background to the various situations that led to the uprising. The chapter then provides a look at how most of the international news agencies failed to report the actual situation in Bahrain which resulted in their providing misinformed or biased reports of the events to their readers. This chapter is regarded as a departure from the localisation of international news in order to provide a view on how international news agencies report local events in the Middle East to the international readers. It thus reverses the focus on how English newspapers

6 “emicise” – that is, form an insider or localised understanding – the etic perspective on news events presented by international news agencies in the prior chapters, to a focus on how such international news agencies “eticise” the emic perspective of those experiencing events in the Middle East.

Chapter 7 sums up the results of the thesis and provides suggestions for future research in the field of media discourse analysis in the Middle East. In considering both the “emicisation” of “etic” viewpoints, and the “eticisation” of “emic” viewpoints in this thesis, it is concluded that these perspectives are qualitatively different loci of understanding. It is suggested that in representing events in the print media, the loci of understanding can prove critical, given that (a) an emic perspective is that of members who are not only observing, but also participating in, events in ways that can be consequential for the political system, the social order and so on in that society; while (b) an etic perspective is ultimately that of those who are outside observers of such events for whom any broader consequences, albeit sometimes quite significant, are only realised as an outcome of those events experienced by the insiders.

7 Chapter 2 Media in the Middle East

2.1. Introduction:

This chapter is an attempt to give an overview of the media in the Middle East by highlighting how the media developed in the region and what role it plays in the political life of the region. The chapter also reviews the rules regulating the media in

Middle Eastern countries. Although the current thesis focuses on one type of media, namely newspapers’ news reports, this chapter will make reference to other types of media in order to give a better overall understanding of how the media in all its forms operates and runs in this part of the world. The chapter starts by reviewing the press in the Middle East and identifying the rules and regulations governing the print media in each country. A brief discussion of the role of radio and television will also be provided, with substantial focus on the role of satellite television in the Arab world, and specifically on the role Al Jazeera television currently plays in the development of the region. The role the Internet plays in this region will also be discussed, as it is one of the tools for new media. As the data analysis in this thesis will use an English newspaper from Bahrain as a case study for the localisation process in media in the

Middle East, this chapter will also highlight Bahrain’s foreign relationships to better understand the ideologies that underpin or influence the media output. This will be followed by an overview of the media in Bahrain. This chapter concludes by examining the processes of globalisation and localisation in the media in the Middle

East.

Since the thesis is focused on the media in the Middle East, it is essential to start by identifying what the term ‘Middle East’ refers to. The term has many geographical

8 interpretations and it is used today to refer to the Arab world, Israel, Iran, Turkey and even Afghanistan (Boyd, 1999; Mellor, Ayish, Dajani and Rinnawi, 2011). This thesis, however, uses the term ‘Middle East’ to refer mainly to the eighteen Arab world countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya,

Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United

Arab Emirates and Yemen. The figure below shows the map of the Middle East, including Mauritania, Djibouti and Somalia, which are not listed as part of the Arab world in this thesis as they have their own unique “historical backgrounds” and have

“several other official languages” (Mellor et al., 2011: 2).

Figure 2-1: Map of the Arab world

Although the word “Arab” does not refer to a specific race, as Arabs are of diverse religions (including Muslims, Christians and Jews) and of different ethnic origins

(including Nubians, Bedouins, Kurds and Berbers) (Mellor et al., 2011: 1), the Arab world countries have a number of similarities shared among them. The one main thing shared by them is the widespread and official use of Arabic language. Other

9 similarities include culture and traditions. By the same token, the Arab world countries also have many differences. For example, while Egypt has a soaring population of over 85 million people, Bahrain’s population is barely over one million.

The economic situation differs significantly from one country to another as well. For example, looking at the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (PPP) entry on the

CIA World Factbook, Yemen has the lowest with $2,200 and Qatar the highest with

$102,800. Rugh (2004: 1) also states that the Arab world’s “pre-independence political histories” were different too, but they mainly experienced French or British dominance. The following table provides a complete list of the population, GDP and colonial influences for each of the Arab countries:

Colonial Country Population GDP per capita PPP influences 38,087,812 (July 2013 Algeria $7,500 (2012 est.) France est.) 1,281,332 (July 2013 $28,200 (2012 Bahrain Britain est.) est.) 85,294,388 (July 2013 Egypt $6,600 (2012 est.) Britain est.) 31,858,481 (July 2013 Iraq $4,600 (2012 est.) Britain est.) 6,482,081 (July 2013 Jordan $6,000 (2012 est.) Britain est.) 2,695,316 (July 2013 $43,800 (2012 Kuwait Britain est.) est.) 4,131,583 (July 2013 $15,900 (2012 Lebanon Britain est.) est.) 6,002,347 (July 2013 $13,300 (2012 Libya Italy est.) est.) 32,649,130 (July 2013 Morocco $5,300 (2012 est.) France est.) 3,154,134 (July 2013 $28,500 (2012 Oman Britain est.) est.) West Bank: 2,676,740 (July 2013 est.) Palestine $2,900 (2008 est.) Britain Gaza: 1,763,387 (July 2013 est.) 2,042,444 (July 2013 $102,800 (2012 Qatar Britain est.) est.)

10 Saudi 26,939,583 (July 2013 $25,700 (2012

Arabia est.) est.) Sudan 34,847,910 $2,400 (2012 est.) Britain 22,457,336 (July 2013 Syria $5,100 (2011 est.) Britain est.) 10,835,873 (July 2013 Tunisia $9,700 (2012 est.) France est.) 5,473,972 (July 2013 $49,000 (2012 UAE Britain est.) est.) 25,408,288 (July 2013 Yemen $2,200 (2012 est.) Britain est.) Table 2-1: Arab world population and GDP (from CIA World Factbook (CIA, 2013)) and colonial influences (Abdelali, 2004).

During the colonial period, and in their attempt to stop the spread of Arab nationalist movements, colonising countries such as Britain and France tended to limit and control the production of newspapers and other media in the Arab countries, although they “had a tradition of free press at home” (Rugh, 2004: 6).. Following their independence, Arab governments took over control of the political and economic situations and they soon realised the importance of the media in maintaining their power and so ensured they maintained control of it too. Rugh (2004) states that the

Arab governments justify their control over the media by claiming that they aim to protect their newly independent countries from external and internal problems and therefore the media has to support the governments’ policies for the national interests.

Media was subsequently used to mobilise public opinion and journalists were often regarded as “mouth-pieces” for the Arab governments (Mellor et al., 2011: 12).

However, the media in the Middle East have seen many changes since the early

1990s, especially following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 (Hafez, 2001; Mellor et al., 2011).

2.2. Newspapers in the Middle East:

11 Before discussing the development of newspapers in the Arab countries as well as the rules and regulations governing them, this section will start by providing an overview of some of the main models used to study and categorise the Arab media in general and the Arab press in particular. Iskandar (2007) states that the earliest attempts to provide categorical classifications of the Arab press go back to the late 1940s, although Hamdy (2013) claims that it has never been easy to fit the Arab press to the models used to describe the Western media.

Academic interest in studying the Arab press rose significantly with “the advent of

Radio Bari from Italy, BBC Empire Radio Arabic from London, and the subsequent rise in Radio Monte-Carlo Moyen Orient and the Voice of America” (Iskandar, 2007:

4). Although Douglas A. Boyd has provided some detailed historical and descriptive analysis of some of the media systems in a number of Arab countries since the 1950s, his writings provided information on the media on a state-by-state basis and he refused to provide a model to categorise the Arab media (Iskandar, 2007). William

Rugh (1979; 2004) was one of the first people to provide a categorisation model for the Arab press that is based on the local political system – that is, based on the principle or claim that the Arab political systems “are the dominant factor in influencing the role of media” (Hamdy, 2013: 7).

Rugh’s significant contribution was thus to provide a framework for categorising the

Arab countries according to the nature of their press vis-à-vis the local political system. The following is an overview of that framework (bearing in mind that some of Rugh’s categorisations have since been altered by recent historical developments such as the Arab Spring):

12

(1) the ‘mobilising press’ which is controlled totally by the political system and controlled by revolutionary governments, such as in Syria, Libya and Sudan.

(2) the ‘loyalist press’ which is privately owned, but supportive of the political system, including Saudi Arabia, Oman, Palestine, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE.

(3) the ‘diverse press’ where the press is free, such as in Kuwait, Morocco, Yemen,

Iraq and Lebanon.

(4) the ‘transitional press’, which Rugh (2004: 134) explains is in a “transition to a different type of system that will stabilise and remain for a long time” such as the press in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia.

Rugh’s categorisation has been the subject of many criticisms from many Arab scholars (Mellor, 2005). One of the main critiques of Rugh’s categorisation of the

Arab media is that he transferred classical Western media typologies to the Arab world “with only minor modifications that serve to affirm an increasingly outdated view of Arab media” (Iskandar, 2007: 9). Rugh’s categorisations were also criticised for over emphasising the role of the state in controlling the media. These criticisms of

Rugh’s model led many other scholars to try to provide new ways to categorise the

Arab media. For example, Farouq Abu Zaid used ownership patterns to categorise the

Arab media in his study in 1986 (Hamdy, 2013) and another study by Ayish in 2002 suggested a three-category classification of the Arab media: traditional government- controlled, reformist government-controlled and liberal commercial (Iskandar, 2007).

Despite all the criticism Rugh’s model has received, it is “still in use” and claimed to be “helpful” in describing and understanding the Arab press (Hafez, 2001: 5, 7). Rugh

13 (2007: 1) argues that the current national political systems in the Arab world “are still a dominant variable affecting the structure and behaviour of Arab media”. He also stresses that his categories “are not static, because they are fundamentally rooted in existing political systems. When a political system changes, a transformation takes place in the media system” and leads to its shifting in category (Rugh, 2007: 7). The following overview is based on Rugh’s categorisation of the Arab press, mainly because understanding the relationship between the political system and the media in the Arab countries will help in understanding some of the reasons that lead English newspapers in the region to localise international agencies’ news reports.

Figure 2-2: Illustration of Rugh's (2004) categorisation of the Press in the Middle East

14 It should also be noted here that the events of the Arab Spring in some countries have changed both the political and media systems, and although the following overview is based on the way Rugh categorised the Arab press, as much up to date information as possible is provided for the countries affected by the recent events. In order to provide updated and recent information about the media in the Middle East, online resources were referred to since they have the luxury of being updated more easily and more frequently than scholarly books. One of the main sources for up to date information on the media in general and the press specifically, is the Freedom House website with all its detailed annual reports on the freedom of the press for almost all countries in the world. Freedom House is an independent American organisation established in

1941 to support democracy and freedom around the world. The organisation considers itself as ‘a clear, forthright and nonpartisan voice for democracy’ and it supports

‘policies that will expand freedom, both in the U.S. and abroad’. To achieve its mission, the organisation monitors, measures and explains ‘freedom’s condition through studies, reports and articles’ (FreedomHouse, 2010). However, it should be noted here that despite Freedom House’s importance as an updated and useful perspective, it nevertheless needs to be critically examined in light of other scholarly literature.

2.2.1. The mobilising press:

Rugh (2004) lists the press in Syria, Libya, Sudan and pre-2003 Iraq as part of the mobilising press. It should be noted here that following the 2011 revolution in Libya and the death of Colonel Muamar Al Qaddafi, the Libyan press cannot be regarded as mobilising anymore as the media witnessed more freedom of expression and there has been significant relaxation of control of the media by the state. Therefore, the

15 discussion of the Libyan press in this section covers the pre-2011 revolution. The press in these countries share a number of common characteristics. For example, the mobilising press, according to Rugh (2004: 29-31), does not “criticise the policies of the national government and never criticises the government leaders”. The following is a look at the development of the mobilising press in four countries.

2.2.1.1. Syria:

Following its independence in 1946, the Syrian press was not paid much attention by the ruling parties as they were occupied by the various political problems the country had as well as by the many military coups that plagued the country (Mellor et al.,

2011). It was when the Baath Party came into power in 1963 that the Syrian press started to develop. The new regime established a new body to control the affairs of the press (Mellor et al., 2011) and the press began restructuring along similar lines to those of communist countries, which resulted in limited freedom of expression (Amin,

2001; Lahlali, 2011). Although the Syrian Baathist government has allowed other non-Baathist parties to publish newspapers since 2000 (Mellor et al., 2011), the government still monitors what is to be published and still maintains control over the press (Rugh, 2004). Currently, the government and the ruling Baath party own all newspapers and the publishing houses (FreedomHouse, 2012). The 2011 Syrian uprising was accompanied by a massive government crackdown on the media (BBC,

2013) as the state-run press continued to support the ruling party and publish more

‘propaganda and falsehood’ (FreedomHouse, 2012) that aimed to denounce the protestors and to portray foreign reporting on the situation in Syria as false and inaccurate. Reporters without Borders ranked Syria number 176 out of 179 countries in the world press freedom index in 2013 (Reporters-without-Borders, 2013).

16

2.2.1.2. Pre-2003 Iraq:

The press in Iraq has experienced various levels of freedom of expression across the ages since its independence, but it was during the republican regime that ruled in 1953 that the press witnessed its most flourishing development (Mellor et al., 2011).

However, just like the situation in Syria, the continuous military coups prevented the development of the press and when Saddam Hussain and the Arab Baath Socialist

Party came to power, the press was totally controlled by the government and only a few newspapers were permitted to publish, with no freedom of expression (Amin,

2001; Lahlali, 2011; Mellor et al., 2011). The Iraqi government did not allow any foreign publications and local journalists had to be loyal to the state as they were aware of the consequences if they reported against the state or the ruling party. For example, Rugh (2004: 37) states that Decree No. 840 of 1986 allowed the death penalty for “insulting the president or high government officials”.

2.2.1.3. Sudan:

Although it is the largest Arab country in its geographical size, Sudan has many economic difficulties and the press is under severe censorship under the military government of Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Al Bashir (Amin, 2001). It is currently ranked number 170 out of 179 in the Reporters without Borders press freedom index (Reporters-without-Borders, 2013). Prior to Al Bashir’s coup in 1989,

Sudan had more than forty newspapers and magazines and was enjoying a more relaxed press environment (Amin, 2001). According to Rugh (2004), the Sudanese

Press Law allows the arrest of journalists without any trial if they are found to operate against the government’s policies. Sudanese journalists practise self-censorship to

17 prevent their newspapers being suspended and themselves from being arrested. In

2011, Sudan was included as one of nine countries in the Freedom House’s report of the world’s most repressive societies and was named one of the worst of the worst

(FreedomHouse, 2011).

2.2.1.4. Libya:

The Libyan regime of Muamar Al Qaddafi owned all the newspapers in Libya. The

Green Book, written by Al Qaddafi, was the country’s main guide for the political system and legislation and it also provided a “general framework for the mass media and the freedom of expression” (Omer, 2009: 165). Rugh (2004: 36) quotes from Al

Qaddafi’s Green Book regarding the media ownership. Al Qaddafi states in his book that the “press is a means of expression of the society and is not a means of expression of a natural or corporate person. Logically and democratically, the press, therefore, cannot be owned by either of those”. He also stated that a natural person

“should not be permitted to own any means of publication or information” (Rugh,

2004: 36). Therefore, media during Al Qaddafi’s era could not contradict the government’s policies and the regime maintained strict censorship of incoming foreign media. The Libyan legislation did not allow the establishment of any private media (Omer, 2009). The Libyan News Agency was the only authorised source for all types of national news and was responsible for the gathering, editing and distributing of national and international news as well as being the publisher of most of the newspapers in Libya (Amin, 2001; Omer, 2009).

2.2.2. The loyalist press:

18 This category includes six countries: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United

Arab Emirates and Palestine. According to Rugh (2004: 59), the press in these countries does the same job in the political process as the mobilising press although they are privately owned: that is, they are “consistently loyal to and supportive of the regime in power”. This section will discuss the development of the press in five of the six countries, as the media in Bahrain will be discussed in more detail at a later stage in this chapter.

2.2.2.1. Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia has always been an important country for the Arab world as it is the birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed and the cradle of Islam. The significant Islamic role of the country might be the reason for its having one of “the most tightly controlled media systems” in the Arab world (Amin, 2001: 27). Although the ownership of newspapers and other print media is private by law, most are owned by members of the ruling family or people close to them (Mellor et al., 2011). The Saudi

Press Law is among the most repressive and restrictive in the region. According to the laws, the press does not criticise Islam, the ruling family or the government and if found guilty, the government has “the right to stop a paper from publishing” (Rugh,

2004: 71). The Information Ministry, which is the body responsible for monitoring the press, has the right to select the members of the board of directors of newspapers as well as select the editor-in-chief from among a number of candidates nominated by the board (Rugh, 2004).

2.2.2.2. Qatar:

19 When Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani came to power in 1995, he assured the people of freedom of expression. However, this freedom remains limited and

‘according to circumstances and conditions’ (FreedomHouse, 2012). According to

Qatari Press Law, the media “should not in any way criticise the Amir, not publish anything that could undermine the established order or endanger the political system”

(Rugh, 2004: 72). Although the government in 1996 abolished the Information

Ministry, which was responsible for censoring the print media, journalists still practise self-censorship. The Qatar News Agency is the main source of news in the country (Amin, 2001) and the Qatar Foreign Information Agency issues accreditation for foreign reporters to work in the country (FreedomHouse, 2012). However, the government can still refuse to issue or extend visas for foreign reporters without giving any reason.

2.2.2.3. Oman:

As with the other countries in this category, the Omani Press Law guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of the press, but these rights are not practised in reality.

According to the law, the press is prohibited from criticising the sultan or publishing news that ‘lead[s] to public discord, violates the security of the state or abuses a person’s dignity or rights’ (FreedomHouse, 2012). The government has the right to censor all local and foreign publications and can stop anything politically, culturally or sexually offensive (Rugh, 2004). When protests demanding more reforms reached

Oman in 2011, Sultan Qaboos bin Said issued a decree to ban the publication of anything that could affect the security of the country (FreedomHouse, 2012; BBC,

2013).

20 2.2.2.4. The UAE:

With the UAE becoming a regional and international media centre and its constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and freedom of the press, one would assume that the country enjoys more freedom in the media than its counterparts in the Arab world.

However, the Freedom House lists the press status in the UAE as not free, stating that the government ‘uses its judicial and executive powers to limit those rights in practice’ (FreedomHouse, 2012). According to the Publication Law, the press “cannot criticise the ruling family, or the UAE’s allies or friendly countries, or carry the names of crime victims, propagate religion, carry dishonest commercials, one-sided reporting of controversies, promote liquor, sex or pornography” (Rugh, 2004: 73).

The National Media Council is the authority responsible for issuing licenses to publications as well as approving foreign print or broadcasts. With the Dubai Media

Free Zone established in 2000, foreign media outlets are able to produce print and broadcast material for foreign audiences and operate with relative freedom. However, the free zone is also subject to the rules and regulations of the publication law

(FreedomHouse, 2012).

2.2.2.5. Palestine:

Publishing under occupation in Palestine has been widely debated by media and political scholars, with some people supporting the printing of newspapers as doing so would serve to educate Palestinians, and others opposing it, claiming that it would provide the Israelis with information about the Palestinian community (Amin, 2001).

The Freedom House lists the press in Palestine as not free, as journalists are frequently abused ‘at the hands of three different governing authorities: the Fatah- controlled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the Hamas-led government in the

21 Gaza Strip; and the Israeli military’ (FreedomHouse, 2012). Today, there are three daily newspapers in the West Bank, including two newspapers affiliated to the Fatah authority – one is fully funded by it and the other partially funded. The third newspaper is privately owned, but is censored by the Israeli military. The Hamas group bans the distribution of these three newspapers due to their constant criticism of them. Hamas have two other newspapers affiliated to them, which are banned from distribution in the West Bank.

2.2.3. The diverse press:

Rugh (2004) claims that the newspapers in the countries in this category are different from one another in their content, style and their political tendencies. Some of the newspapers publish news that is not supportive of the regime, while others might be seen as strong promoters of it. Rugh lists the press in Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco and

Yemen as part of this category. However, Rugh’s categorisation has been the subject of a number of criticisms, as some scholars argue that some of the countries should no longer belong in it. For example, Hafez (2001: 5) states that Kuwait has restricted its freedom of the press and “favoured a trend towards loyalist self-censorship among journalists”. However, the present discussion will still include Kuwait as part of the diverse press as it is still considered “one of the most open in the Middle East”

(FreedomHouse, 2012). Even Rugh (2004: 116) is aware of the vagueness of this category as he clearly states that only the press in Lebanon is “relatively free from government control”, whereas the press in Kuwait, Morocco and Yemen ‘operate within stricter boundaries’.

2.2.3.1. Lebanon:

22 Lebanon is considered the most liberal state in the Arab world and has more newspapers than any other country in the region (Amin, 2001; Rugh, 2004).

Newspapers are privately owned and are regulated by press laws. The press in

Lebanon witnessed its best era prior to the 1975 civil war, as there were approximately fifty newspapers. These newspapers provided their readers with the

“widest variety of opinion” as many of them were patronised for political reasons by

Russia, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Saudi Arabia (Rugh, 2004: 90-91). The civil war imposed a lot of pressure on the press with the decline of the financial resources in the country. The war era also witnessed the issuing of a number of decrees to impose censorship on the press and the possibility of severe penalties. After the war, the

Lebanese press continued to face economic problems, but the constitution provided for more freedom of the press. However, journalists should not insult the head of state or foreign leaders and the government can prosecute those found guilty in special publication courts (Rugh, 2004; FreedomHouse, 2012). Rugh (2004: 98) states that the Lebanese government’s failure to “silence press criticism” in comparison with what other Arab countries do and the “continuation of the pluralist society and confessional democracy” are two factors that helped make the Lebanese press one of the most free in the Middle East.

2.2.3.2. Kuwait:

The Kuwaiti press is one of the most advanced in the Gulf and Arab world as it has developed a degree of diversity, independence, competition and openness that can be somewhat compared to that of Lebanon (Rugh, 2004; Mellor et al., 2011). Freedom of expression and freedom of the press are granted by the constitution, but it prohibits the publication of material that insults God, the prophet, Islam or criticises the Amir.

23 The press also cannot disclose secret or private information or call for the overthrow of the regime (FreedomHouse, 2012). The Information Ministry issues licenses to publishers and it can censor any publication found to be offensive. However, the ministry does not interfere with, or restrict access to news.

2.2.3.3. Morocco:

The newspapers in Morocco represent various views depending on the political party they belong to though they are mostly independent and liberal (Rugh, 2004; Lahlali,

2011; Mellor et al., 2011). The Moroccan Press has become more “rigorous, active and pluralistic” since the late 1990s and the press has grown in number, along with an increased confidence since the ascension of King Mohamed VI to the throne (Lahlali,

2011: 20). While the constitution guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of the press and the Moroccan government accepts some criticism of the government and its performance, the press is prohibited from criticising the monarchy and Islam

(Lahlali, 2011; Mellor et al., 2011; FreedomHouse, 2012). French language newspapers used to have the largest circulation (Mellor et al., 2011), but according to

Rugh (2004) the Arabic newspaper Al-Ahdath al-Maghribiya now has the highest circulation.

2.2.3.4. Yemen:

Although Rugh (2004) lists Yemen as part of the diverse press for having an open and free press, it seems that his analysis and discussion is no longer applicable. The

Yemeni press is listed as ‘not free’ by the Freedom House report on the freedom of the press (FreedomHouse, 2012). Since the Yemeni people were involved in deadly protests against the government in 2011, massive crackdowns on the press and

24 journalists have taken place. The Yemeni press laws prohibit journalists from criticising the president, defaming individuals or damaging the image of Yemeni,

Arab or Islamic culture. Violators are prosecuted at specialised courts and punishments vary from high fines to imprisonment (FreedomHouse, 2012). The government controls most news outlets in Yemen and even the few newspapers that present independent views practise self-censorship to prevent getting into trouble.

2.2.4. The transitional press:

Rugh (2004) states that the press in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria has developed a transitional system that has undergone steady changes for more than a decade, but still appears unsettled. The press in these countries is complex as it contains elements of government control and elements of freedom of expression. Some newspapers are owned by the government and others by the private sector or the political parties. The following discussion will review the regulations governing the press in these four countries.

2.2.4.1. Egypt:

In 2011, President Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign following almost 30 years in power. After his departure, the press in Egypt started to improve. According to the

Freedom of the Press report of 2012, the Egyptian press is considered partly free as a result of the publishing of new independent newspapers, less self-censorship and loosening of governmental control over the media (FreedomHouse, 2012).

Although the press in Egypt is one of the oldest and most advanced in the Arab world, the government often uses it to control the public (Amin, 2001). However, the press in

25 Egypt has witnessed a number of changes under the control of the various presidents.

The following is a look at the press under Jamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Al Sadat and

Hosni Mubarak:

• President Nasser nationalised all privately owned newspapers and the press

became controlled by the regime. This meant that approval by the government

had to be obtained prior to publishing. The press during Nasser’s era was

detached from its main function to inform the people and became more of a

tool to control them. President Nasser was also responsible for appointing new

editors-in-chief, a practice which was then followed by his successors (Mellor,

2005; Mellor et al., 2011; Pasha, 2011).

• The press during Al Sadat’s era remained “obedient” (Mellor et al., 2011: 52),

but the new president lessened some of the government’s control over the

press. For example, news sources for information were opened and journalists

who were exiled or jailed during Nasser’s presidency were rehabilitated and

given important positions in the press (Rugh, 2004; Pasha, 2011).

• Mubarak’s regime declared an intention to provide more relaxed press laws

and allowed political parties to publish newspapers (Rugh, 2004; Mellor et al.,

2011). However, the government owned all the national press and the

president had the ability to appoint their editors. Journalists were also liable

for punishment for insulting the Egyptian president, presidents of foreign

countries, government officials, the armed forces or the parliament. The

government also controlled the publishing houses and had a monopoly over

the printing of newspapers and their domestic distribution (Rugh, 2004).

26 2.2.4.2. Jordan:

The Jordanian laws allow private and political parties to own newspapers, but only by

Jordanian nationals and they are required to obtain a license. The government also holds shares in some newspapers, although it has always expressed its intention to privatise the press. Jordan used to have one of the most repressive press laws and despite the government’s claims that it is providing more freedom for the press, the press is currently listed as ‘not free’ on the Freedom House report on the Freedom of the Press in 2012 (FreedomHouse, 2012). Najjar (2001: 77) quotes a reporter who described that working under the 1997 Press Laws was like “being required to move between one rain drop and another without getting wet or else be punished”. The

Jordanian Press Laws went through a number of stages from the 1950s through to the current day that allowed the press to become “more liberal over time” (Najjar, 2001:

77). For example, the 1953 Law of Publication required newspapers to apply for licenses only under strict conditions, and the 1967 laws required that the Jordanian government become a joint owner of most newspapers. The 1993 Press Law allowed political parties to publish their own newspapers, a move that was seen as liberating.

And although the 1997 temporary press law increased the list of news items that were forbidden from publication, it replaced journalists’ potential imprisonment for infringement of the laws with fines (Najjar, 2001). However, although the laws appear to be moving from repressive to more liberal, it seems that the Jordanian government is taking steps backward. For example, Freedom House (2012) reported that ‘the legislature in 2010 passed an amendment that established special courts to prosecute violations of the Press and Publications Law’.

2.2.4.3. Tunisia:

27 Since Tunisia has had a long French presence, several newspapers appear in both

Arabic and French. Political parties, individuals and the government own newspapers in Tunisia (Rugh, 2004). After independence, the press took on the role of supporting the government and promoted its policies and activities without any criticism (Lahlali,

2011). The press witnessed many restrictions and limitations on ownership and press freedom in the 1980s (Amin, 2001). For example, the Press Law under the former

Tunisian President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, criminalised defamation and prohibited criticism of the president, with fines and imprisonment for violators. Self-censorship was a necessity for the Tunisian journalists during the Ben Ali era. With the Tunisian people leading the Arab Spring in late December 2010 and protesting against Ben

Ali’s government, strict censorship was placed on all media to prevent coverage of the revolution. However, with Ben Ali leaving the country in January 2011, the press situation improved significantly. Today, more privately owned newspapers that provide a wide variety of viewpoints with less self-censorship and state control over their content, have started publishing (FreedomHouse, 2012).

2.2.4.4. Algeria:

The press in Algeria is based on a French background and it was used by the French administration to serve their aims in controlling Algeria. When Algeria got its independence in 1962, the press enjoyed a high level of freedom and there were many publications representing different political views (Lahlali, 2011; Mellor et al., 2011).

However, this openness did not last long as the parliament declared Algeria a one- party state and so the press became a tool used by the state. The 1980s witnessed public demand for more freedom and liberalisation, which resulted in a better press environment, and more newspapers were published. The freedom did not last long,

28 and when the army took over the government in 1992, more restrictions were placed on the press. Although the constitution guarantees freedom of the press, the government still controls and restricts the media and violators are punished. The government controls all the printing houses; therefore self-censorship is widely practised to ensure the printing of the newspapers (FreedomHouse, 2012).

The above brief overview of the press in the Middle East reveals that most countries in the region are moving towards providing more freedom of the press and freedom of speech although the situation has been complicated somewhat by the recent events of the Arab Spring. However, press freedoms in this part of the world should not be compared to the freedom of the press practised in the US or UK or other western countries. The press in the Middle East still operates under the umbrella of the government, even if it is privately or independently owned and operated. Despite the

Arab governments’ claims that their constitutions guarantee freedom of the press, journalists and reporters ensure that they practise self-censorship to keep their newspapers and their jobs. Leaders and heads of states are still considered taboo issues that cannot be discussed or criticised by the press in almost all Arab countries, and the press in the Middle East remains loyalist in nature for the most part, despite any signs that might indicate more freedom of the press. This all applies currently even after the Arab Spring events, which are considered to have liberated some of the countries and established more freedom in all walks of life. The only positive effect of the Arab Spring for countries where the press had been controlled by the government, such as Libya, is the establishment of more newspapers. However, most of the newly established newspapers lack professionalism (Kilman, 2012). Moreover the Arab audience, especially the younger generation, increasingly rely on new media outlets,

29 especially different forms of social media to obtain up to date news and information; and so the press, despite its history and importance, appears to be facing a decreasing number of interested readers.

2.3. Radio in the Middle East:

Radio broadcasting in the Middle East goes back as far as the 1920s when the colonising countries started experimenting with wireless transmitting in some countries (Mellor et al., 2011). However, after independence, the Arab governments monopolised radio broadcasting and used it as a tool of national expression, political mobilisation and cultural development (Rugh, 2004; Mellor et al., 2011). Radio systems in the Arab world prior to the 1990s could be divided into three main groups

(Amin, 2001; Rugh, 2004):

• The first group includes countries with traditionally strict control over the

radio systems such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Sudan.

These countries have always used the radio as a tool of political

communication to control their people and ensure national unity and support.

According to Rugh (2004), when the revolutionary regimes came into power,

they expanded their radio facilities to ensure that they could communicate

their political policies to more people in their countries.

• The second group includes all the other Arab countries except for Lebanon

and they are referred to as loyalist radio systems. The countries in this group

have administrative control over the radio broadcasting, but they do not

“maneuver their broadcast media in a controlled direction in order to gain

nation-wide support for the government” (Amin, 2001: 29).

30 • The third group includes Lebanon, which, according to Rugh (2004: 195), is

“a special case among Arab broadcasting systems”. The broadcasting in

Lebanon was partially private and partially owned and operated by the

government.

Since the early 1990s, the political, economic and technological developments in the region have affected the radio systems in a significant way and the above categories no longer apply. The radio today is used as an entertainment tool for listening to music or live talk shows and it barely has any role in the political life in the Arab world. Private broadcasters have been introduced in most of the Arab countries and they present new broadcasting formats that resemble Western-style radio programs

(Mellor et al., 2011). This might be one of the reasons that media scholars appear to no longer be interested in examining the role of radio, and so there are very few recent studies on the status of radio in the Middle East.

2.4. Television in the Middle East and the phenomenon of Al Jazeera:

Prior to the 1990s, Arab television systems could be characterised as local and government controlled systems with limited reach and primarily serving as mouthpieces for their states (Mellor et al., 2011). However, the development of the television sector in the Arab world following the Gulf War in 1991 was marked, as the dominance of CNN in covering the Gulf War alerted Arab governments to the importance of satellite television and to the need for allowing private owners to enter the television business (Sakr, 2001; Lahlali, 2011; Mellor et al., 2011). Private media companies started to launch satellite channels, such as the Middle East Broadcasting

Centre (MBC) in 1991, the Arab Radio and Television (ART), ORBIT and the

31 Egyptian Satellite Channel (ESC). These channels aimed to provide the Arab audience with a more objective coverage of news. However, none of these channels managed to garner the fame and international recognition of Al Jazeera Satellite

Channel that was launched in Qatar in late 1996. Al Jazeera has managed to transform the face of the Arab media and has ended the long state control over television in the

Middle East.

Al Jazeera started to cover subjects that were considered taboo by other Arab media in a provocative way and provided a voice for opposing Arab views, immersing the channel in controversies (Sakr, 2001; El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003; Zayani, 2005;

Fandy, 2007). This new and uncensored way of reporting news was not widely welcomed among the Arab countries and they submitted official complaints to Qatar regarding some of the channel’s reports. These complaints were always directed to the

Qatari Foreign Minister, Shaikh Hamad bin Jasim Al Thani. In an interview with CBS in May 2001, he said that Arab people are not used “to hear[ing] things which they don’t like, especially the top people, including me. However, democracy started.

Either the leaders like it or they don’t like it. Either you open the door or they break the door. It’s a matter of time, in my opinion” (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003: 117).

Many Arab countries banned Al Jazeera from working in their countries and they closed their offices in a move to curb the channel’s reporting about their leaders and governments. For example, Kuwait closed the channel’s bureau in 1999 for attacking its Amir and the state of Kuwait (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003), and Jordan closed

Al Jazeera’s offices in Amman in 1998. Other countries took different measures, for example, Morocco and Libya recalled their ambassadors to Qatar in 2000 for the

32 channel’s criticism of the monarchy in Morocco and of Libyan policies (Omer, 2009).

However, despite Al Jazeera’s continual reporting of the problems in Arab countries,

Fandy (2007: 9) claims that the channel follows the motto of “anywhere but here” as it barely reports anything about its host and owner country, Qatar. Fandy (2007) supports his claims by giving an example of a documentary by Al Jazeera on

September 18, 2007 in which they attacked senior members of the Saudi royal family based on a story published in The Guardian British newspaper about the defence company BAE Systems and its bribing of Saudis to secure defence contracts.

According to Fandy, Al Jazeera focused on the story the week before the documentary was aired and continued to feature it on news bulletins throughout the subsequent week. However, the “irony is that The Guardian had also run numerous stories about BAE System’s corrupt dealings with senior officials of the state of

Qatar”, but Al Jazeera never reported such incidents (Fandy, 2007: 9).

Al Jazeera became an international name when it broadcast a speech of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in October 2001. This feed was used by the CNN along with translation and the anonymous Al Jazeera became an international channel (El-

Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003). That speech was one of many other exclusives to Al

Jazeera and led many in the West to realise the “seriousness of the propaganda machine that bin Laden had created” (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003: 156). For example, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, requested to be interviewed by Al

Jazeera to explain the reasons for attacking Afghanistan and he was interviewed on

October 9, 2001. The U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave a short interview with the channel six days after the September 11 attacks and the U.S. National

Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, appeared on Al Jazeera to explain the bombing

33 of Afghanistan (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003). However, Al Jazeera’s international fame was not always welcomed by the West in general and the United States in particular. The United States often criticised the channel for giving too much time to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and people hostile to the U.S. as well as for airing videos and images that encouraged anti-American feelings throughout the Middle East (El-

Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003; Zayani, 2005). The U.S. thus allegedly took a number of measures to stop Al Jazeera: for example, a U.S. missile destroyed Al Jazeera’s

Kabul bureau on November 13, 2001, a move that was considered by Al Jazeera as intentional, though the U.S. denied such claims and said that the attack was an accident (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003; Zayani, 2005).

Many scholars and researchers doubt the ability of the media alone to play a transformative role in democratising the Arab world (Lamloum, 2003; Zayani, 2005;

Hafez, 2008). However, it is safe today to claim that Al Jazeera has changed the way

Arabs watch TV, as it has developed the Arab audiences’ “political awareness” (El-

Nawawy and Iskandar, 2003: 55) and led them to “democratic revolution” (Hafez,

2008: 322). Scholars used to argue that Al Jazeera “cannot promote a move toward greater Arab democratisation and political mobilisation” (El-Nawawy and Iskandar,

2003: 55), but now, after the Arab Spring, it is widely believed that it was Al

Jazeera’s ‘relentless’ 24-hour coverage of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and

Libya that ‘toppled long-time dictators’ (Anonymous, 2012). Robert Fisk (2011), for instance, claims that if it was not for Al Jazeera’s live coverage from the Tahrir

Square in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak would still be president and ‘his regime still producing fake news and fake ministries and fake elections for his people’.

34 This brief review of the television in the Middle East and the rise of Al Jazeera shows the influence of the relatively free Al Jazeera reporting on events of interest to the

Arab world (apart from in its home country) and on the trajectory of events in the region, including the recent Arab Spring events.

2.5. Internet and online censorship in the Middle East:

The Middle East has always been at the forefront of welcoming new telecommunication technologies and this is reflected in the speed at which the Internet has spread throughout the region. However, the Arab governments are faced with the dilemma of how to deal with the Internet. For example, they are fully aware of the importance of the Internet for their economic development and for attracting foreign investment. However, the Internet also opens the gate for limitless freedom of expression and communication, which they believe would affect their countries’ political and social stability (HumanRightsWatch, 2005; Mellor et al., 2011). It seems that the governments have managed to utilise many techniques that have turned the

Internet into a “public sphere subject to the usual censorship and sanctions” (Mellor et al., 2011: 123) . This section will review the various ways Middle Eastern governments handle the Internet and the policies and laws that restrict access to the

Internet, freedom of expression, and online censorship.

Tunisia was the first country in the region to establish Internet connection in 1991, but it was only made available to the public in 1996. As of 2011, 39 per cent of the

Tunisian population has access to the Internet. Despite the government’s attempts to spread the use of the Internet, high connection prices and underdeveloped infrastructure still retard the number of users from increasing further

35 (HumanRightsWatch, 2005; FreedomHouse, 2012). Tunisia used to have one of the most repressive Internet censorship systems while under the regime of the ex- president Ben Ali, as the government used three techniques to control Internet access.

These techniques included technical filtering, post-publication censorship, and proactive content manipulation (FreedomHouse, 2012). When the Tunisian revolution began in late December 2010, the government took more measures to control the

Internet and censored various websites It blocked hundreds of Facebook pages that promoted the revolution and news websites covering the revolution, including Al

Jazeera and the BBC. The government also blocked video and photo sharing websites, such as YouTube and Flickr. After Ben Ali’s departure, the Internet in Tunisia became more open, and all web content could be freely browsed, with just a few exceptions as censorship still applied to websites that offended ‘public decency, through violence or incitement to hatred’ (FreedomHouse, 2012).

Egypt introduced the Internet in 1993, but it was only used in a number of government offices and government-affiliated research institutes. The commercial use of the Internet was introduced in 1996 and it soon penetrated into Egyptian society.

As of 2011, 36 per cent of the population had access to the Internet (FreedomHouse,

2012). Since Egypt witnessed the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, the Internet was widely used by the protestors as they used the social media websites to spread their ideas and call other Egyptians to take part in the protests. This online content put a lot of pressure on the government to the extent that it decided to shut down the Internet on the 27th of January 2011. After the end of the revolution, social media websites became the trend for political parties in Egypt and Facebook users numbered over

10.6 million by the end of 2011, making Egypt one of the top 20 countries using

36 Facebook (FreedomHouse, 2012). However, even after the end of the Mubarak regime, bloggers and online activists are still being intimidated by the government.

Algeria established the Internet in 1993 via the state-owned CERIST research centre and after five years, private companies were allowed to provide Internet services. As of 2010, 13.6 per cent of the population use the Internet (Mellor et al., 2011). Algeria introduced a cybercrime law in 2009 that allowed the government to block websites that affected the public order or decency. Moreover, bloggers in Algeria are now subject to defamation suits similar to journalists (FreedomHouse, 2012).

The UAE connected to the Internet through the Etisalat Company and it is considered today as one of the most ‘wired’ Middle Eastern countries with 75.9 per cent of its population Internet users. A new Internet provider was introduced in 2006 to ensure diversity in the national telecommunication market (Mellor et al., 2011). The

Information and Privacy Cybercrime Law prohibits using the Internet to violate political, social and religious norms, although the government claims that only pornographic sites are subject to online censorship (FreedomHouse, 2012). The UAE realised the importance of the Internet in attracting local and foreign investments and therefore established an Internet city, which is considered one of only two in the region (Mellor et al., 2011). The Dubai Internet City (DIC) was established in 2000 and since then it “has successfully developed a prosperous ecosystem for technology organisations” and it is currently the home for more than 500 multinational and global companies, such as Facebook and LinkedIn (DIC, 2013).

37 Jordan introduced the Internet in 1994, and once it became available to the public, the government tried to support its expansion to reach all citizens (Mellor et al., 2011).

The government allowed the public sector to provide the Internet, which led to an increase in user numbers, reaching 35 per cent of the population in 2011. Jordan provides more online freedom in comparison with that of other countries in the region, and the government does not block many websites. However, there are a number of restrictions regarding the content, especially with news websites. For example, many news websites are pressured to remove articles that are politically sensitive (FreedomHouse, 2012).

Although Internet usage in Sudan is only around 19 per cent of the population, this is considered a high percentage when compared with other African countries. Since the

Internet was introduced in Sudan in 1994, the government has taken firm control over it, monitoring e-mails and blocking websites as well as obstructing access to the online video sharing website, YouTube (FreedomHouse, 2012).

Morocco connected to the Internet in 1995, but it was when King Mohamed VI came to power in 1999 that Internet usage became more popular as he connected all schools to the Internet (Mellor et al., 2011). Around 51 per cent of the population used the

Internet in 2011 and the government does not have any official laws that regulate

Internet access or content. However, the government sometimes blocks some websites and restricts the use of certain online tools, such as Google Earth (FreedomHouse,

2012).

38 Although Yemen introduced the Internet earlier than some other countries in the region, its miserable economic situation affected the development and penetration of the Internet. As of 2011, only 15 per cent of the population had access to the Internet.

Yemenis are free to create websites without any restrictions and bloggers have been increasing in number since the unrest that swept the country in 2011. Since the government owns the Internet providers, it blocked access to opposition websites in

2011, and also blocked access to Skype when it discovered journalists used it to conduct online interviews (FreedomHouse, 2012).

People in Oman were first able to use the Internet in 1997, but the sector was dominated by the state-run Oman Telecommunication Company until 2008 when a private company was allowed to provide the Internet. However, the government prohibits online defamation of the ruling family and blocks websites that have sexual or political content. E-mails and Internet chat rooms are constantly monitored as well.

The e-Government project initiated by the Omani government contributed to increasing the number of Internet usage and as of 2011, 68 per cent of the population had access to the Internet (Mellor et al., 2011; FreedomHouse, 2012).

Since the Internet was provided in Qatar in 1997, the government has supported this new telecommunication medium and today the country has one of the best infrastructures in the world in this field. As of 2011, 86 per cent of the population used the Internet (FreedomHouse, 2012). The private Q-Tel Company now controls the telecommunication sector in Qatar. However, although it is a private company, the fact that a member of the royal family owns it enables the government to control

Internet use in practice (Mellor et al., 2011). The government constantly censors

39 political, religious and pornographic content as well as websites that contain materials that contradict the so-called moral values of the country.

The Internet sector has been privatised in Kuwait since the Internet was introduced in

1997 and today there are a number of different Internet providers in the country, which has contributed to the increase in user numbers. As of 2011, 74 per cent of the population use the Internet. However, the Internet has always been monitored by the government to block websites with materials that are anti-Islamic, extremist or pornographic (Mellor et al., 2011; FreedomHouse, 2012).

Although the Internet was introduced in Saudi Arabia in 1998, it took the Saudis a long time to accept this new technology and it was not made available to the public until December 2007. 47.5 per cent of the Saudi population had access to the Internet in 2011. All Saudi connections are routed through a single government-controlled server in order to prevent the public from accessing unsuitable materials (Mellor et al., 2011). This strategy enables the government to exercise strict filtering of the

Internet. The government also blocks websites that contain harmful, illegal, anti-

Islamic and offensive material as well as those with contents that criticise Saudi

Arabia, the royal family or other Gulf States. Websites providing information about drugs, alcohol, gambling or terrorism are also blocked (FreedomHouse, 2012).

The Internet has been available in Syria since 1997, but its use was considered illegal by the Syrian government. It was not made available to the public until 2000 when

Bashar Al Assad became president. Security forces aligned with the government objected to the use of the Internet from the beginning (Mellor et al., 2011), which led

40 the government to establish “a host of repressive and extralegal measures” to suppress the Syrians’ rights to access the Internet freely (HumanRightsWatch, 2005: 67). The

Syrian government censors all written and electronic correspondence and has detained people for expressing their opinions or reporting information online. Following the

2011 unrest in Syria, the government has increased its censorship of the Internet and periodically shuts down the Internet and mobile phone networks to prevent citizens from exchanging news and contacting foreign news correspondents. The government has also intensified the filtering of websites and constantly monitors and tracks

Internet users’ activities. The Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net report for 2012

(FreedomHouse, 2012) regarded Syria “as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for citizen journalists and bloggers, with an untold number arrested and several killed”.

Libya first accessed the Internet in 1998, but the state-owned telecommunication company has monopolised the market (Mellor et al., 2011). During the Al Qaddafi era, the government constantly suppressed freedom of expression online via a number of tactics, including monopolising control of the Internet infrastructure, blocking websites, and continuously monitoring online correspondence as well as punishing online critics. The government’s online censorship and monitoring reached extreme levels after the February 2011 uprisings, and led to the shutting down of all Internet connections. This lasted until August 2011. Following the death of Al Qaddafi, Libya started to witness an unprecedented online openness that has resulted in an increasing number of Internet users. In 2010, only 5 per cent of the population accessed the

Internet, but this number jumped to 17 per cent in 2011, with this number expected to have doubled today (Mellor et al., 2011; FreedomHouse, 2012).

41

Palestine started Internet connections in the late 1990s and there were 13 Internet providers by 2001. The Palestinian National Authority for the Internet was founded in

2005 to administer Internet services (Mellor et al., 2011). Although there are no restrictions on Internet use, there have been some reports that the Palestinian

Authority, Hamas and the Israeli authorities sometimes monitor e-mails and online chat rooms (FreedomHouse, 2012).

The Internet started operating in Iraq in the late 1990s under the strict control and monitoring of Saddam Hussain’s regime. People were not allowed to have Internet access via private providers and the only way to access the Internet was via the public institutions that were monitored by the government. Following the fall of Saddam’s regime, private Internet providers were introduced to the market and people were able to access the Internet at their homes. However, the poor telecommunication infrastructure and poor electricity supply have been the main obstacles to further

Internet penetration in Iraqi society. As of 2011, only 5 per cent of the population accessed the Internet (Mellor et al., 2011; FreedomHouse, 2012).

Lebanon had to rebuild its telecommunication infrastructure following the civil war and the Internet was made available by the early 1990s. Private companies provide the Internet and are supervised by the Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunication

(Mellor et al., 2011). Although Internet infrastructure in Lebanon is one of the poorest in the region, almost 52 per cent of the population accessed the Internet in 2011. The government does not restrict Internet access and there are no laws or regulations regarding online access or publication (FreedomHouse, 2012).

42

As has been shown in the discussion above, most of the Arab governments have been aware of the threats that the internet might pose to political control and social order, and that is why they made sure to set the rules and legislation that enabled them to control access and use of the internet. However, people in the Middle East have found in the Internet the open space that they have always looked for, which allows them to discuss and share information that cannot be broadcast through other forms of media.

This fact has been reflected in the Arab Spring revolutions, which some people refer to as the Internet revolution, Facebook revolution or Twitter revolution, as Arab activists who were actively effective in initiating or developing the events, relied heavily on social media and social networks to discuss and express their thoughts.

This shows that Arab governments have not been able to emulate their past success in controlling the press in their current efforts at controlling the Internet, as the new technology appears far more difficult for governments themselves, or loyalists to the governments, to control.

2.6. Politics and media in Bahrain:

This section will first provide a brief background to Bahrain’s political relationships with the international world, with a special focus on its relationships with the US, UK,

Israel and Iran, given that localisation processes in English newspapers in Bahrain are the primary focus of this thesis. Then it will look into the development of the media in

Bahrain, providing an overview of the roles played by the press, radio, television and the Internet as well as the rules regulating them. This section will be useful in providing a better understanding of how Bahrain’s relationships with the other countries play a major role in the ideologies that are broadcast through its media.

43

The Kingdom of Bahrain, as shown in the figure below, is an archipelago of 33 islands situated in the middle of the Arabian Gulf near the west coast of Qatar and the east coast of Saudi Arabia. It has been ruled by the Al Khalifa family since 1783, and it was a British protectorate from 1861 until its independence in 1971. Islam is the official religion of Bahrain and 85 per cent of the population are Muslims. Bahrain offers a climate of religious tolerance and other religions are practised in an open environment, including Christianity and Hinduism., A small minority of Jews and

Zoroastrians also live there (Hamod and Parsigian, 1994). According to the results of the last census in 2010 conducted by the Central Informatics Organisation, the population of Bahrain was more than 1.2 million people (CIO, 2010).

Figure 2-3: Map of Bahrain

44

2.6.1. Bahrain’s foreign relationships:

Bahrain has always been of commercial and strategic interest for foreign powers and attracted “successive waves of Portuguese, Dutch, Ottoman, British and latterly US intervention” (Held and Ulrichsen, 2012: 3). This mixture of foreign interaction has affected the socio-political development of Bahrain. This section will review

Bahrain’s relationships with some of the key international powers, such as Britain and the US as well as its relations with its Middle Eastern neighbours, especially Iran,

Israel and Palestine. This overview will help understand the ideologies transmitted through the Bahraini media.

2.6.1.1. Bahrain and the UK:

Bahrain has had long and ongoing good relationships with the UK that go back to

May 1861 when Bahrain ruler, Shaikh Mohammad bin Khalifah Al Khalifa, signed

“the Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship” with the British through which the Al

Khalifa aimed to ward off threats from Persia and the Ottoman Empire (Joyce, 2012: xi). During the 1880s Bahrain ruler Shaikh Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa signed further agreements that made Bahrain a protected state of the British, who assumed responsibility for its defence and obtained a substantial say in its external affairs. The

Al Khalifas remained responsible for the internal affairs of the state, although they employed British nationals to assist them in various capacities (Winkler, 2007). Due to Bahrain’s strategic location, it was a staging point for the British Expeditionary

Force and when the British had to abandon their naval base in southern Iran, they believed Bahrain would be an ideal location for their navy. The Royal Navy moved to

Bahrain in 1935 (Winkler, 2007; Joyce, 2012). When India obtained independence in

45 1947, it was assumed that Britain was ready to leave the Gulf, since its presence in the

Gulf had been mainly to secure its sea route to India. However, Britain continued to maintain its position in the Gulf. It was after the end of World War II that Arab nationalism started to spread across the Arab world. Arabs, including Bahrainis, started to demonstrate against Britain. However, Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf was mainly due to its financial situation rather than to any pressure from demonstrations in the Middle East, and so it was not until 1971 that the British publicly announced their intention of withdrawing from the Gulf. Bahrain got its independence in December 1971, but has retained its friendly relationship with

Britain.

Alongside the gradual withdrawal of the UK from Bahrain, another country was securing a greater presence in the country and in the Gulf region as well, namely, the

U.S. The following part will thus examine the history of the Bahraini-American relationships.

2.6.1.2. Bahrain and the US:

Bahrain’s relations with the US date back to 1892 when Reverend Samuel Zwemer arrived in Bahrain with medicine to treat certain ailments. In 1900, Zwemer was granted land to build a two-storey hospital that “served Bahraini’s healthcare needs for the next sixty years” (Winkler, 2007: 15). Although the British resisted any

American corporate presence in Bahrain, Standard Oil Company of California received the right to search for oil and formed the Bahrain Petroleum Company

(BAPCO) in 1928. It was in June 1932 that the company was successful in discovering oil and it was the first in the Gulf region. With the US investment in

46 Bahrain, the US proposed to establish a US Consulate in Bahrain, but the British refused. Therefore, the US turned to Saudi Arabia and opened a consulate in Dhahran in 1944 that maintained contact with members of the Bahrain Al Khalifa rulers. In the

1940s, Britain allowed US sailors to use its recreational facilities at its Naval base in

Jufair. A number of US battleships also stopped there to obtain fuel, and, according to

Winkler (2007: 27), in 1949 almost “158 US Navy fleet oilers and tankers” stopped at

Bahrain to obtain fuel for the fleet. This growing US presence in Bahrain led the US to ask Britain for a small amount of land on which to store its naval equipment and they agreed. By 1966, Bahrain had become the homeport for a US battleship that served as the flagship of the US Middle East Force (MIDEASTFOR) and in

December 1971, the US and Bahrain signed an agreement that ensured the continued presence of the US Naval Forces in Bahrain following the departure of the British forces. Bahrain has thus become the “only Arab state that provided a home port for the US Navy” (Joyce, 2012: 62). When the first Bahrain elected parliament established in 1973 refused to renew the MIDEASTFOR’s lease, Shaikh Isa dissolved the National Assembly and a number of the opposition members were exiled from

Bahrain. Diplomatic relations between Bahrain and the US were further strengthened when in 1974 a resident US Ambassador was assigned and in 1976 Bahrain appointed an Ambassador to the United States. In 1991, Bahrain and the US signed a security agreement and in 1995 Bahrain became the operational headquarters for the US

Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which was “the first new American fleet in 50 years” (Joyce,

2012: 109).

Having looked at how Bahrain has historically had good political relations with two international powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the UK and the US, it

47 is now important to review Bahrain’s relations with its more immediate neighbouring countries.

2.6.1.3. Bahrain and Iran:

Iran, or Persia, as it was known in the past, invaded Bahrain in the seventeenth century although the ancestors of the present Al Khalifa rulers re-established control in 1783 (Joyce, 2012). However, Iran has always been interested in Bahrain and from time to time has claimed that Bahrain belongs to them. The following is a look at the repeated Iranian claims. In 1930, the Iranian government complained that the Shaikh of Bahrain had no right to grant oil concessions and in 1934, Iran contacted the US and claimed that the oil concessions granted by Bahrain were not valid. In 1948, the

Iranian Foreign Office sent two notes to the British Embassy in Tehran claiming that

Bahrain was part of Iran. In 1956, Iran’s Foreign Minister claimed in a press conference that Bahrain belonged to Iran. Both the US and the British refused these claims and have always countered Iran, arguing that its claims are not valid. The claims came to life again after the British announced that they would leave the Gulf region and in 1970, the Shah of Iran asked the United Nations to investigate its claims. The UN mission arrived in Bahrain to investigate the wishes of the Bahraini people as to whether they wanted their sheikhdom annexed by Iran or they wished their sheikhdom to become an independent state. The mission reported that the vast majority of the Bahraini people rejected Iran’s claims and wanted to become an independent state.

After the Shah left Iran in 1979, and Iran got a new ruler, Ayatollah Ruholla

Khomeini, the relations between Bahrain and Iran started to be a concern for both the

48 UK and the US. Iran resurrected its claims to Bahrain in 1979 after the Iranian revolution and Bahraini supporters for Khomeini organised demonstrations in Bahrain and demanded that Bahrain become an Islamic state like the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The influence of the Iranian revolution resulted in a lot of the Bahrain Shia population holding ongoing demonstrations against the Bahraini Sunni leaders. Although most of the demonstrations were motivated by domestic dissatisfaction and hope for greater political participation, Iran provided these demonstrators with financial support and military training in the hope of overthrowing the Al Khalifa family. These demonstrations continue to cause unrest in Bahrain and Iran remains a threat to

Bahrain’s existence as a politically independent state.

2.6.1.4. Bahrain, Palestine and Israel:

The year 1947 was a very important year that established the lines for Bahrain’s relations with both Palestine and Israel. At that time, Bahrain had a “small Jewish community that numbered between 300 and 400 members” (Joyce, 2012: 7), which had good relationships with the Bahraini Muslims. When the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine in November 1947 and establish two states, a Jewish and a

Palestinian state, anger spread all over the Arab world, including in Bahrain. Jewish homes and shops were smashed and robbed by mobs “composed largely by Iranian and Trucial Coast sailors” (Joyce, 2012: 7). Shaikh Salman, the Bahrain ruler at that time, was annoyed by such actions and assumed responsibility to ensure the safety of the Jewish community in Bahrain. Although Bahrain wanted no connection with the new state of Israel, and despite the public sympathy for the Palestinians, the Bahraini government did not want to permit large numbers of Palestinian refugees to settle in

Bahrain (Joyce, 2012).

49

Due to British support for the attack on Egypt in 1956 and its support for Israel, riots broke out in Bahrain and British nationals were attacked. However, the relations with

Britain settled down quickly and went back to normal, although Bahrain continued to support the Arab boycott of Israel. In 1967, when the Six Days’ War began, Bahrainis gathered outside the British Political Agency to show their opposition to the British support for Israel. In October 1973, war broke out again between the Arab countries, led by Egypt and Syria and Israel. Being aware of the US support for Israel during the war, Shaikh Isa, the ruler of Bahrain, called in a number of the US diplomats in

Bahrain and informed them that due to their support for Israel, Bahrain had decided to expel the US Navy. However, this decision was subsequently retracted to ensure

Bahrain’s safety and ward off any Iranian threats as well as to provide training for

Bahraini soldiers (Joyce, 2012). Following the 1973 war, Arab countries allowed the establishment of Palestinian liberation offices in their countries and to follow the rest of the Arab world, Bahrain also agreed to permit the establishment of such an office.

In 1979, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in Washington outraged Arabs and

Bahrainis, and Bahrain continues to have no formal diplomatic ties with Israel.

However, despite Bahrain’s continuous and consistent opposition to the recognition of the state of Israel, Shaikh Hamad, the King of Bahrain, appointed Houda Nonoo, a

Bahraini Jewish woman, as a member of the Shura Council in 2008. The King was

“able to distinguish between support for Israel and friendship with Jews” (Joyce,

2012: 114) and in 2011 she became the first Jewish ambassador to represent any Arab country when she was appointed Bahrain’s Ambassador to the US.

50 2.6.2. Media in Bahrain:

Under British protection, the local media in Bahrain was suppressed and there were not many developments in the field of media at that time as there was “virtually zero press representation” (Hamod and Parsigian, 1994: 28). This was mainly due to the

British trying to prevent the spread of feelings of nationalism among the Bahraini people. However, with the early introduction of education that goes back to 1919 and the early discovery of oil, an infrastructure for the development of media was established. However, the main developments in all fields of media came after independence in 1971.

2.6.2.1. The press in Bahrain:

According to Al Shaiji (1989), the first printed newspaper in Bahrain was in English, the Bahrain Islander, and was published by the Bahrain Petroleum Company

(BAPCO) before 1938, being distributed for free to the company’s European and

Asian employees as well as to English-speaking Bahrainis. The first Arabic newspaper was published in 1939 six months before the beginning of the Second

World War (Sarhan, 2006). When Bahrain got its independence in 1971, there were almost no Bahraini newspapers being printed, and so the government took on the role of nurturing the development of the print media as it regarded it as “a valued public service and an important means of communication in all areas of human activity”

(Hamod and Parsigian, 1994: 28). As has already been discussed earlier in this chapter, Rugh (2004) categorised the Bahraini press as a loyalist press.

When King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa came to power after the death of his father in

1999, he immediately initiated many political reforms and various developments in all

51 sectors, including the press and media sectors. Bahrain witnessed unprecedented openness and more freedom of expression than it had ever had. This resulted in an increase in the number of newspapers. Today, there are six privately owned newspapers, four in Arabic and two in English. Al Wasat Arabic newspaper represents the opposition in Bahrain as it is more critical of the government than all the other newspapers (FreedomHouse, 2012). Al Wasat newspaper was founded in 2001 by Dr.

Mansour Al Jamri, the son of the late Abdul Amir Al Jamri, one of the most prominent Shia leaders in Bahrain. Dr. Al Jamri had been living in London since 1979 in self-imposed exile and returned to Bahrain when King Hamad allowed all exiled

Bahrainis, most of whom resided in the UK and had established good relations with foreign media outlets, to return home. They were given their Bahraini passports back as part of the King’s reforms. Regarding the English newspapers in Bahrain, the Gulf

Daily News has been around since 1978 and has a paid daily circulation of 11,500 copies (AlHilal, 2012). The newspaper covers primarily local, political and social news, but it also features international business and social news. The Daily Tribune is the other English newspaper published in Bahrain, and it was first printed in 2010. It is a small newspaper, mainly focusing on local news.

Despite the newspapers in Bahrain being loyalist in nature, their coverage of news and politics is seen as more critical and independent than that in most of the other

Arab and Gulf countries. However, just as with the other loyalist newspapers in the region, Bahraini newspapers also avoid covering sensitive issues such as “sectarian tensions, relations with surrounding countries, government corruption, demonstrations and human rights violations” (FreedomHouse, 2012). Newspapers are monitored by the Information Affairs Authority (IAA) to ensure their compliance with the Bahraini

52 Press Law. The current Press Law in Bahrain was enacted in 2002 and although it stipulates in its first Article that “each and every human has the right to express his/her opinion and publish it through words or writing” (IAA, 2013), it also “includes

17 categories of offences and provides for sentences ranging from six months to five years imprisonment for criticising the state’s official religion, the King and inciting actions that undermine state security” (IFJ, 2008). Although the government introduced some amendments to the 2002 Press Law, which eliminated imprisonment sentences for journalists and prior censorship on publications, journalists and professionals in the media field in Bahrain are still pushing for more amendments that will ensure more freedom of expression in the country.

When Bahrain experienced uprisings that were linked to the other Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, the overall level of press freedom in Bahrain declined and the government took a number of measures to punish (alleged) misreporting of these events by local journalists. For example, during the early days of the uprisings, Al

Wasat newspaper published a number of reports that were found by authorities to be false, including one about a photo of a man who, the newspaper claimed, had been beaten by the Bahraini security officers. This photo and a number of other reports were found to be news reports from other countries that had been rewritten to be used in the newspaper. The beaten man was identified as a Moroccan citizen who had been beaten in Morocco and not in Bahrain (Fahad, 2012). The newspaper was shut down in April 2011 and its editor-in-chief and founder, Dr. Mansour Al Jamri, resigned from his position and was fined by the court for publishing false information and inciting the public. The newspaper soon reopened and Dr. Al Jamri was even restored to his position as part of the King’s and the government’s efforts for reconciliation

53 (FreedomHouse, 2012). Therefore, although the freedom of expression and freedom of the press were affected by the 2011 uprisings in Bahrain, some of the actions that the government took against violating journalists, such as Dr. Al Jamri, were exaggerated by many foreign organisations, even Freedom House, and have been used to damage the overall image of the state of freedom of the press in Bahrain.

2.6.2.2. Radio in Bahrain:

Bahrain’s first experience with radio transmission was in the 1940s when the British established a radio station, but the British radio broadcasting did not live for long and radio operation had ended by the end of the World War II. In 1955, the Bahraini government started an Arabic radio station that initially started airing programs for two hours a day. The station mainly provided news, music and some entertainment programs. By the 1980s, the broadcasting was extended to 14 hours per day. The

Bahrain radio transmission reached neighbouring countries and attracted commercial sponsorship from those countries. In 1977, the Ministry of Information started an

English radio station that became popular in the neighbouring countries (Hamod and

Parsigian, 1994; Boyd, 1999). Today, Bahrain has a number of radio channels that operate almost around the clock, although they mainly operate as entertainment tools.

2.6.2.3. Television in Bahrain:

Television broadcasting was late to start in Bahrain as it only began in 1973 when an

American company signed a contract with the Bahraini government to start operating a colour commercial television service. The company started operating from a small studio and the Ministry of Information soon took over operating the station in 1976

(Boyd, 1999). In 1981, the government started another channel in English and the

54 number of channels increased during the 1990s. Increasing the number of channels was mainly in order to increase the range of program choices and provide more coverage of various events in the 1990s, especially the Gulf War (Hamod and

Parsigian, 1994). The introduction of satellite television provided Bahrainis with more television content. Bahrain has always welcomed private broadcasters to operate from the country, as it was the host for Orbit and MBC. Recently, Saudi businessman and investor, Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, signed contracts with the Bahraini government to start operating a new satellite channel from Bahrain that will be dedicated to news, to compete with Al Jazeera and other similar news channels in the region.

2.6.2.4. The Internet in Bahrain:

Bahrain connected to the Internet in 1995 and has today one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the region (Mellor et al., 2011; FreedomHouse, 2012). As of

2011, more than 77 per cent of the population have access to the Internet. Bahrain’s telecommunication infrastructure is ranked first in the Middle East and 13th globally, according to the United Nation’s e-Government Readiness report for 2010

(AMEinfo.com, 2010; FreedomHouse, 2012). There are 13 Internet service providers in Bahrain today, and most of them are privately owned except for Batelco whose shares are mostly owned by the government. The 2002 Press Law in Bahrain covers online censorship and the Information Affairs Authority (IAA) is responsible for handling online content. Religious, political and pornographic websites are the main websites that get censored in Bahrain and there are more than 1,000 websites blocked by the IAA (FreedomHouse, 2012). However, online censorship intensified following the 2011 events and the government deliberately slowed down Internet speeds to make uploading media more difficult for anti-government protestors, who were active

55 in uploading videos of their protests against the government on YouTube. The social media in Bahrain has grown rapidly and by 2011 there were 315,000 Facebook users and 62,000 Twitter users, which puts the Bahraini people among the most active on social media.

As has been discussed above, the media and the press in Bahrain are loyalist, and so operate according to the rules and regulations established by the government. It is therefore considered normal for the media to support the government and all its policies, including its relations with the international community. This relationship between the government and the media plays an important role in the production and broadcast of news, as news producers always make sure to maintain support for the government through broadcasting the ideologies that call for the public unity with the government. The case of Bahrain can be extended to apply to almost all the Arab countries, particularly since the events of the Arab Spring. Therefore, understanding how the media operates in Bahrain, and more specifically to this thesis, understanding the localisation process of news in Bahrain, can arguably provide insights into how this process is carried out in the other countries in the region as well.

2.7. Concluding remarks: media in the Middle East between globalisation

and localisation:

The discussions in the previous sections show that the Middle East has witnessed massive development of the media since the 1990s. For example, this development has been reflected in the launch of various transnational satellite channels, some of which have reached international fame, such as Al Jazeera. Thus, despite the attempts of most of the Arab governments to control the media and increase feelings of

56 nationalism among their people, globalisation has changed the face of the media in the region.

Globalisation has been defined as “a world without a nation-state, or without a nation and without a state. It is a world of corporations and networks” (Lahlali, 2011: 51).

However, it could be argued that most of the effects of globalisation on the media in the Middle East have been one way, in the sense that Western culture has had more effect on the Arab world via the media than the other way round. For example, Arab broadcasters import “between 40 to 60 per cent of their programs” from the West

(Sabry, 2005: 44). Faced with the challenges posed by globalisation to their societies’ cultures and identities, Arab governments have tried to control the inflow of foreign information and instructed their media institutions to engage in the process of localising foreign media content. It is only when this process is understood within the contexts outlined in this chapter, that the importance of the concept of ‘localisation’ of the Middle Eastern media (and in turn, of the whole culture and political systems of the region) becomes clear. Localisation, therefore, is defined here as “the process of selecting particular elements and adapting global information to suit a local framework” (Clausen, 2003: 105). This thesis thus focuses on how media in the

Middle East localises foreign information by examining how English newspapers in the Middle East localise the news reports of the international news agencies. The following chapter outlines relevant previous studies, and provides a more detailed look into how the current thesis will approach the localisation process.

57 Chapter 3 Literature Review

News media is becoming increasingly important all over the world and the interest in how media works, how language works and how both interact has grown significantly in recent years (Bell, 1991; Rugh, 2004). This section will give an overview of the reasons that have made media discourse such a rich topic for research, and will highlight the various methodologies used to study media discourse. The methodologies discussed in this chapter are those that form the multidisciplinary framework used in the analysis of this study. The details of the framework will be explained in detail in the methodology chapter.

This chapter starts by providing a theoretical background that informs the analytical framework adopted in the current study by first looking at the reasons for studying media discourse (3.1), and then the various methodologies used to analyse media discourse (Sections 3.2 and 3.3). After briefly outlining relevant perspectives on ideology, (Section 3.4), the chapter next provides a detailed review of relevant studies

(Section 3.5). The chapter ends by highlighting the research questions of this study

(Section 3.6).

3.1. Media discourse:

Media discourse is a multidisciplinary field and as such has been the focus of language, communication and media studies scholars (Bell and Garrett, 1998; Talbot,

2007). Bell (1991: 3) lists a number of reasons for studying media discourse and claims that just because media language is “there”, it attracts researchers to describing

58 how the media uses language. In other words, since media is accessible and familiar to almost everyone, studying it would help identify how society plays a role in the language of media. He also argues that because language is a tool that is used to express the media’s messages, researchers are concerned not only with what the media transmits, but also with how language carries that content. Another feature of media discourse that has made it so popular for research, according to Bell (1991), is availability. He states that media discourse is easier to collect than conversation and it is available in large quantities.

This thesis focuses on studying media discourse because these days most people’s knowledge and perceptions of the world are influenced by what they receive through the media. Media discourse has become a tool through which people view the world, but this raises a major question: does the media transmit a ‘true’ image of the world?

In other words, how large a role does the media play in manipulating people’s perceptions and attitudes toward certain events? This question is the central topic of this thesis, as it aims to identify how three of the major international news agencies report a number of global events, and compare these with how a local English newspaper in Bahrain uses these reports to produce its own versions, with its own views and attitudes towards these events. The thesis also examines the reverse of this topic, that is, how international news agencies internationalise or eticise the perspective of insiders with respect to the events of the Arab Spring.

Media includes both written and spoken news, such as newspapers, radio and television, as well as the new types of media, that is, online media with all its forms such as online newspapers. This study will focus on only one type of media discourse:

59 newspapers’ news reports. Thus the focus will be on written language. Other types of media discourse will not be included in the analysis of this study. Therefore, the term

‘media discourse’ in this study will refer primarily to newspaper news reports. It is essential here to discuss the genre of news reports and identify its main characteristics that distinguish it from the other genres of media discourse.

3.1.1. The genre of newspaper news reports:

Genre refers to “a type of text or communicative event” (van Leeuwen, 2008: 345) or in other words it refers to the way language is used in a conventionalised communicative setting (Wodak, 2008; Lavid, Arus and Moraton, 2012). Genre analysis, according to van Leeuwen (2008: 346), aims at “describing what people do to, for, or with each other by means of text and communicative events” and

“describing how the way in which they do this helps set up or maintain specific relationships”.

The mass media includes various genres, such as “editorials, news reports, review articles, advertisements, sports reports, letters to the editor” (Bhatia, 2002: 10). This thesis focuses on the genre of news reports, which is regarded by many “cultural studies” as a mode of “narrative” (White, 1997: 101). Although news reports are referred to as “stories” even by journalists (van Leeuwen, 2008: 349), news reports have their own “general properties of discourse” and are distinguished from other media texts or similar non-media texts by their “characteristic structures” (van Dijk,

1988b: 176). News reports mainly present “the point of views of various external sources” and “strive to remain objective” by using “neutral language” (Lavid et al.,

2012: 5) and “impersonal mode of meaning making” (White, 1997). Caldas-Coulthard

60 (1994: 302) claims that most people believe what they read in a newspaper even if “a journalist reports events which can be shown not to have happened” mainly because

“the medium determines for the reader what sort of text s/he is exposed to”.

Van Leeuwen (2008) identifies a number of the distinctive features of the news reports. He states that the news report “has a beginning, but no end” and it recounts actions and events, but these actions and events “are not necessarily told in their chronological order” (van Leeuwen, 2008: 352). News reports are widely known for their “inverted pyramid” structure (van Dijk, 1988b; Huckin, 1997; van Leeuwen,

2008) as they begin with the most “newsworthy, recent, urgent, unexpected, relevant to the readers’ interests” information “as construed by the newspaper” (van Leeuwen,

2008: 353). This important information, or the central event of the news report, as van

Leeuwen (2008: 353) mentions, is tied in in the report with many other events in a number of ways. Borrowing from Allan Bell (1991), van Leeuwen (2008: 353) lists some examples of the ways the central event might be linked to other events in a news reports. One of the methods is to include earlier events to serve as “background” or

“context”. Another way is to provide “follow up” of the actions “subsequent to the main action of an event” (van Leeuwen, 2008: 354). Using the method of commentary enables the journalist to provide his or her own “observations on the action” (van

Leeuwen, 2008: 354). Such methods or ways helps the news producer to bring

“diverse events together” (van Leeuwen, 2008: 355).

One of the main features of a news report is reporting “what people said” (Caldas-

Coulthard, 1994: 295). Since a news report is supposed to be “factual, neutral and free of subjectivity” (White, 1997: 106), a news producer or journalist is “supposed to

61 represent the actual wording” when someone is quoted in the news report (Caldas-

Coulthard, 1994: 296). This objectivity in reporting the opinions of other people in a news report is achieved by attributing the opinions quoted “to signify that they are the opinions of spokespeople” and not “of the journalist him or herself” (van Leeuwen,

2008: 356). However, when a journalist uses indirect quotes or paraphrase, they

“represent the sense or gist of what was supposedly said” and therefore they are “not simply formal variants, but they also differ in meaning” (Caldas-Coulthard, 1994:

296). One of the possible ways for a journalist to interfere in the quoting is through the reporting verb which can be used to convey an idea (Caldas-Coulthard, 1994).

Having identified how news reports have their own special characteristics, the next section provides a detailed discussion of some of the main methods used in media discourse analysis in general, and news reports analysis in specific.

3.2. Discourse analytic methods for studying media discourse:

This section will give an overview of some of the main approaches of discourse analysis used for analysing the kinds of media discourse that are used in the multidisciplinary framework in this study. It starts by highlighting the text linguistics approach and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). A detailed overview of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach is then provided. This overview of

CDA also highlights some of the major criticisms it has received, and identifies subsequent alternative approaches to analysing media discourse. This section will then provide a detailed look at how ethnography is of benefit to media discourse analysis in this study. The section will end by providing a brief overview of how

62 ideology is viewed by a number of scholars in order to identity the perspective of this study towards ideology.

3.2.1. Text linguistics and SFG:

Text linguistics refers to any work in language science which considers the text as its primary object of inquiry (de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981). According to de

Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), text was first used as an object of analysis by rhetoricians of Ancient Greece and Rome. Rhetorics shares some of the concerns of text linguistics. For example, it has been found that the accessing and arranging of ideas is open to systematic control judgments of texts that can be made in terms of their effects upon the audience or receivers; and texts are vehicles of purposeful interaction. Traditional Stylistics was also concerned with texts, as style results from the characteristic selection of options for producing a text or set of texts. According to text linguists, the study of conversation (often in the guise of discourse analysis) is also important to a science of text, as de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) mention that the “mechanisms which combine texts as single contributions into discourses as sets of mutually relevant texts directed to each other, reveal major factors about the standards of textuality”.

Halliday’s SFG, which is an approach to linguistics different from traditional text linguistics, has been widely used in discourse analysis to look into the role of language in structuring power relations in society as it “stressed the relationship between the grammatical system and the social and personal needs that language is required to serve” (Wodak, 2006: 7). Some linguists believe that SFG provides a

63 useful descriptive and interpretive framework for viewing language as a strategic, meaning-making resource (Eggins, 1994).

According to Halliday (1994), texts can be analysed on the basis of how language is used, the meaning in language, and how each element in language refers to its function in the linguistic system. He claims that linguistic analysis helps in the understanding of the text as it shows how and why the text means what it does. It also helps in the evaluation of the text as it shows why the text is or is not effective for its purposes. Halliday states that effective discourse analysis starts with grammatical analysis, as this will enable the analyst to interpret the meaning of a text. However, one problem that the analyst must inevitably face is the issue of how to divide the text into pieces and how this can affect in turn, what can be analysed (Martin, Matthiessen and Painter, 1997).

Written texts are already divided into sentences and this forms a good starting point for the analyst. In Halliday’s SFG, it is argued that the clause is an important point of analysis too, and so he provides three ways for analysing texts, which he calls metafunctions (Martin et al., 1997). These metafunctions are:

• Ideational: involves looking for the processes in a text.

• Interpersonal: involves treating the text as a dialogue.

• Textual: involves taking advantage of the fact that the text may tend to return

to closely related starting points at the beginning of successive clauses.

64 These three metafunctions that Halliday identified as components of meaning in language correspond to three grammatical components. Thompson (2004) explains that the textual metafunction is represented by the system of theme. The interpersonal component of the grammar is the part where we describe all the options that we have in expressing interpersonal meaning, which is referred to as the system of mood. The ideational metafunction is divided into two functions: the first is experiential, which is represented in grammar by transitivity. This looks into who did what to whom and in what circumstances. The second function of the ideational metafunction is logical, which is represented in grammar by the clause complex that explores the relationships between clauses (Martin et al., 1997).

This brief discussion of the main features of SFG is vital to the understanding of the multidisciplinary analytical framework adopted in this study, which borrows some

SFG features and applies them along with other approaches. Such features include using certain parts of the transitivity function and applying some parts of the theme system in the analysis of the texts.

3.2.2. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA):

The relationship between language, society and ideology in media discourse has always been the focus of CDA because media discourse represents a rich source of accessible data: it influences and represents people’s use of language in a speech community; it can tell us about social meanings and stereotypes; and it reflects and influences the formation and expression of culture, politics and social life (Bell and

Garrett, 1998). CDA aims to critically investigate social inequality as it is expressed by language (Wodak and Meyer, 2001). The purpose of CDA, according to

65 Blommaert (2005: 24), is to analyse “opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language”. CDA explicitly tries to discover and reveal the role of discourse in reproducing or challenging socio-political dominance (Bell and Garrett, 1998). CDA has been widely used in the study and analysis of media discourse because media discourse, it is argued, involves hidden power relations that are not clear to people. A key focus of CDA has been to examine the workings of power relations hidden in the media discourse (Fairclough, 2001).

3.2.2.1. The roots of CDA:

CDA traces its roots from “classical Rhetoric, Text linguistics and Sociolinguistics, as well as Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics” (Wodak, 2006: 1). Its origins can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s in the works of Roger Fowler and Gunter Kress

(Wodak and Meyer, 2001). This approach to linguistic analysis was labelled Critical

Linguistics (CL).

It was only in the 1990s that the term CDA started to be used (Wodak and Meyer,

2001; Blommaert, 2005). According to Wodak and Meyer (2001: 4), the start of CDA was marked by “the launch of van Dijk’s journal Discourse and Society as well as through several books, such as Language and Power by Norman Fairclough (1989),

Language, Power and Ideology by Ruth Wodak in 1989, and Teun van Dijk’s first book on racism, Prejudice in Discourse in 1984”.

Wodak argues that the terms CL and CDA are often used interchangeably. Unlike other discourse analysis and text linguistics paradigms, CL and CDA not only focus

66 on texts as objects of inquiry, but also aim to offer critical accounts of the social processes and structures which take place in the text production, and of the social processes and structures within which individuals or groups (as social historical subjects) create meanings in their interaction with texts (Wodak and Meyer, 2001).

In this brief overview of the CDA approach, the frameworks of two of the main scholars that contributed to its development, Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk, are outlined.

• Norman Fairclough:

Fairclough, who is arguably one of CDA’s most influential practitioners (Poole,

2010), in his book Language and Power (1989; 2001) sets out the basic theories of

CDA and illustrates the field, its aims and methods of analysis through analysing a variety of textual examples (Wodak and Meyer, 2001). His CDA approach is “based mainly on Halliday’s multifunctional linguistic theory” (Titscher, Meyer, Wodak and

Vetter, 2000: 148).

Fairclough’s CDA approach aims at helping people to see the extent to which language rests on common-sense assumptions and how these assumptions can be ideologically shaped by relations of power. He claims that in discourse people can be legitimising or delegitimising particular power relations without being aware of doing so and it is the role of CDA to help increase people’s awareness of such hidden practices in discourse. This claim applies to media discourse where the nature of power relations enacted in it is not clear and involves hidden relations of power.

67 Fairclough focuses on the analysis of mass media discourse as he tries to reveal the misleading assumptions made by media institutions in which they claim that what they provide is neutral (Wodak and Meyer, 2001). He provides an extensive approach to critically analysing media discourse. His framework is based on three stages that can be illustrated as in the following figure:

Process of production

Text Description

(text)

Interpretation (processing Process of interpretation

analysis)

Discourse practice

Explanation (social Sociocultural practice analysis)

(situational, institutional, social)

Figure 3-1: Dimensions of discourse and discourse analysis (Titscher et al., 2000:

152)

The following will explain the three stages of Fairclough’s CDA framework

(Fairclough, 2001; Bazzi, 2009):

68 (1) the description stage is concerned with formal properties of the text that make one aware of power and discourse effects. This stage builds on Halliday’s SFG and pragmatics in its approach to analysing discourse. Fairclough suggests examining as many features as possible in relation to power and ideology and provides ten main questions that can be asked of a text to facilitate its analysis. These questions are categorised into three formal features of discourse (vocabulary, grammar and textual structure). Some of the questions that can be asked about the text can be in regard to: the selection of particular grammar structures (transitivity and passivisation), modality, categorisation in vocabulary, cohesion (lexical cohesion), informational structuring (thematisation, foregrounding or backgrounding), making certain voices heard or marginalised, and being polite. According to Fairclough, powerful participants in discourse can control the text and the contribution of non-powerful participants by exercising a number of constraints. The first constraint is content, which refers to, for example, what is included or excluded, in order to influence the audience’s knowledge and beliefs. The second constraint is relations with readership, such as enmity or solidarity, thus, influencing the social relationship. The third and last constraint is subject or identity, which shows how power positions one as subject.

(2) The interpretation stage is concerned with the relationship between text and interaction. This stage makes the analyst more aware of how the text producer and target audience make use of their background knowledge and ideological assumptions to make sense of the text. This stage draws upon pragmatic meanings and common- sense assumptions. Common-sense assumptions refer to the cognitive aspect needed to interpret a text, such as beliefs, knowledge and presuppositions. Fairclough (2001:

69) argues that none of “the common-sense assumptions” are asserted in the text. The

69 process of text interpretation, according to Fairclough, is done in two stages. The first stage involves the interpretation of text and this is done on a number of levels. The first level relates to the process through which the interpreters convert strings of sounds or marks on paper into recognisable words, phrases and sentences by using their knowledge of the language. The second level has to do with relating the meanings to the constituent parts of text by using their semantic knowledge and pragmatic conventions. The third level establishes meaning connections between utterances, and produces coherent interpretations. The fourth and final level is the interpretation of text structure, achieved by working out how a whole text hangs together. The second stage of interpretation is the interpretation of context, which suggests that readers or interpreters of situational context arrive at their interpretation based on a number of external cues such as the discourse type that is drawn upon.

(3) The last stage of the framework is explanation, which is concerned with the relationship between interaction and social context. It is also concerned with the ideological reproduction of social structures. It is in this stage that the analyst attempts to understand the social struggles, political institutions and/or educational systems that influence the text producer. “Questions of power are of central interest” in this stage (Titscher et al., 2000: 151).

In his later publications, Fairclough elaborates on how CDA’s analytical framework is used to investigate the relationship between language, power, ideology and social change. His research focus has shifted to processes of social change in their discourse aspect. He is now more concerned with contemporary processes of social transformation such as “neo-liberalism, globalisation, transition, information society,

70 knowledge-based economy and learning society” (Fairclough, 2005: 1). Fairclough states that his approach assumes that language is an irreducible part of social life and interconnected with other elements of social life. He claims that social analysis and research always have to take language into account (Fairclough, 2003). So his approach involves working in a transdisciplinary way through dialogue with other disciplines and theories that address contemporary processes of social change. This approach, according to Fairclough, aims to account for the extent to which social changes are changes in discourse, and to identify, through analysis, the particular linguistic, semiotic and interdiscursive features of texts which are a part of processes of social change in ways which facilitate the integration of textual analysis into multi- disciplinary research on change. Interdiscursive analysis is a central feature of

Fairclough’s approach as it allows the analyst to incorporate elements of context into the analysis of texts to show the relationship between concrete occasional events and more durable social practices and to show innovation and change in texts. It also allows analysts to show connections between detailed linguistic and semiotic features of texts, and various processes of social change (Fairclough, 2005). The analysis of texts is concerned with the linguistic forms of texts and the distribution of different linguistic forms across different types of texts. To Fairclough, the analysis of texts is part of social science, and since he adopts a realist social ontological position, the reality of texts should not be assumed to be exhausted by our knowledge about texts, and therefore no analysis of a text can tell us all there is to be said about it

(Fairclough, 2003). His transdisciplinary approach helps enhance our capacity to see things in texts through operating the social theoretical perspectives and insights in textual analysis.

71 • Teun van Dijk:

Teun van Dijk (1998a) is another influential CDA practitioner who has provided a comprehensive study of the relationship between discourse, ideology and media. His study of media discourse not only uses “his own reflection on communication in the mass media”, but also combines the theories and applications of many other scholars

“interested in the production, uses and functions of media discourse” (Wodak and

Meyer, 2001: 7).

Van Dijk explains that his aim is to show how elements of societal structure (such as groups, institutions, power or inequality), as well as the everyday social practices of discourse and other forms of interaction among people as group members, are systematically related to the socially constructed dimensions of their minds (van Dijk,

1998b). His CDA approach focuses on “the role of discourse in the reproduction and challenge of dominance” (van Dijk, 1993: 249) and just like Fairclough, he also argues that CDA is a multidisciplinary approach. However, his approach is represented by the triangular analysis of cognition, society and discourse. He argues that the relationship between society and discourse is indirect, and is mediated by shared mental representations of social actors as group members (van Dijk, 1995a).

He used his sociocognitive CDA approach in analysing ideologies in media discourse.

He defines ideology as “the basis of the social representations shared by members of a group” (van Dijk, 1998b: 8). Closely related to ideology, is manipulation, which van

Dijk defines as “illegitimate domination confirming social inequality” (van Dijk,

2006a: 359). He states that manipulation is a crucial notion in CDA and argues that it is a form of social power abuse, cognitive mind control and discursive interaction. He states that manipulation implies the exercise of a form of illegitimate influence by

72 means of discourse, and it has a negative association because it violates social norms.

The following is an outline of the three components of van Dijk’s triangular approach:

(1) the social functions answer the question ‘why do people develop and use ideologies in the first place?’ It suggests that ideology is not only used by dominant groups, but that dominated groups need ideologies as well. However, dominant groups make use of all available discursive social practices, such as manipulation, in order to reproduce their power and reproduce social inequality. Van Dijk states ideologies are not wrong or right, but more or less effective in promoting the interests of a group. Their main social function, however, is to coordinate the social practices of group members to enable effective realisation of the goals of the social group and the protection of its interests. Van Dijk stresses that many ideologies develop in order

“to sustain, legitimate or manage group conflicts” and the relationships of power and dominance (van Dijk, 1998b: 24). In order to be able to produce and exercise such ideologies that can produce social control, social actors need to satisfy personal and social criteria that would enable them to influence others. Therefore, van Dijk urges that the macro-level analysis should investigate “the social conditions of the manipulative control such as group membership, institutional position, profession, and other factors that reveal the power of groups and their members” (van Dijk,

2006b: 362).

(2) Cognitive structures, according to van Dijk, should be tailored to the social functions to make the ideologies effective, and therefore what group members do should reflect what they think as group members. He claims that the general and abstract beliefs such as knowledge, attitudes and ideologies comprise an influential

73 form of manipulation. He says that if a political party wants to increase its popularity with the voters, it will try to positively change the voters’ attitudes towards the party, because “a general, socially shared attitude is far more stable than the specific mental models of individual language users” (van Dijk, 2006b: 268). He also claims that the positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation may influence groups’ opinions and attitudes about what they think of as “Us” and “Them”. These ideologies and social representations are gradually acquired throughout one’s lifetime by being exposed to a number of discursive strategies that influence these socially shared beliefs. Van Dijk lists generalisation as one essential strategy in influencing people’s social representation, knowledge and attitudes. He gives the example in which the US manipulated world opinion about terrorism after 9/11, in which emotional opinions held by citizens about this event were generalised to more “general, shared fears, attitudes and ideologies about terrorism and related issues” (van Dijk, 2006b: 370).

(3) Discourse structures make use of a number of strategies to illustrate “positive self- presentation and the negative other-presentation” (van Dijk, 2006b: 373). According to van Dijk, language and discourse have a range of structural possibilities to emphasise and de-emphasise information and the ideological opinions about in- groups and out-groups. This variety of discourse structures and strategies can be used to express ideological beliefs and the social and personal opinions of such beliefs.

3.2.2.2. Critiques of CDA:

A lot of research has been conducted on analysing media discourse using CDA as it helps to reveal hidden values, beliefs and bias in the media discourse. However, CDA has also received a wide range of criticisms from a number of text analysis scholars,

74 mainly scholars from Conversation Analysis (CA) who see CDA as a challenge to CA in that it provides “an alternative approach to the study of interaction” (Wooffitt,

2005: 137). The following is a brief overview of the main critiques of CDA that are drawn upon to help enhance the analytical framework of the current study.

Schegloff’s (1997) article ‘Whose Text? Whose Context?’ in which he defends CA and attacks CDA, is considered one of the first moves in establishing a comparison and debate between CA and CDA. He claims that CDA analysts choose texts that

“illustrate their own views” (Schegloff, 1997: 171) and let their assumptions

“dominate their analysis” (Billig, 1999: 544). Schegloff argues that CA is dealing with how people’s interpretation of “their own conduct and that of others” enables them to predict and understand the interaction or conversation (Schegloff, 1997;

Wooffitt, 2005). Schegloff and Billig became involved in a debate and exchanged a number of articles in the journal Discourse & Society in which each one of them tried to reply to the other’s ideas. Billig (1999) claims that Schegloff’s comparison between

CA and CDA is not neutral and is designed to “show the strengths of CA and the weaknesses of CDA” (Billig, 1999: 546).

Another major debate on CDA took place between Widdowson (1995a; 1995b; 1996;

1998) and Fairclough (1996). Widdowson argues that the name “Critical Discourse

Analysis” is a contradiction in terms and suggests that what it does is only interpretation and not analysis (Widdowson, 1995a: 159). He also claims that the interpretation is partial as it selects the text features that support its preferred interpretation and this “undermines its validity as analysis” (Widdowson, 1995a:

169). Widdowson also suggests that Faiclough’s CDA has no coherent theory as he

75 questions the difference between cohesion and text structure. He also states that the various terms used by Fairclough in his CDA theory make it difficult “to know which are meant to be taken as conceptually significant and which are just different ways of saying the same thing” and the process of establishing the significance is a

‘frustrating’ one (Widdowson, 1995b: 512). Fairclough in his reply to Widdowson’s criticism states that Widdowson’s failure to distinguish between interpretation and explanation has led him to claim that CDA does not allow alternative interpretations.

On the contrary, argues Fairclough, CDA “is committed to the assumption of diversity of interpretations of texts” (Fairclough, 1996: 51). Fairclough also suggests that Widdowson’s view of analysis is very narrow and that his definition of the term

‘analysis’ enabled him to claim that CDA is not analysis. That is because according to the definition, it is not what CDA does. Fairclough (1996: 51) defines analysis as

“any reasonably systemic application of reasonably well-defined procedures to a reasonably well-defined body of data” and based on this definition, CDA qualifies to be called “analysis”.

It seems that CDA does have some problems and is not flawless. First of all, CDA does not provide a clear definition of power. Power seems to be a confusing term and is conflated with manipulation. Another major criticism of CDA is that it is focused on exposing ideology, yet itself is highly ideological, which can lead to unwarranted analytical conclusions.

Such criticism of CDA has led scholars, analysts and researchers to realise that “no methodological tool can do it all” (Mautner, 2009: 45), and as a result they started to broaden the scope of the CDA approach. McKenna (2004: 16) claims that CDA can

76 overcome its criticisms if it is “situated within a wider panorama of common concerns, questions and approaches”. Wodak (2007: 211) argues that it is essential to complement CDA “with a range of other linguistic theories as well as theories from other disciplines to minimise the risk of critical bias and to avoid politicising”.

Fairclough (2003: 6) states that CDA “can in fact draw upon a wide range of approaches to analysing text” and even van Dijk (van Dijk, 2001: 96) urges that CDA

“should be essentially diverse and multidisciplinary”.

3.2.2.3. Attempts to broaden the scope of CDA:

The following section presents an overview of how CDA scholars have attempted to broaden its scope to overcome criticism of it by providing examples of the text analysis methodologies employed in CDA.

• CDA and corpus linguistics:

Corpus linguistics is “a methodology that uses computer support – in particular, software called concordance programs – to analyse authentic, and usually very large, volumes of textual data” (Mautner, 2009: 122). Fairclough (2003: 6) argues that “the qualitative analysis of texts by CDA can be usefully supplemented by the quantitative analysis offered by corpus linguistics”. Using corpus linguistic techniques in CDA is becoming increasingly popular (Baker, Gabrielatos, KhosraviNik, Krzyzanowski,

McEnery and Wodak, 2008) because “Corpus linguistics has a lot to offer to CDA”

(Mautner, 2009: 138). Mautner (2009: 37) argues that viewing corpus linguistics as a

“methodology” and not as an independent branch of linguistics enables it to be compatible with many other approaches, including CDA.

77 Working with larger corpora can contribute to counteracting the criticisms against

CDA that it “cherry-picks small and unrepresentative data samples in order to suit researchers’ preconceived notions about hidden ideological meanings” (Mautner,

2009: 32). Mautner (2009: 123) also suggests that “corpus linguistics allows CDA analysts to work with larger data volumes” and that corpus linguistics software offers both quantitative and qualitative perspectives on textual data.

Mautner (2009: 36) states that “the history of the usefulness of combining corpus linguistics and CDA actually goes back a long way to the research of Stubbs and

Gerbig (1993), Hardt-Mautner (1995), and Krishnamurthy (1996)”, but these researchers, who were the first to conduct studies combining the two, did so because they have a background in corpus linguistics. In 1997, de Beaugrande made reference to such a combination in his edited volume on discourse studies and the awareness of the potential of such a combination started to grow.

The following example is one of the recent studies conducted to illustrate how corpus linguistics and CDA can work together fruitfully. ‘A useful methodological synergy?

Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press’ by Baker, Gabrielatos, KhosraviNik,

Krzyzanowski, McEnery and Wodak (2008) is based on the analysis of a 140-million- word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM) taken from twelve national and three regional newspapers between 1996 and 2005. The researchers explain that the corpus was divided into sub-corpora in terms of type of newspaper and year of publication to aid the comparative and diachronic aspects of their project. They also state that the corpus

78 linguistics analysis made use of the whole corpora, but the CDA analysis was carried out on a sample of texts from the corpus mainly due to time and financial constraints.

They explain that emerging lexical patterns such as key words and collocates led to the examination of their full concordances or the whole text. The researchers used a number of CDA notions, such as topos and topics and specific metaphors employed in racist discourse, for grouping collocates and key words of the corpus linguistics analysis. This strategy enabled the researchers to assign more explicit and finer semantic and discourse prosody values than just assigning a general positive/negative bias. The concordance analysis revealed that a large number of the references to refugees and asylum seekers are accompanied by quantification that tend to dehumanise them and describe them as out of control, agentless and akin to an unwanted natural disaster. The researchers claim that corpus linguistics analysis alone cannot explain or interpret why certain linguistics patterns were found or not found and it does not take into account the social, political, historical and cultural context of the data, and that is where CDA can contribute to the analysis.

• CDA and pragmatics:

Wodak (2007: 203) claims “that pragmatic theories and methodologies can be fruitfully applied in contemporary CDA research” and she further suggests that the concepts of text, discourse, context and co-text should be clarified and theorised in an interdisciplinary framework combining CDA and pragmatics.

She illustrates the potential combinations of CDA and pragmatics by a case study in which she analyses three utterances of an election speech by the Austrian right-wing politician Jorg Haider. The utterances were from a 2001 election campaign when

79 Jorge Haider, a former leader of the Freedom Party in Austria, began a campaign that stimulated anti-Semitic beliefs and prejudices that were directed at attacking the president of the Jewish community, Dr. Ariel Muzicant. Wodak claims that an in- depth critical discourse analysis is required in order to deconstruct the inferred and indirect linguistic devices and explicitly prejudiced utterances, but also argues that this alone is insufficient to systematically analyse anti-Semitic traces. Therefore,

CDA should make use of pragmatic theories to assist in this regard. She uses pragmatic devices such as insinuations/allusions, wordplay, presuppositions and implicatures in her analysis, as she claims that they serve to convey anti-Semitic prejudices. The analysis shows that Jorg Haider employed allusions in his accusations of Dr. Ariel Muzicant without being held responsible for them as he only implied certain presuppositions that many people shared as common sense knowledge. He also made use of word play by playing on Muzicant’s first name, which is also the name of a detergent. The analysis also shows that Jorge Haider attempts to create a distinction between real Austrians, exemplified by himself, and Jews as non-Austrians in order to deny the citizenship of Austrian Jews and categorise them as not on the same level.

• CDA and Membership Categorisation Analysis:

Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) is “a formal analysis of the procedures people employ to make sense of other people and their activities” (Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil, 2004: 244) and it was developed by Sacks in the 1960s. According to

Leudar et al (2004), Sacks’s works suggested that everyday knowledge about people is organised in Membership Categorisation Devices (MCDs), which consist of membership categories and rules of application. Quoting Sacks, Freiberg and

80 Freebody (2009: 5) state that MCDs are “collections of categories for referring to some persons, with some rules of application, where these devices can be applied to populations and members apply them to populations to say things about them”. They illustrate MCDs by giving an example of the category concept “child”. They state that

“child” can be used with reference to one or more of the following collectives: stage of life, family, social activities, etc. and it is these collectives that are called MCDs.

Schegloff (2006: 467) explains that MCDs are “a set of categories that go together”.

A study by Leudar, Marsland et al. (2004) investigated public presentation of violence and of participants in the violence, by looking at the attacks on New York and

Washington in September 2001. By using MCA, the researchers analysed public addresses made by the then US President George W. Bush, the then British Prime

Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda. The analysis is based on analysing ‘us’ and ‘them’ as membership categories, but it assumes that using one in the interaction invariably invokes the other. The analysis shows that Bush and Blair distinguished the two categories in social, political and moral terms, while bin Laden did so in religious terms. The analysis also shows that the three participants, although separated in time and space, are coordinated in arguments and networks.

It is argued that MCA can be used as a quantitative text analysis as “the concepts of collections, categories and activities are set up and illustrated enabling quantitative evaluation” (Titscher et al., 2000: 117), and it has potential usefulness if applied in combination with CDA.

81 CDA, as can be seen from the discussion above, is closely related to studying and analysing media discourse, and that is why it is considered a major component of the analytical framework of this study. This brief explanation of the major features of

CDA will be essential in understanding the components of the analytical framework that will be discussed in detail in the subsequent methodology chapter. However, in order to overcome the various critiques of CDA as explained above, the framework in this study is going to be a multidisciplinary one that combines CDA with other approaches. The following section will thus discuss in detail how CDA or media discourse analysis can benefit from methods and research in ethnography.

3.2.2.4. Studies analysing media discourse using multidisciplinary

approaches:

This section will provide a review of some recent studies that utilise a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis of news discourse. Most of these studies rely on CDA and supplement it with one or more other approaches.

Teo (2000) combined CDA and SFG to form a framework which he used to analyse how power, manipulation and ideologies are used in news media discourse to construct racism. He analysed news reports relating to a Vietnamese gang in Australia taken from two Sydney-based newspapers. The analysis was done in two stages. The first was a general characterisation of the newspaper discourse that revealed evidence of a systematic othering and stereotyping of the ethnic community by the white majority. In this stage, Teo provided a detailed analysis of newspaper headlines and leads, which he believed function to form a cognitive macro-structure to control the way readers process the report. Teo argued that the lexical choices used in headlines

82 and leads can have a powerful ideological effect on readers’ perceptions and interpretations of people and events. The analysis also investigated the quotation patterns used in the news reports, which, according to Teo, serve as a gate-keeping device that admits only those in position of power and influence, while shutting out the opinions and perspectives of the powerless and therefore manipulate readers’ perceptions and interpretations of people and events in news reports. The second stage of Teo’s analysis relied mainly on some aspects of Halliday’s SFG. One aspect was transitivity, which is a useful analytic tool that foregrounds the agency or the attribution of agency and process to the various participants in the text by the writer.

Teo stated that the comparative transitivity analysis of the two texts revealed contrast between the ways the gang and the police were portrayed through the roles and processes that have been attributed to them. Another aspect Teo focused on in this stage was thematisation, which looks at the organisation of information within a clause. He argued that the positioning of a piece of information in a clause indicates the kind of prominence the writer wishes to attribute to it. Teo concluded that the media is operated under an economic imperative and that media ideologies are communicated to support the owners and controllers of the media industry.

(Mis)representing Islam by Richardson (2004) is a comprehensive study of the discursive representation of Islam and Muslims in British broadsheet newspapers in which he analysed the ways in which they reproduce anti-Muslim racism. In his study, Richardson used what he refers to as ‘levels of analysis’ to analyse the news reports. His CDA approach was drawn from the works of the major scholars, such as

Fowler, Fairclough and van Dijk. The first level of analysis in Richardson’s approach was style, which included lexical choice and syntactic structure. In the second level,

83 he examined the semantic structure, at both the micro and macro levels, while the last level that he looked at was the functions of texts in which he investigated Speech Act

Theory. The results of the analysis were presented in four chapters of the book; each chapter was structured in order to reflect prominent patterns in broadsheet reporting of Islam and Muslims. For example, in the first chapter, Richardson’s analysis of the news reports revealed that the negative reporting of Islam and Muslims was based on a structuring of presupposition, themes and arguments. Richardson concluded that his approach was able to illuminate the social and ideological meanings that journalistic texts variously presuppose, draw upon, imply and support through the critical analysis of the features of the news reports. He also concluded that journalists employ argumentative strategies to make their version of the reported action persuasive, to distance themselves from these claims, and to appear reasonable and objective.

Bazzi (2009) examined the language representations in the media over the Arab-

Israeli conflict by using a multidisciplinary approach to discourse analysis which combined semiotics, ideology and discourse analysis. Bazzi’s ideological framework attempted to identify and explain the important ideological layers of context underlying the production of political texts in the media. She stated that in the Arab world there is an ideological recognition of the discourses of resistance where the

Arab fighters and victims are considered martyrs, whereas this recognition is not met by a westerner who does not believe in the concept of attacking Israel or suicide bombings. Therefore, media text producers reproduce specific ideological relations that submit to different ideological concepts. For example, a translation of a Reuters news report where the Arab-Israeli conflict is described as ‘violent’, would appear in an English-Language newspaper in the Arab world as ‘struggle’. This adaptation,

84 according to Bazzi, is relevant in this context, as the Arab audience submits to the same dominant belief as the newspaper. She also used a discourse analytical approach that is based on Halliday’s SFG and pragmatics. Using Halliday’s SFG tools, she analysed the texts through a number of aspects, such as transitivity, mood and modality, theme and lexical cohesion. Her pragmatic tool examined speech acts to show how the text producer uses language to intrude, interact and cooperate with the audience to achieve the goals of the discourse. Bazzi’s study concluded that power relations, cognition and editorial control give legitimate and logical reasons for the final semantic, structural and pragmatic choices found in a politically motivated news text.

These studies show that combining CDA with other approaches to analyse media discourse can be useful in overcoming the usual critique associated with CDA, as was discussed earlier. These studies are of relevance to the current study as the latter draws on some aspects from the methodological approaches used in these studies.

Although Teo focused on news reports headlines and leads in his study, some parts of his analytical approach will be used in the analytical methodology of this current study, such as analysing quotations. The way Richardson analysed the lexical choices will also be drawn upon in the methodology of this study. Bazzi’s ideological framework will be of much importance in identifying the hidden ideologies of the various new producers analysed in this study.

3.3. Media discourse analysis and ethnography:

Although most CDA scholars stress the importance of supplementing text analysis with a look into the processes of production and reception, very little research has

85 actually been implemented along these lines. For example, Fairclough (1992: 2) states that most critical linguists focus on “the description of texts as finished products” and neglect or pay little attention to the ‘processes of text production and interpretation’.

Thompson (1990: 268) also stresses the importance of analysing the structure and content of media discourse in relation to their “production” and “reception”.

Fairclough (2003: 2) suggests using discourse analysis “in conjunction with other forms of analysis, for instance ethnography”. This might bring up an important question: how compatible is it to supplement discourse analysis with ethnography?

Many scholars have attempted to answer such a question, and some have given positive answers, stating that incorporating the two would “enhance the effectiveness of sociocultural description” (Atkinson, Okada and Talmy, 2011: 89), provide

“fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in everyday activity” (Rampton, Tusting, Maybin, Barwell, Creese and Lytra, 2004: 2), and “extend our understanding of the role language plays in social life” (Creese, 2008: 235). However, Lima (2010) suggests that it is difficult to come up with a unified answer to such a question. She states that answering the question depends on three factors. Firstly, it depends on the understanding of ‘the theoretical principles and acceptable practices within both traditions’; secondly, it depends on the researcher’s research questions and ‘the social phenomena’ investigated; and last, it will also depend “on historical developments in the field of academic research as a whole” (Lima, 2010: 1).

To answer the question of how compatible it is to combine and supplement CDA with ethnography in the current thesis, this section will discuss the three factors Lima suggested. Since CDA has already been discussed in detail earlier, this section will

86 start by discussing what ethnography is. It will then identify how and why supplementing CDA with ethnography is of benefit to the current study, and the section will end by reviewing some studies that have combined the two approaches in media discourse analysis.

3.3.1. What is ethnography?

For years, ethnography was regarded as part of anthropology (Lima, 2010; Atkinson et al., 2011) and according to Blommaert (2006: 2), it can be seen as “the only truly influential invention of anthropological linguistics”. Early ethnographers of the twentieth century were engaged in studies that required them to live with the people they studied, usually non-Western societies in developing countries, for extended periods of time (Hammersley, 2005; Lima, 2010) in order to “comprehend their lives emically – that is, as understood by the people themselves” (Atkinson et al., 2011:

86). By the middle of the twentieth century, ethnographers became more concerned with studying “urban areas in their own countries” instead of making long trips to other countries (Lima, 2010: 2).

Today, ethnography generally includes any study that involves “some participant observation” (Hammersley, 2005: 6) and it is viewed as a method that can be added

“to different scientific procedures and programs” (Blommaert, 2006: 2). According to

Blommaert (2001b: 2), ethnography can be found “wherever issues of human consciousness are dealt with”. Ethnographers nowadays are interested in investigating the social processes involved in schools, hospitals, companies and institutions (Lima,

2010).

87 Lima (2010: 2) claims that ethnographers are interested in studying the relationships between individuals in specific social settings through observing “attitudes, linguistic and cultural manifestations, relationships and conflicts” that can explain a certain social problem. Relative to the field of language studies more broadly, ethnography is concerned with “the study of context”, whereas “the study of talk” is a concern for linguistics, conversation analysis or discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2006: 2).

According to Rampton et. al. (2004: 9), the “analytic sensibilities in linguistic ethnography” have been historically shaped by a number of “ongoing and recent fields of socio and applied linguistic research” (Creese, 2008: 234). These include:

• The ‘New Literacy Studies’ movement that argues for the importance of

ethnography in “understanding how people’s uses of literacy derive meaning

and power through their embeddedness within social practice” (Rampton et

al., 2004: 9).

• ‘Interactional Sociolinguistics’ and its focus on ethnicity, language and

inequality in education and the workplace.

• ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ and the focus on ideology and the cultural

dynamics of globalisation (Rampton et al., 2004; Creese, 2008).

• Studies on language and cognitive development that focus on teaching and

learning interactions.

• Studies on the role of applied linguistics in language teaching.

In her study that explores “the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing”, Lillis (Lillis, 2008: 353) suggests a number of levels or strategies in which ethnography can be used by researchers:

88

• Ethnography as method (talk around text): this is the minimal level at which

ethnography can be used and it is useful in directing the researcher’s attention

outside the text “towards consideration of some elements of writer’s

perspectives about texts” (Lillis, 2008: 355). Paltridge (2012) states that

interviews and using survey data to supplement the textual analysis are ways

of conducting talk around text. This is the level at which ethnography will be

utilised in the current thesis as interviews will be conducted with news

producers in the Middle East in order to better understand how and why

localisation of international news agency reports is undertaken. However, the

current study will take it a step further and will make use of ethnography to

understand how readers of news reports in newspapers view the localised

reports and whether they are aware of the reasons for producing such news

reports.

• Ethnography as methodology: this includes using multiple data sources and

being involved for a period of time in the context of text production in order to

understand the “dynamic and complex situated meanings and practices that are

constituted in and by academic writing” (Lillis, 2008: 355). Lillis (2008: 362)

argues that this way of using ethnography “opens up richer opportunities for

developing contextualised studies of academic writing”. This thesis draws

from this implicity, given the researcher’s past professional involvement in the

English news media in Bahrain.

• Ethnography as “deep theorising”: this level or strategy of using ethnography

challenges how text and context are viewed as separate entities and calls for

the development of analytical tools that “narrow the gap between them”

89 (Lillis, 2008: 355). This will be accomplished in the chapter on the

localisation of news reports and the interviews (chapter 5).

3.3.2. The emic – etic distinction:

One of the most important contributions of ethnography to the study of culture is the application of a comparison between the insider and outsider knowledge or perspectives (Chen, 2010; Xia, 2011). The analysis that is based on an insider’s perspective or knowledge is referred to as “emic” and the analysis that is based on an outsider’s knowledge is referred to as “etic”. The emic and etic terms were developed by the linguist Kenneth Pike (1967) (Harris, 1976; Xia, 2011) in making a distinction between phonemic and phonetic perspectives on sound in linguistics. The etic approach “focuses on universals of psychological process and human behaviour” and the emic approach “analyses particulars of concepts and phenomena in specific cultural settings” (Chen, 2010: 364). Psychology, anthropology and ethnography scholars have extended the use of the terms to their own approaches.

This thesis further extends the use of these terms in proposing that they are useful notions in media discourse studies. The study first focuses on how editors and reporters of English newspapers in the Middle East emicise (or localise into ways of understanding or representing that make sense to local readers) the news reports that were originally produced by international news agencies. The application of the emic and etic approaches in Chapter 5 on the localisation of news reports is based on the fact that the news editors arguably have insider’s knowledge of the events being reported since the events took place in the Middle East. More importantly, however, readers treat themselves as “insiders” vis-à-vis those reported events, whereas the

90 international news agencies provide an outsider’s perspective of the events in their reporting. This comparison of the insider with the outsider perspectives is one of the main motivations for the production of localised reports.

The notions of emic and etic perspectives are also utilised in Chapter 6 where the ways in which the international news agencies eticise – that is, generate an outsider’s perspective – what were originally the emic perspectives of the people who were taking part in the events of the Arab Spring in Bahrain are discussed. This reversed look at how the international news agencies report local events to the outside world is interesting as it helps in identifying to what extent these agencies are successful in conveying a comprehensive and balanced picture to the outside world.

3.3.3. Combining CDA and ethnography:

This chapter has already discussed some of the critiques the CDA approach has received. One of those criticisms is that analysts might let their assumptions dominate their analysis of the texts and so result in unreliable conclusions. Blommaert (2001a:

14) is aware of such “weaknesses” of CDA and its sometimes ‘partial and biased’ conclusions and states the importance of a closer integration of CDA and ethnography

“if one wants to achieve the critical targets set by analysts”. Combining CDA with ethnography would ensure “credibility” and “dependability” of the results mainly due to “using approved data collection procedures” (Atkinson et al., 2011: 86). According to Creese (2008: 232-233), ethnography can provide CDA with “a close reading of context” and “a non-deterministic perspective on the data”. Rampton et. al. (2004: 2-

3) state that ethnography can help in reducing the researcher’s subjectivity by using

91 “systematic field strategies” and “accountable analytic procedures” that will

“constrain self-indulgent idiosyncrasy”.

Lima (2010: 2) states that the feature that distinguishes ethnography from the other research approaches and methods, is that ethnographers “are always people who, to lesser or larger degree, are immersed in the community they are studying”. Since the author of this thesis is from the Middle East and also worked in a professional capacity in an English newspaper based in Bahrain, he is able to understand and access the Middle Eastern media community from an “insider’s” perspective, and this will enable him to better understand the Middle Eastern media discourse as well as conduct ethnographic studies to understand the production and reception of news in the region. In other words, this will enable the author to understand the “scene from an emic, or insider’s perspective” as he is “a constitutive part of the scene” (Atkinson et al., 2011: 86). Although this might give rise to some criticism that the author will be more subjective or sensitive towards the Middle East, the systemic discourse analysis alongside the ethnographic part of the data analysis that draws on the experiences of others will help counter such criticism. According to Blommaert

(Blommaert, 2001b: 2), the ethnographer “is required to formulate his/her own positions vis-à-vis the facts, and he/she cannot claim to be an un-gendered, un-aged, un-classed etc.; producer of knowledge. In ethnography, one often takes sides: one knows people, not facts. Involvement is a rule, not an exception nor a luxury”.

As the discussion above shows, ethnography will be of significant importance in supporting the analysis of media discourse in the current study and will help in producing a more comprehensive and nuanced account of the localisation process.

92 The next section will give a brief overview of the limited number of studies to date that have combined textual discourse analysis with ethnography in analysing media discourse.

3.3.4. Studies combining discourse analysis and ethnography to analyse

media discourse:

It can be claimed that there is currently no approach to media discourse that can be referred to as the ethnography of media discourse, just as Spitulnik (1993: 293) has claimed that there is no “anthropology of mass media”. She also claimed back then that the studies combining anthropology and mass media were “rather small” in number (Spitulnik, 1993: 293). This also applies today to studies combining ethnography with media discourse analysis as the majority of research has focused on analysing the textual features of the mass media, neglecting the importance of understanding the processes of media production and reception. This section will give a brief overview of some of the few studies that ventured to go against the mainstream research trends and have investigated media discourse by combining discourse analysis and ethnography studies.

In his book on how the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera cover the Middle East, Barkho

(2010: 23) claims that he “would have failed to delve into the social and discursive reality” of the three news producers if his analysis relied only on “their written output”. He states that his communication with “the power holders and observing their production, both input and output processes” enabled him to properly describe the reality of the three broadcasters (Barkho, 2010: 23). One aim of Barkho’s study was to find out to what extent institutional members, including journalists and editors,

93 are “aware of the ideological practices of their institutions” (Barkho, 2010: 35) and to do so, he used a CDA approach based on Fowler and Fairclough. However, he stresses that CDA “relies predominantly on the linguistic forms and the discursive patterns of texts to explain power relationships and differences”, and that there is a gap in the literature addressing the power of the individuals and institutions “to dictate and control the text as a final product” (Barkho, 2010: 38). Therefore, his book is an attempt to fill in the gap and provide “the ethnographic perspective that CDA analysts have been reluctant to supplement their studies with” (Barkho, 2010: 23). His analysis

“triangulates CDA with ethnographic research, which includes observation, stories, field visits, anecdotes, interviews, and important secondary data such as media reports and samples from international guidelines” (Barkho, 2010: 40).

Gillespie (2007: 275) presents a collaborative project on how “new security challenges are constituted in the intersecting relationships between political and military actors, news producers, news representations and discourses, and news audiences”. This project is unique as it presents a new approach to the study of media production, media texts and media reception, which the author refers to as “Integrated

Multidisciplinary Media Analysis” (Gillespie, 2007: 276). The project is considered an extension to a previous project on shifting securities, which focused on textual analysis of “news coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the USA and reception of the coverage among transnational audiences in the UK in the three months following these events” (Gillespie, 2007: 276). According to the author, the project was conducted by three main research groups that worked in coordination and updated each other. These three research groups or “Strands” as Gillespie (2007: 276-

277) calls them included:

94

• Strand A: this research group worked on the ‘collaborative media

ethnography’ methodology that included a mixture of interviews and

participant observation to examine diverse groups’ cultures of news media

practice in depth and detail.

• Strand B: this group conducted textual and discourse analysis of news

programs.

• Strand C: this group conducted interviews and focus groups with security and

media professionals to find out their understandings of their roles and

influence on the content of news programs.

Finally, Schroder (2007: 77) provides an analytic method to study media discourse that “combines a careful attention to textual detail with systematic fieldwork that explores the meaning processes of text producers and recipients”. He claims that discourse ethnography is vital in analysing media discourse mainly because “we simply cannot take for granted that the meaning intended by the sender is identical to the meaning actualised by the audience” (Schroder, 2007: 79). He also hits out at

Fairclough stating that despite Fairclough’s calls to analyse media texts along with processes of their production and reception, “his analysis of actual media productions

… does not hesitate to make quite far reaching claims about the production and reception processes” (Schroder, 2007: 82). Schroder’s article analyses what he refers to as a “responsibility ad” from an oil company that appeared in one of the newspapers in Britain and Denmark. His analytical framework is a unique one in which he combines discourse analysis with ethnography to identify what the producers meant with their ad and what the audience made out of it; and he also

95 integrates the analysis “with a perspective of sociocultural discourses about citizenship, democracy, political power and public opinion” (Schroder, 2007: 86) He concludes his article by calling on media discourse analysts to “align their scholarly discourse and practice with a holistic ‘discourse ethnography’” in order to provide more “trustworthy insights” (Schroder, 2007: 97).

This section clearly shows how useful it is to supplement CDA studies with ethnography in order to overcome the various critiques associated with CDA. One other key criticism of the CDA approach is that the term ‘ideology’ does not seem to be clearly defined. Therefore, the following section will provide a brief overview of some of the ways ‘ideology’ is defined or viewed by some of the prominent CDA scholars in order to provide a clear picture of how ideology is approached in the current study.

3.4. Media discourse and ideology:

Media are believed to be a means through which various ideologies are produced and reproduced (Thompson, 1990; Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1995b; Bell and Garrett,

1998), but what does the term ideology refer to? The literature on ideology reveals that it is one of the most “ambiguous” (Thompson, 1990: 5), “problematic” (de

Beaugrande, 1999) and “elusive” (van Dijk, 1998a: vii) terms in “the social sciences”

(van Dijk, 1998b: 23), and that it does not seem to have “a single fixed meaning”

(Fairclough, 2001: 77). This section will give a brief overview of the definition of the term and how it is approached in relation to media discourse. In the course of this overview, it will also identify how media discourse plays a significant role in establishing and transmitting ideologies.

96

3.4.1. Thompson’s concept of ideology:

In his book Ideology and Modern Culture, Thompson (1990: vii) explained “the nature and role of ideology, its relations to language, power and social context” and the ways it can be analysed and interpreted. He regards ideology as related to the ways meaning is used in society “to establish and sustain relations of domination”

(Thompson, 1990: 56). He argues that ideology can normally operate within five modes (Thompson, 1990: 60-66):

• Legitimation: the process of presenting ideologies or relations of domination

as legitimate.

• Dissimulation: the process of concealing, denying or obscuring of ideologies

or relations of domination in order to distract the attention from existing

relations or processes. Thompson (1990: 62-64) differentiates between three

strategies in which this can be achieved. One is “displacement” in which a

term that is usually used to refer to one object or individual is used to refer to

another, transferring the original term’s positive or negative connotations to

the other object of individual. Another strategy is “euphemisation” in which

actions, instruments or social relations that are usually regarded as negative or

unacceptable are described in positive ways. An example of this strategy could

be how the US regarded its involvement in Iraq as “liberation” and not

“invasion” (Pasha, 2011: 54). The third strategy of dissimulating ideologies is

“trope”. Thompson explains that trope refers to the figurative use of language

or symbolic forms such as synecdoche, metonymy and metaphor.

97 • Unification: the process of constructing a form of unity between a number of

individuals as a collective identity regardless of their various differences.

• Fragmentation: the process of establishing fragmentation or differences

between unified groups or individuals who are regarded as a threat to the

dominant groups.

• Reification: the process of “representing a transitory, historical state of affairs

as if it were permanent, natural and outside of time” (Thompson, 1990: 65).

As part of Thompson’s extensive study of ideology, he identified the importance of media and mass communication in understanding and analysing ideology. He takes a position that regards media as the “institutionalised production and diffusion” of ideologies through its broadcasting of information (Thompson, 1990: 270). He argues that in order to understand how ideology works, it is important to understand how the content of media messages are used in certain circumstances. Such a position is also taken up in Fairclough’s approach to ideology in CDA, which is discussed in more detail below.

3.4.2. Fairclough’s concept of ideology:

Fairclough (1992: 87) considers ideology as “significations / constructions of reality

(the physical world, social relations, social identities), which are built into various dimensions of the forms / meanings of discursive practices, and which contribute to the production, reproduction or transformation of relations of domination”. Fairclough

(2010: 57) claims that ideology is a property of both structures and events and it is not possible to “read off” ideologies from texts, as depending on the text alone to uncover the ideological processes is insufficient. He explains that this is due to the fact that

98 “meanings are produced through interpretations of texts” (Fairclough, 2010: 57) and texts can have more than one interpretation “which may differ in their ideological import” (Fairclough, 1992: 88). Ideological processes, for Fairclough (2010: 57), are related to discourses as whole social events rather than to the texts, which he states

“are produced, distributed and interpreted as moments of such events”. He claims that language is “a material form of ideology” and it is “invested by ideology”

(Fairclough, 2010: 59). Fairclough (2010: 59) explains this by arguing that the analysis of discourse requires the analysis of social practice, both discoursal practice and the text; and that there is a “significant” connection between “features of texts, ways in which texts are put together and interpreted, and the nature of the social practice”. Fairclough (2010: 59-60) states that one way ideology can be identified is through discovering the ideological investments of “elements which are drawn upon in producing or interpreting a text, and the ways they are articulated together in orders of discourse”. He illustrates this by giving an example of the way scare quotes can be used to signal a point of confrontation between ideologies that are not further represented in the text. The example centres around the word ‘personal’ in the expression “the ‘personal’ problems of young people” in a left-wing newspaper’

(Fairclough, 2010: 60). Meanings and forms of texts are closely related, according to

Fairclough (1992), and some features of texts can be ideologically invested. He also states that the turn-taking system in a classroom or the relationship between the secretary and manager might have “ideological assumptions about the social identities of, and social relationships between teachers and pupils, and managers and secretaries” (Fairclough, 1992: 89-90). However, people might not be aware of such ideological dimensions in their everyday practices.

99 Fairclough also views ideology as “propositions that generally figure as implicit assumptions in texts, which contribute to producing and reproducing unequal relations of power” (Fairclough, 1995: 14), and thereby links ideologies to common sense, as ideological common sense contributes in “sustaining unequal relations of power”

(Fairclough, 2001: 70). He states that ideologies are usually implicit in media texts and are embedded in the ways language is used by the reporters or the text producers

(Fairclough, 1995) and it is this which makes ideologies appear “naturalised” and thus more effective (Fairclough, 1992: 87). To Fairclough (2001: 71), ideology is “most effective when its workings are least visible”.

According to Fairclough (2010: 67), ideologies exist in societies that have relations of domination and as long as “human beings are capable of transcending such societies they are capable of transcending ideology”, but he denies that all discourse is

“irredeemably ideological”. He states that not all types of discourse are “ideologically invested” to the same degree (Fairclough, 2010: 67), and that sometimes, even in some types of media, discourse ideology might be a “more salient issue” than for other types (Fairclough, 1995: 47). It is the role of a “critically oriented discourse analysis” to uncover the implicit ideological common sense in discourse in order to provide more awareness and critique of ideology (Fairclough, 2010: 68). Fairclough

(2010: 68) argues that “awareness and critique” contribute in creating “possibilities of empowerment and change”. He also reiterates that even the critical discourse analysis might not be “immune” from ideology (Fairclough, 2010: 68) as CDA argues that

“we are all … writing from within particular discursive practices, entailing particular interests, commitments, inclusions, and so forth” and “no theory or science is immune from that possibility” (Fairclough, 1996: 52-53).

100

However, while Fairclough makes a number of theoretical claims regarding ideologies, one can criticise him for not offering a sound methodological approach to address the claims he makes. For example, Fairclough’s claim that ideologies cannot be ‘read off’ texts, as they are related to discourses as whole social events, sounds a bit confusing, as he does not provide a clear approach as to how to analyse or read ideologies. This claim is one of the points made in Widdowson’s (1995a: 157) criticism of the CDA approach as he states that there is “a good deal of conceptual confusion in the field” and one aspect of this confusion is the inability to distinguish

“between analysis and interpretation”. De Beaugrande (1999: 270) states that

Fairclough’s arguments that ideologies cannot be read off texts might lead to a different interpretation, which is that “different interpreters can and often will read off different ideologies from the same text”. Fairclough takes a particular position on what constitutes ideology, linking it explicitly to issues of power and dominance, but this is not backed up by proposals that outline how such ideologies might be best uncovered.

3.4.3. Van Dijk’s concept of ideology:

Van Dijk provids an extensive socio-cognitive approach to ideology and he sees ideologies as “the social beliefs shared by specific social collectivities or groups” (van

Dijk, 1998a: 48). He states that his approach to ideology is more focused on “the cognitive and the discursive dimensions of ideologies” (van Dijk, 1998a: viii), and so triangulates cognition, society and discourse. He stresses the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of ideologies, but points out that relying on analysing the relationships between structures of discourse and structures of society to identify

101 ideologies would be incomplete (van Dijk, 1995a). Van Dijk, as with Fairclough, then stresses that ideologies cannot be ‘read off actual text and talk’, as he explains that ideologies, before reaching discourse, go through “a broad and complex range of mental factors” that affect the discourse production and comprehension (van Dijk,

1995a: 142). He suggests that a “socio-cognitive interface” would also be needed for identifying ideologies mainly because (1) “the notions of (social) ‘action’ and ‘actor’ themselves have an important cognitive dimension”; (2) “interaction, action co- ordination and the strategic adaptation of action to the social context … all require mental representations of other actors as well as of the relevant properties of the situation or context”; (3) “the social macro-micro link … also needs a cognitive dimension”; and (4) “verbal interaction and discourse … also need to be formulated in terms of a cognitive account of the mind” (van Dijk, 1995a: 137).

Since van Dijk views ideologies as shared by groups and not individuals, then ideologies might be used “to show a polarising structure between US and THEM”

(van Dijk, 1995a: 139). For van Dijk, ideologies allow group members to identify their social beliefs and what they accept as “good or bad, right or wrong … true or false” and groups develop their ideologies to either impose them on other groups or resist the ideologies of other dominant groups (van Dijk, 1998a: 8). Therefore, van

Dijk’s concept of ideology differs somewhat from the other approaches that consider ideologies as negative or as instruments of domination (van Dijk, 1995a; 1998a). He identifies a number of strategies and structures that would normally be regarded as ideological when found in discourse, as they signal ways by which people or groups can present themselves as positive or negative. The following table illustrates some of the structures van Dijk identifies:

102

Ingroup Outgroup Emphasis De-emphasis Assertion Denial Hyperbole Understatement Topicalisation De-topicalisation High, prominent position Low, non-prominent position Headlining, summarising Marginalising Detailed description Vague, overall description Attribution to personality Attribution to context Explicit Implicit Direct Indirect Narrative illustration No storytelling Argumentative support No argumentative support Impression management No impression management Table 3-1: Describing/attributing positive action (van Dijk, 1995a: 144)

Despite van Dijk’s theoretical claims regarding ideology, he seems to have failed to provide a comprehensive approach or methodology for analysing ideologies. Van

Dijk, as with Fairclough, stresses the insufficiency of relying on texts to ‘read off’ ideologies, but he only provides textual approaches to analysing ideologies without providing the tools for taking into account the broader social context in which ideologies are inevitably located.

3.4.4. Ideology in the current thesis:

Since this thesis deals with analysing news reports, it also deals with the ideologies transmitted by news producers through their reports. Although the thesis draws from all the above mentioned scholars in its approach to ideology, it relies more heavily on

Fairclough’s approach given that his approach is the most well developed in relation

103 to media discourse and the newspaper discourse in particular. However, reference is made to particular elements of other approaches when warranted, as will be seen in the course of the data analysis in the chapters that follow. The thesis aims to identify how the ideologies of the international news agencies are either adopted or challenged by a local newspaper from the Middle East that uses their news reports as a major source for its news. It would be expected that the different cultures and societies of the news agencies and the local newspaper would play a major role in the ideologies or worldviews that are transmitted through their news reports. The thesis will look into how and why the local newspaper selects parts of the reports of a number of news agencies and makes some changes to them in order to produce its own version of the news articles. The questions of what is included and what is excluded, as well as what is changed or added, are of great importance in understanding how the audience might influence the production of news. Therefore, the thesis takes into account the notion of how it is insufficient to analyse media only by analysing texts. Text analysis is supplemented by ethnography studies that include interviews with news producers as well as readers in this study to further understand how ideologies are produced and received.

3.5. The localisation of news media:

This section will provide a review of studies on the issue of ‘localisation’.

Localisation, or ‘domestication’ as it is sometimes referred to by some media studies, is inspired by the work of Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh in 1991, as Clausen (2003) points out. Gurevitch et al.’s work concluded that an event could be judged newsworthy only if it was presented in a framework familiar to and recognisable by news producers as well as by audiences. Clausen claims that the terms

104 “domestication” and “localisation” can refer to “bringing information home”

(Clausen, 2003: 107), and is part of the strategies news producers use to reframe and recontextualise news output to target their local audience. This overview of these studies paves the way for the current study by showing where the current study stands among the other media studies and what contribution it will make to the field of media discourse analysis.

There have been a number of studies that have focused on the localisation of news and how the reporting of one event can differ from one country to another. Fang

(1994) examined the rhetorical strategies used by one of China’s local newspapers in reporting international riots and demonstrations in two categories of countries. The first included governments considered hostile by China, such as South Africa and

Israel; and the second category included governments with which China has always maintained cordial relations, such as Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Nepal and Algeria.

Fang claims that by selecting, interpreting and presenting events, media institutions control the flow of information and construct reality according to their underlying ideologies. The focus of Fang’s paper is on how the Chinese newspaper constructs reality for its readers. By examining the newspaper’s syntactic and lexical choices,

Fang aimed to find out how an international event is labelled in the local Chinese newspaper. Since the choice of words in the Chinese newspaper used in Fang’s study reflects the government’s point of view, the results showed that the newspaper’s labelling of the riots and demonstrations tend to reflect China’s policy towards the countries and their governments where these events took place. The results also showed how this labelling aims to influence the readers’ perspective towards the events reported.

105

Domesticating a global media event reflects and reproduces each society as a discursive community, argue Lee, Pan, Chan and So (1999) in their study which examined how the media in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong produced different reports about the handover of Hong Kong. Their analysis used a form of framing analysis that investigated the concrete textual elements such as images, catchphrases and metaphors that reflect the underlying structures of the report. The study showed that the Chinese media reporting of the event was to reflect celebration and national festivity. The Taiwanese media rejected China’s efforts to extend the Hong Kong formula to them, while the Hong Kong media showed a sense of uncertainty and confusion about the event. The researchers concluded that the reporting of global events was still being made through domestic lenses according to the institutional configurations and the event’s relevance to the home audience.

In Reporting the same events? A critical analysis of Chinese print news media texts,

Fang (2001) analysed how two ideologically opposed newspapers, one from China and the other from Taiwan, reported the same events differently. Fang analysed how lexical choices, grammatical elements, headlines and thematic structures can be used differently and manipulated by the two newspapers in order to present two different reports on the civil unrest in South Africa and in Argentina for their readers. The results revealed that various linguistic devices were employed by the two newspapers to present images of overseas events in a way that suited the respective diplomatic policies of each regime. The study also showed that when the newspapers are faced with topics that do not match their perspectives, these topics are either downplayed or omitted. Fang gives the example of the Chinese newspaper ignoring the topics of

106 vengeance killings of black officials by blacks and the Taiwanese newspaper downplaying the topics that suggest the South African police had opened fire on a group of unnamed mourners.

In her study on the commemoration of the 9/11 event, Clausen (2003) focused on studying flagship television news programmes in six countries covering the EU, US,

Asia and the Middle East in order to get insights into the socio-political character of national broadcasting which also reveal how audiences view international news. In her analysis of the event, Clausen showed that all the television programmes covered the same global theme of the 9/11 event by showing almost the same visuals.

However, each programme had its own domestic spin on the event. For example, the

Canadian programme highlighted the help of Canada in the rescue process following the 9/11 events; the Irish and the Danish programmes showed memorial events in their countries; and Al Jazeera presented reports on the relations of Saudi Arabia and the US. The results of the study show that although the main themes of the news reports were the same among all the television programmes, each broadcaster placed its own national spin on the events through their reporting. The strategies used by the broadcasters in producing their reports were found to be similar in the way they domesticated or localised the news to suit their audiences.

Another study by Clausen (2004) investigated the localisation aspects in international news production in Japan by analysing factors at the global, national, organisational and professional levels of influence. She focused her analysis on the 1995 United

Nations Conference on Women in Beijing. She provided a comparative analysis at the global level and found that although formats and framing processes were similar in

107 the Danish and Japanese presentations, the communication strategies, the themes in focus, and the choice of actors included elements of domestication that made news content differ from one national output to another in terms of its national socio- political context. Her analysis at the national level identified two distinct presentations in the Japanese broadcasting: pro- and anti-government presentation styles. She illustrated a number of factors that influence the domestication of international news production, such as the dual public-commercial media system in

Japan which provides viewers with a variety of news programmes; the role domestic politics play in influencing the production of text and images; and exclusive agreements with international news agencies and national Western broadcasters which result in different use of sources. Her analysis at the organisational level highlighted differences and similarities in communication strategies and in-house norms at the two Japanese television stations. She ends her analysis by providing insights about the domestication strategies at the professional level. She states that news producers domesticate events through efforts to make information understandable to national audiences. Clausen’s study shows that the international newsroom faces twofold challenges. Editors try to make international news a mirror on the world, while on the other hand they also try to domesticate these news items for their national audiences.

Translation or transformation? A case study of language and ideology in the

Taiwanese press by Kuo and Nakamura (2005) looked into the relationship between language and ideology in the news discourse related to Taiwan’s first lady’s interview with the media, which appeared in two ideologically opposed newspapers and which were both translated from an identical English text. Although their study is on translating news, it is closely related to the localisation of news mainly because

108 translation, as Kuo and Nakamura state, is a form of rewriting and both culture and ideology play a role in translating news as much as they do with the editing and production of international news. Their analysis of headlines found that none of the newspapers used the headline that appeared in the original English text, as each newspaper attempted to represent different topics and focus through their headlines, by making different choices of lexical items. They also found that the two Chinese versions made a number of major changes in their texts to the original English text through the use of a number of strategies, such as deletion and addition, syntactic and lexical variations, and stylistic differences in paragraph/thematic combination. Kuo and Nakamura’s study suggests that different newspapers could have various versions of the same story to accommodate their ideologies in relation to different kinds of audiences.

Ruigrok and van Attenveldt (2007) investigated how global and local terrorist attacks were framed by US, British and Dutch newspapers. Their aim was to find out whether these events were reported in a global or local way and to what extent the events of

9.11 had an impact on the creation of one global public sphere in the Western world.

The researchers defined a number of hypotheses in regard to the local versus global events and used computer content analysis for each hypothesis. Their hypotheses were the following: that newspapers pay more attention to local events than global events; all news is local: global news is linked to an audiences’ world; local news is globalised; the local media will perform a “rally around the flag” role; Muslims are portrayed more negatively after a local event; and Muslims are connected with terrorism more strongly after a local event. The findings of their study showed that news coverage increases when an event occurs on the local level. The study also

109 revealed that the newspapers’ analysis adopted a pattern of initial globalised reporting of the event, followed by more localised reports in which the event is analysed and consequences for the domestic nation are investigated. It was also found that the events of 9.11 created a strong framework of Muslims as terrorists and that this global frame was reinforced and transformed to the local events.

The examples discussed above show that global events tend to be presented in a local way by media outlets and this presentation can differ from one country to another and even from one media organisation to another within one country. As it can be seen, most of these studies cover the localisation phenomenon in various countries, such as

China, Taiwan and Japan. There seems to be a lack in the literature on studying the localisation of English news in the Middle East and this current study is an attempt to fill in this gap and provide insights into the field of English news making in this part of the world.

3.6. Research questions:

The above review of studies shows that there is a lack of studies looking into the localisation of news in the Middle East. The current study aims to investigate English news production in the Middle East and the localisation of news in this region. The study has three main questions that it aims to answer:

• How do English newspapers in the Middle East produce localised versions of

the news reports they receive from the major international news agencies?

• Why do these newspapers produce these localised versions instead of using

them as is?

110 • How do these localisation processes contrast with the “internationalisation” of

events in the Middle East for “western” audiences?

In order to be able to answer these questions and shed more light onto English news production in the Middle East, the study aims to use a multidisciplinary approach. The methodology and the analytical framework will be discussed in the next chapter.

111 Chapter 4 Methodology

This chapter starts by identifying the data used in the analysis. It provides a detailed description of the sources of the news reports as well as the topics of these reports.

The second part of this chapter is allocated to providing an in-depth explanation of the multidisciplinary discourse analytical framework used in analysing the data and is followed by a section describing how and why interview data was used.

4.1. Data:

This section will start by identifying the different sources of the news reports used in the study and then will provide background information about the topics of these news reports.

4.1.1. News sources:

Since the study aims at identifying how English newspapers in the Middle East localise the news reports of the international news agencies, the news reports used for analysis were derived from two main sources: international news agencies and an

English newspaper in the Middle East. The reports of three international news agencies are analysed because all of them are drawn upon in the localisation of the reports produced by the English newspaper in the Middle East that is examined in this thesis.

4.1.1.1. International news agencies:

112 International news agencies are “organisations whose main raison d’etre is to gather and to sell news throughout the world for the benefit of ‘retail’ media (newspapers, broadcasters, on-line suppliers) and other outlets (business, finance institutions, governments, private individuals)” (Boyd-Barret, 1998: 19). Most newspapers around the world depend heavily on international news agencies in providing news about other countries by subscribing to these agencies (Boyd-Barret, 1980). In the 1970s and 80s, the major international news agencies were known as the ‘Big Four’ and included “two American agencies, Associated Press (AP) and United Press

International (UPI), the British agency Reuters and the French agency Agence France

Presse (AFP)” (Boyd-Barret, 1980: 14). However, with the decline of the UPI in the

1990s, they are now referred to as the “Big Three” (Boyd-Barret, 1998: 20).

The ‘Big Three’ news agencies, Reuters, AP and AFP constitute one of the two sources for the news reports in this study. The following is a brief look at why these three agencies are considered as the “Big Three”:

• Reuters: Reuters is “the world’s largest international news agency” (Reuters)

and dates back to 1851 (Boyd-Barret, 1980: 23). Reuters is a non-government

agency that is owned by “four daily press associations” (Boyd-Barret, 1980:

25) and provides news reports that are “free from national or regional bias”

(Reuters). It is considered the “strongest” news agency, “mainly because of its

financial news service” (Boyd-Barret and Rantanen, 1998: 15).

• Agence France Presse: the AFP can be regarded as “the oldest of the

surviving world agencies” as it is the direct successor to Havas, which was

established in 1835 (Boyd-Barret, 1980: 23). AFP has “a cooperative

113 ownership structure, representing newspapers, journalists and the state”

(Boyd-Barret, 1998: 25). AFP claims that its mission is to provide a “balanced

coverage” of general news from around the world and to ensure to “get the

other side of the story, always seeking a response to accusations, claim and

recriminations” (AFP). However, having the state as one of its owners, it is

subject to “government interference through state representatives on its

governing council” (Boyd-Barret, 1998: 25).

• The Associated Press: the AP claims on its website that it is “the largest and

oldest news organisation in the world” (AP) having been “established in 1848”

(Boyd-Barret, 1980: 23). However, as Boyd-Barret referred to the AFP as the

oldest world agency, the AP’s claim does not seem to be correct. It is a

“cooperative of daily US newspapers” (Boyd-Barret, 1980: 25) and its mission

is to provide “news services of the highest quality, reliability and objectivity

with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed” (AP).

4.1.1.2. The local English newspaper in the Middle East:

The other source of news reports for this study was a local English newspaper in the

Middle East. There were a number of candidate newspapers from which to select, but the Gulf Daily News (GDN) newspaper of Bahrain was ultimately chosen. One main reason for choosing this newspaper was the ability to access news archives online, alongside the ability to get access to the original printed version, with the latter being a decisive reason in choosing GDN over the other candidates. Another vital reason for selecting the GDN is that it is from Bahrain, which, as has already been discussed, has unique relations with the international world. These relations result in the likelihood of media outlets in Bahrain adhering to a number of ideologies that could be different

114 from those disseminated by the international news agencies. These ideological underpinnings will be discussed in more detail in the data analysis chapter. Since the researcher is from Bahrain and has direct connections with some reporters at the newspaper in question, it was possible to obtain photocopies of the original printed news reports used in this study. By viewing the original printed copy of the news reports, it was possible to determine why GDN had two reports of the same topic.

One was found to have appeared on the first page and the other on the international news page. It also gave the researcher direct access to “insider” perspectives on the localisation process.

4.1.2. News topics:

Having considered the sources of the news reports used in this study, it is now important to identify the topics of the news reports selected in this study. In selecting which topics to cover, it was taken into consideration that each topic should be an international event with direct importance to the Middle East. These events had to be major ones that resulted in them being covered globally by the international agencies as well as by the local English newspapers (the GDN in this case). It was also necessary that they happened between the years 2008 and 2010. This was mainly due to the fact that at the time of data collection, the GDN’s online archive was only able to retrieve news reports as old as 2008 and data analysis started in late 2010.

Therefore the topics for analysis were selected from these years for the chapter on localisation of news reports.

The following is a look at each topic with a brief background on each one of them:

115 • Ex-US President George Bush shoed at by an Iraqi reporter: Bush’s

presidency tenure was notable for his controversial war in Iraq. In the eyes of

many critics, this war broke his bond with the American people (Walsh, 2008)

as well as with people all over the world. The Iraq war “has cost 4,209

American lives from the start of combat in 2003, tens of thousands of Iraqi

lives and $657 billion” as of December 2, 2008 (Walsh, 2008). However,

Bush always believed that this war was important as part of his “war on

terror” movement. At the end of his presidency, on December 14th, 2008, he

decided to make a last visit to Iraq to thank the US soldiers and sign security

agreements with the Iraqi leaders. During a press conference with Iraqi Prime

Minister Nuri Al Maliki, an Iraqi reporter hurled his shoes at Bush. This

incident, along with Bush’s visit to Iraq, was the focus of news reports all

around the world. The reason for choosing this topic was that it was believed

that the localised news report of the GDN would have placed more focus on

the shoe-throwing incident than on Bush’s visit and might have even reported

the person who threw the shoes at Bush as a hero. As the results of the

analysis show, the GDN report was the only one that barely reported the shoe-

throwing incident and its focus was primarily on Bush’s visit to Iraq.

• US President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo: with

the Arab and Muslims’ anger over the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,

Obama made “a promise during his presidential campaign to give a major

address to Muslims from a Muslim capital during the first few months in

office” (Colvin, 2009). He kept his promise and on June 4th, 2009, he

delivered a speech in Cairo that aimed to restore relations between the US and

the Muslim world. This topic was selected because it was expected that the

116 GDN localised news report would present different views regarding what

Obama said during his speech than would be found in the international news

agencies’ reports, mainly regarding whether his speech was welcomed by the

Muslim world or not.

• Israeli commandos’ raid of a peace flotilla: the Gaza Strip has been under

blockade by both Israel and Egypt since 2007. This blockade was mainly put

in place to restrict arms and weapons going to the Hamas group. The Gaza

blockade left the Gaza Strip in a very poor state and humanitarian

organisations had been calling for the blockade to be removed. On May 31st,

2010, a humanitarian aid flotilla with hundreds of humanitarian activists on

board was heading to Gaza in order to break the Israeli blockade. However,

the flotilla was raided by Israeli commandos, who killed nine and injured a

dozen of its activists. This incident was widely reported around the world,

with some condemning the Israeli actions and others defending them. It was

interesting to compare how the news agencies and the GDN reported the

incident, given that Bahrain has no diplomatic relations with Israel and does

not recognise it as a state.

Besides focusing on the localisation of the reports of the international news agencies by the GDN, this thesis also offers an examination of how these international news agencies view the local events that take place in the Middle East. This investigation reverses the primary focus from that of localisation to globalisation processes, as it aims to analyse how the international news agencies broadcast the local perspective of the people involved in the events in the Middle East to the international or Western readers. This investigation of the ways the international news agencies ‘eticise’ the

117 emic perspectives of the local Middle Eastern people will be provided in Chapter 6, which examines the reporting of the events of the Arab Spring, with a special look at the uprisings in Bahrain. The topic of the news reports that will be analysed is the

Formula One race that took place in Bahrain in 2012. This topic was selected mainly because the 2012 race was widely publicised as being controversial, following the cancellation of the 2011 race due to the uprising events in Bahrain that year. As a result, all international media were present to cover it – or to actually cover the uprising events instead of the sporting event – as will be discussed in Chapter 6.

Having identified the data used in the study, the next section will explain in detail the multidisciplinary approach used in analysing the data.

4.2. The multidisciplinary approach:

As was discussed in the literature review chapter, the current study uses a multidisciplinary approach that combines a number of methodologies. It draws from

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Pragmatics and Systemic Functional Grammar

(SFG), and supplements the findings with ethnographic interviews with news producers as well as with readers of English newspapers in the Middle East. The approach used in this study was developed following a preliminary study that was conducted to investigate the localisation strategies used by English newspapers in the

Middle East to enable them to produce localised versions of the news reports issued by major international news agencies. The preliminary study also served to show the fruitfulness of using and applying discourse analytical approaches in the analysis of media discourse. The following section is a brief overview of the findings of the

118 preliminary study and how it helped in developing the analytical framework of the current study.

4.2.1. Overview of the preliminary study:

The preliminary study aimed at investigating how ideologies are implicitly embedded in the news reports of three international news agencies (Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France Presse) by analysing news reports related to the controversy of

Pope Benedict XVI’s speech in 2006 on Islam and the Prophet Mohamed (see

Appendix One). The study also investigated how the Gulf Today and Gulf News newspapers of the UAE managed to produce other versions of these news reports that are more suitable for Middle Eastern readers. The texts were analysed using the description stage of CDA that was mainly adopted from Paltridge (2006) and

Fairclough (1989) as well as some parts from Pragmatics and SFG, and focused on analysing text features such as framing, connotations and presupposition. The analysis showed that no news report is free from ideologies and none of the news agencies managed to achieve their stated goals and missions of providing objective news without incorporating their ideologies in some way. The study also showed that while the Gulf Today and Gulf News newspapers used international agencies news reports as sources for their reports, they often carried out some changes to the agencies’ parts that were sourced to produce their localised texts. These changes included using strategies such as foregrounding and backgrounding, addition and omission, and summarising.

The preliminary study illustrated how English newspapers in the Middle East use the news reports of international news agencies in order to produce their own localised

119 news items. It was necessary to further support the findings of this preliminary study by analysing more news topics and further developing the analytical framework. The results of the preliminary study were limited to identifying some of the strategies used by English newspapers in the Middle East in producing their localised versions, but the study did not address the reasons for their doing so. Therefore, it was essential to develop a multidisciplinary approach to analysing the news reports of international news agencies as well as localised reports produced by English newspapers in the

Middle East. This new approach combines both a discourse analytical framework and an ethnographic perspective through interviews with news producers and newsreaders in the Middle East. The incorporation of interviews as part of the approach was important because, as Barkho (2010: 23) states, it provides “the ethnographic perspective that CDA analysts have been reluctant to supplement their studies with”.

The following sections will explain in detail the two parts of the multidisciplinary approach adopted in the thesis: the discourse analytical framework and the ethnographic interviews.

4.2.2. The discourse analytical framework:

The discourse analytical framework used in this study is useful in identifying the underlying ideologies of the international news agencies as well as the GDN and highlighting the localisation strategies used by the GDN. The diverse framework that is used in the analysis of the news reports is argued to be useful in identifying how facts and meanings are presented differently in the various news texts (Matheson,

2005), and how significant these differences are to the overall meaning of the text.

120 The following is a detailed overview of the analytical tools of the discourse analytical framework:

4.2.2.1. Word frequency analysis:

This part of the analysis looks at the most frequently used words in the text. When a news article continually repeats a specific word, phrase or collocation, this repetition may be of significance to the overall meaning of the text. Therefore, this part of the analysis is an attempt to find out if there are significant differences in the frequency of expressions from one text to another and how this affects the overall meaning of the text. Word frequency analysis examines whether there are any patterns in lexical expression that are particular to one text or texts, given that all the texts describe the same event.

4.2.2.2. Naming analysis:

This technique examines how each text refers to people, places, groups and events and investigates how they are formulated in the different news articles. This includes both the vocabulary that is used (as well as not used) by the articles to represent people, places, groups and events. The choice of vocabulary can reveal how the producers of each news article “embody their experience, conscience, reactions, perceptions and cognitions of themselves and their real world” (Barkho, 2010: 27).

4.2.2.3. Quotation analysis:

Quotations are a vital component of any news article, since it is through quotations that news producers distance themselves from the text and provide so-called

“objective” reporting (Barkho, 2010). According to Fairclough (Fairclough, 1995:

121 81), quoting helps reporters maintain “boundaries between representing discourse and the represented discourse - between voices of the reporter and the persons reported”.

This part of the analysis looks at the various types of quotations used in each of the texts including: direct quotations, indirect quotations (paraphrasing) and partial quotations. The latter is a strategy apparent in media discourse where the text producer paraphrases the words of a speaker, but supplements the paraphrasing with some of the actual wordings of utterances taken from that speaker (Lanson and

Stephens, 2008). Although it is commonly believed that quotations in news texts result in a more objective reporting, the different types of quotations have a significant role in determining the degree of objectivity, since indirect and partial quotations accommodate more room for the text producers to inject their own beliefs and ideas, and yet present them as if they were part of what the person quoted actually said.

As part of the quotation analysis, the quoting verbs used in the news reports are also analysed. The analysis focuses on the choice of quoting verbs based on Chen’s (2005;

2007) categorisation of verbal processes. She proposed three sub-categories of verbal processes, namely: “neutral”, “positive” and “negative”. The choice of a particular verbal process can reveal much about the text producer’s attitude toward, or opinion about, what is being quoted or paraphrased (Thompson, 1996; Chen, 2005; Barkho,

2010). Chen (2005: 36-40) provides a detailed explanation for each of these sub- categories:

• “Neutral verbal processes”: these verbs make it opaque as to whether the

writer is agreeing or disagreeing with what the person being reported is

122 saying. Examples of this category are quoting verbs such as said, told and

describe.

• “Negative verbal processes”: these verbs introduce an element of doubt about

the veracity of what the speaker is saying. They thus demonstrate a certain

negativity of feeling on the part of the writer towards the person whose words

are being introduced. Such quoting verbs can include insist, claim and deny.

• “Positive verbal processes”: the effect of these is to somehow promote in the

reader a feeling that the person whose words are being reported is

knowledgeable, authoritative or in some other sense, positive. Verbs like

declare, announce and explain are regarded as positive quoting verbs.

Another aspect of quotations that will be analysed is attribution. Attribution refers to

“who or what is presented as the source of the language being reported” (Thompson,

1996: 507). The sources can be categorised into three main groups:

• Named individual: the text provides full details of the person quoted. This type

of attribution helps create news reports “that audiences deem to be credible”

(Duffy and Freeman, 2011: 300).

• Unnamed individual: this category of attribution includes quotations where the

journalist does not name the person being quoted, such as saying “an official

said”. This type of attribution enables the text producer to present information

without clearly identifying the source “although the source is, in principle,

identifiable” (Thompson, 1996: 508). Using unnamed sources has been

criticised as a problem in journalism (Duffy and Freeman, 2011), and even

global news agencies, such as the AP and Reuters, point to their “weakness”

123 (Stenvall, 2010: 78), although they are nevertheless used in such reports.

• Named group: this category of attribution falls in between the two previous

types where the quote is attributed to an authority without clearly identifying

the actual speaker by attributing a quote to a country or a ministry.

4.2.2.4. Participation analysis:

This part of the analysis will identify the various speaker footings in the news articles as well as those of their audience. It will also look at the differences in the choice of participants in each of the news reports and how significant these differences might be. This analysis is mainly based on an adapted version of Erving Goffman’s

“participation framework” which he presented in his book Forms of Talk (1981).

According to Goffman’s framework, any communication should have a speaker and one or more recipients or audience. However, Goffman went further in arguing that a speaker actually conflates a number of different roles or stances – or what are called

“footings”. The three types of speaker footings identified in Goffman’s framework

(1981: 144) are:

• Animator: the individual who utters or produces the talk.

• Author: the individual(s) who have designed the talk (including the words

chosen and not chosen in formulating that talk) and selected the sentiments

that are being expressed.

• Principal: someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken,

whose beliefs have been outlined, and/or who is held to be committed to the

meaning of that talk.

124 Goffman also identified two types of audience or recipients (1981: 133):

• Addressed recipients: the ones to whom speakers address their visual attention

and to whom they expect to turn over the speaking role.

• Unaddressed recipients: when more than two people are identified as

recipients, one might be addressed while the others will be the unaddressed

recipients, such as the audience at a stage play or during a political speech.

It should be noted here that Goffman’s participation framework applies to participants who actually have a voice in the news reports – in other words, the people who were directly quoted. Goodwin and Goodwin (2004) explained the fourth type of speaker footings in Goffman’s framework that is embedded in indirect quotes. According to

Goodwin and Goodwin, the “figure” is “a character depicted in the animator’s talk”

(2004: 224) and the animator can evaluate both the talk being quoted and the actions of the party who produced it. Although Goodwin and Goodwin’s work was on talk, their framework can be applied to written text, and in this case, to news reports. In news reports, text producers can use quoting verbs as a tool to achieve the same effect.

4.2.2.5. Grounding and Theme:

Grounding is a fundamental property of text (Khalil, 2000). This part of the analysis focuses on the foregrounding and backgrounding structures at the sentence level, as well as the overall order of the text. This part of the analysis examines how each of the different news articles views and presents the story by examining what is given prominence and so foregrounded, and what is backgrounded. Ordering in newspaper

125 articles “is based upon importance or newsworthiness, with the headline and first paragraph in particular giving what are regarded as the most important parts, and the gist, of the story”. (Fairclough, 1989: 137).

By examining foregrounding and backgrounding at the sentence level, one is also looking at the Theme or what is referred to as topicalisation (Huckin, 1997). Halliday

(1994) states that the clause is organised as a message by having a special status assigned to one part of it which is called the ‘theme’. The theme is concerned with the current point of departure in relation to what has come before and how the clause contributes to the text. The analysis of the news articles will focus on instances of marked themes, since their structural role is different from what a theme typically is

(that is, an unmarked theme). Marked themes are used to draw the readers’ attention to the information being provided. This analysis will focus on identifying any marked themes in the news reports and consider the reasons for using them.

The above analytical tools will be used to analyse all the news reports to help understand the various strategies used by the GDN newspaper to produce localised versions of the news reports originally produced by international news agencies. The following section will explain how the analytical approach aims to find the reasons as to why the GDN produce localised news reports.

4.2.3. Interviews: why localisation is done:

Clausen (2004: 105) argues that news producers who work in the space between global and national news have “developed special competencies in intercultural communication” and that they have a “hunch” for the “selection and production of

126 international stories”. This applies to news producers in the English newspapers in the

Middle East as they have a good knowledge of both international affairs and their receiving audience. This knowledge enables them to select international news and produce localised news reports that suit their receiving audience.

To be able to understand why, as well as how, news producers in English newspapers in the Middle East produce localised news reports, interviews with editors and reporters from a number of English newspapers in the Middle East were conducted.

The reasons for interviewing editors and reporters from other English newspapers in the Middle East alongside those at the GDN was mainly because there are only a couple of people involved at the GDN, and interviewing other editors from other newspapers would thus provide a broader spectrum of views on the process of localisation from various ‘insiders’ to the English newspaper industry in the Middle

East. Ethical clearance was granted to conduct the interviews (LAL/03/11/HREC).

The interviews included open-ended questions, as these types of questions can help the interviewer work with the interviewee and not “delimit the interview with a pre- determined set of questions” (Rapley, 2004: 18). Two pilot interviews were conducted initially to determine the way the interviews would be done. One was conducted online via Skype and the other was an email exchange of questions and answers. It was found that the online interview yielded better results as the interviewer and the interviewee had the chance to explain and discuss a number of unclear issues.

Therefore, approximately 15 editors and reporters from English newspapers in

Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan were contacted to take part in online interviews. When some of them apologised due to their limited time, the researcher had to change the method for conducting the interviews and contacted the candidates

127 again for an exchange of questions and answers via email. However, only five interviews were successfully conducted in the end as some of the people contacted either apologised or did not reply. The interviewees were:

• The Editor-in-Chief of GDN from Bahrain

• The then Editor-in-Chief of the Bahrain Tribune (the newspaper is now out of

print) from Bahrain

• The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Middle East editor of Gulf News

from the United Arab Emirates

• The editor of 24x7 News and reporter for the Daily Arab News online

newspapers from Bahrain

• A reporter at GDN from Bahrain

Interviews were also conducted with three people from Bahrain who are regular readers of the GDN newspaper to gain insights into the readers’ perceptions of the localised news. They were individual interviews conducted online through sending a number of questions. The questions mainly involved comparing an extract taken from a news agency report and another extract from the localised version of that report that appeared in the GDN. The extracts were not named and the interviewees were asked to identify which one of the two was the news agency extract and which the GDN’s, as well as to provide some explanations for their answers.

Since the interviews with the editors and the readers were emailed, there was no transcription involved. The interviews were then analysed mainly to identify any

128 comments the interviewees provided regarding the reasons for localisation. The reasons were then grouped together according to their general theme.

4.3. Concluding remarks:

This chapter explains in detail the multidisciplinary approach adopted in the analysis of the data. This approach combines a discourse analytical framework with an ethnographic approach. The discourse analytical framework aims to answer the question of what strategies are used for the localisation process, whereas the interviews, which form the ethnographic dimension of the methodology, aim to answer the question of why and how localisation is achieved. The results of the data analysis are presented in the following two chapters. Chapter Five focuses on the emicisation of the etic perspectives presented by the international news agencies in their coverage of international events, while Chapter Six explains how the international news agencies eticise the local events to their readers.

129 Chapter 5 Localisation of News Reports

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part will use the discourse analytical framework to analyse the news reports in order to uncover underlying ideological perspectives in their reporting of the three topics. The second part will identify the localisation strategies employed by the GDN newspaper to produce their localised versions of the news reports in order to find out how English newspapers in the

Middle East produce their own versions of the news agencies’ news reports. The last part will discuss the results of the interviews with the news editors and readers in order to ground a proposed framework for analysing the localisation of news reports.

5.1. Case Study 1: Gaza flotilla raid:

On the 31st of May 2010, the Israeli naval forces raided a humanitarian flotilla that was heading to Gaza with the intention of breaking the blockade of the Gaza strip.

The Israeli raid left a number of the humanitarian activists dead and others were wounded. The raid led many to condemn the Israeli actions and the issue was reported all over the world. The analyses of this section show how the international news agencies reported the incident, including how Israel was represented in their reporting, and compares these reports with the localised report produced by the GDN.

Refer to Appendix Two for the news reports.

5.1.1. Word frequency analysis:

Before looking into the word frequency analysis, it is essential to identify the length of each of the four news reports as this plays a role in understanding the reasons for

130 one report having more instances of a specific word than the others. AP and Reuters provided longer reports on the flotilla raid than AFP and the GDN. The following table shows the total number of words in each report:

News report Total number of words

AP 1284

Reuters 912

AFP 572

GDN 586

Table 5-1: Total number of words of each news report

The word frequency analysis shows that all the reports were focused on “Israel” and the “Israeli” actions as these two words were among the most frequently used words in all the four news reports. Table 5-2 shows the top 10 most frequently used words in the four articles:

No AP Reuters AFP GDN

Type Token Type Token Type Token Type Token

1 said 19 Israel 13 said 9 Israel 10

2 Israel 16 said 12 Israeli 7 call 5

3 activist 14 Israeli 10 Israel 7 flotilla 4

4 Israeli 13 Turkey 7 raid 6 said 4

5 Gaza 11 Gaza 6 Gaza 6 Al 4

6 ship 11 Palestinian 6 president 4 UN 4

7 military 8 military 5 aid 3 ambassador 4

131 8 soldier 7 international 5 storm 3 prince 3

9 blockade 7 activist 5 flotilla 3 chief 3

10 off 7 board 4 chief 3 international 3

Table 5-2: Top 10 words in the news reports

The table also shows that the three news agencies’ reports focused on quotations as the quoting verb “said” was among the top three most frequently used words. It was used 19 times in the AP, 12 in Reuters and 9 in the AFP. However, the localised GDN article used “said” only 4 times. A detailed analysis of quotations will be given later to show differences and similarities among the four articles in this respect.

It is also clear that all the top ten most used words in all the four reports reflect the central topic, which is the flotilla raid. As has already been mentioned, “Israel” and

“Israelis” were among the top used words, since all the reports were focused on reporting the Israeli actions. “Gaza”, “blockade” and “Palestinian” were other words used frequently as the incident was closely related to the Gaza blockade in Palestine.

The most used words also represent some of the most important parties involved in the incident, (other than “Israelis” and “Palestinian”), such as “Turkey”, “activists”,

“military” and “soldiers”.

The word frequency analysis shows that overall there are some similarities, but also some differences in the way the four text producers reported on the incident. These similarities and differences will be highlighted in more depth in the following sections.

132 5.1.2. Naming analysis:

Since the topic of the news reports is the raid on the flotilla, it is useful to start the naming analysis by first looking at how each news report named the “flotilla” and then the “raid”. All the reports framed the flotilla ships as peaceful and innocent in intent, while the raid was pictured as aggressive. For example, the flotilla was referred to as “an aid flotilla” in line 1 of the AP and “a civilian vessel” in line 9. Reuters in line 1 also provided more details about the ship as it described it as “a Turkish aid ship” while the AFP described it as “a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza strip” in line 2. However, the GDN also described the ship in a more politically charged way as it was named as “the freedom flotilla” in line 2. On the other hand, the raid was described as bloody and violent by all the four news reports. The AP described it as “a botched raid” in line 3 and it was also described as the “bloody showdown” in line 77.

Reuters also framed the raid in the same manner as it described it as “a bloody end” to the flotilla’s trip to Gaza in line 5. The AFP used the same expression in line 41, describing the raid as a “bloody ending to the high-profile mission to deliver supplies to Gaza”. It also described it as a “deadly raid” in line 3. The localised report labelled it as “Israel’s deadly raid” in line 2 as it aims to draw a negative picture of Israel and its actions.

Another interesting point to investigate here is how each report made explicit reference to the Israeli commandos. All four texts referred to the Israeli forces that performed the raid in a general way, such as describing them as “Israelis”, “troops”,

“Israeli commandos”, “Israeli forces” and “soldiers”. However, only the AP and

Reuters articles identified these forces or soldiers as being “Israeli naval commandos”

(in line 56 of the AP report) and “Israeli marines” (in line 1 of Reuters report). This

133 indicates that both the AFP and the localised report of the GDN were less concerned with the details of who specifically undertook the raid and more interested in generalising that it was Israel who carried out the attack. The information provided by both the AP and Reuters does not change the fact that it was actually Israel who conducted the raid, but it shows that their reporting provides the readers with more detailed information about the incident.

The above analysis leads to a related point, which is how each report presented and named Israeli officials. Consistent with the above finding, the AP and Reuters articles also provide their readers with more details and information from a number of Israeli officials, such as Israeli ministers and naval officials, while the AFP only referred to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (in line 43). The localised version of the GDN did not make reference to, or provide information from, any Israeli official(s). In this way, the text producers removed the perspective of the Israeli officials in reporting on the incident.

Another important part of the reporting of the incident was the treatment of the flotilla passengers. Each article provided varying details about them. All four texts referred to the passengers as “activists”, although only AP and GDN estimated their total number. The AP stated that the Mavi Marmara carried “600 of the 700 activists” (line

30) and the GDN estimated them at “around 700 peace protesters from around the world” (line 8). Each report provided different information to identify the nationalities of the passengers. For example the AP quoted one passenger and stated that he

“identified himself as American” (line 20) and also quoted “a Turkish television reporter on the boat” (line 45). Reuters identified some of the passengers as “Turks”

134 (line 53) and others were identified as “Americans and Europeans, including politicians, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and Swedish author Henning Mankell” (line

59). The AFP also referred to some of the passengers as “Turks” (line 5) and also stated that among the passengers were “16 Kuwaitis” (line 27). The report also stated that Greece “had some 30 nationals on board the flotilla” (line 30). The GDN news report, however, was more concerned with pointing out that there were “four

Bahrainis” on board the flotilla (line 2).

The naming analysis shows that the flotilla was presented by all the news reports as a peace and aid flotilla, while the Israeli raid was characterised with various words that have negative connotations, such as “bloody” and “deadly”. The AP and Reuters reports provided more details about the Israeli commandos who performed the raid and also provided more information from Israeli sources. The GDN report seemed to take its own particular perspective on the incident as it focused on presenting the

Israeli raid in a more negative way, and was also not concerned with providing the viewpoint of the Israeli officials in its article. Each article provided different information that helped the readers identify the nationalities of the flotilla activists, with the GDN providing more insights about the local Bahraini activists on the flotilla, as this information is presumably what its readers are more concerned with.

5.1.3. Quotation analysis:

Quotations constituted less than half of most of the reports. It was only the AFP report that had more than 50 per cent quotations. Table 5-3 shows the total number of quotation words in comparison to the total words used in each of the articles:

135 AP Reuters AFP GDN

Total word 1284 912 572 397 count

Total 591 (46%) 356 (39%) 328 (57%) 157 (39.5%) quotations

Table 5-3: Quotations percentage in each news report

Analysing the types of quotations featured shows that AP, Reuters and GDN preferred to use indirect quotes more than the other types, while AFP used more instances of partial quotes. A detailed look at the quoting types is illustrated in Table 5-4 below.

AP Reuters AFP GDN

Total quoted 591 356 328 157 words

Direct quoting 118 (20%) 69 (19%) 107 (33%) 17 (11%) Indirect 337 (57%) 239 (67%) 18 (5%) 73 (46%) quoting

Partial quoting 136 (23%) 49 (14%) 203 (62%) 67 (43%) Table 5-4: Types of quoting used in each news report

The above table shows that direct quotes, which are commonly believed to be the way news producers ensure the objectivity of their reporting, were actually the least used type amongst all four reports. The AP and Reuters news reports relied mainly on indirect quoting, while the localised GDN report used indirect and partial quotes more than direct ones.

136

According to Barkho (2010: 119), through paraphrasing or indirect quotes, “very little remains of the authorial and orthographic clues of the original discourse apart from the source”, and reporters use this quoting type to “air their own voices”. An interesting example that shows how the Reuters text producers resort to using paraphrasing appears in line 69: “Some said Turkey’s political and economic ties with

Israel were too deep and complex to suffer long-term damage”. Reuters here is possibly using an indirect quote to air their opinion on the ties between Turkey and

Israel. The source, as Barkho (2010) suggests, might be that of the reporter or the text producers.

Partial quotes are very similar to indirect quotes, but the text producers tend to paraphrase most of what the person said and leave one or more words between quotation marks. This strategy, Barkho (2008: 130) argues, is used to show the readers that these words are problematic and represent the speaker’s “discursive patterns” as well as to distance themselves from the stance represented through these words. There are a number of examples of this in all four news reports, especially when the person quoted described the Israeli raid. For example, in line 43 of the AP report, it is stated that Jordan called the raid a “heinous crime”; in line 82 of the

Reuters article it is reported that the Arab League condemned what it called a

“terrorist act”; in line 21 of the AFP article it is stated that Iran’s President Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad denounced the raid as “inhuman Zionist regime action”; and in line 39 of the GDN report, the text quotes the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied

Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, as describing the Israeli raid as “murderous behaviour”. Using a combination of paraphrasing and direct quoting leaves the text

137 producers less accountable for the use of the expressions between the quotation marks and also adds more perceived authority and objectivity to the paraphrased parts.

It is also important to tease out the stance of the text producers toward the people quoted and what they said. An analysis of the quoting verbs used can help with this.

Chen (2007: 476) argues that the choice of one quoting verb over another can indicate whether the text producer’s attitude is “favourable or unfavourable”.

Table 5-5 shows that neutral verbs were the most frequently used, with 60 instances out of the total of 88. This is expected since the verb “said” was one of the most commonly used words among the four news reports and it is also “the most common verbal process in English” (Chen, 2007). However, this does not necessarily mean that the four news articles were totally neutral in their reporting, as it has already been noted in the previous paragraphs that they relied on paraphrasing quotes so that text producers could voice their own views in their reporting.

Type of quoting verb Number of incidences Percentage of total

quoting verbs

All types 88

Neutral 60 68.2%

Positive 25 28.4%

Negative 3 3.4%

Table 5-5: Incidence and percentage of the quoting verbs in all the news reports

138

Negative quoting verbs were the least frequently used and were only used by Reuters and AFP articles, as shown in Table 5-6.

Type of quoting Number of incidences

verb AP Reuters AFP GDN

All types 33 23 22 10

Neutral 25 19 13 3

Positive 8 3 7 7

Negative 0 1 2 0

Table 5-6: Incidence of the quoting verbs in each of the news reports

It is interesting to look at the contextually negative quoting verbs since they were the least used and find out why Reuters and AFP resorted to using them, while AP and

GDN did not use this type. First, in line 42 of the Reuters article, an indirect quote is used to present words of an Israeli minister. The text states that an Israeli minister

“admitted plans to maintain the blockade on Hamas while avoiding an international incident had backfired in spectacular fashion”. The use of the negative quoting verb

“admitted” was the choice of the text producers as they could have used other neutral verbs without affecting the meaning. According to the Merriam Webster Online

Dictionary (2013), ‘admit’ means to concede something as true or valid, and in most cases, this thing is a wrong doing or a negative thing. The use of “admitted” gives the impression that what the minister is saying is viewed as negative by at least some people. According to Chen (2005: 44), reporters tend to use the negative quoting verb

139 “admitted” mostly with senior government figures such as anonymous ministers, as in the Reuters example here.

The other two instances of contextually negative quoting verbs were used in the AFP article. In line 18, the text states “Israel claimed its naval forces were attacked by activists”. The text producers’ use of the verb “claimed” here casts doubt on what is being said as at this stage, there was still doubt about what Israel was saying. Chen

(2005: 45) argues that in formal conflict such as the example of the AFP, the text producers might be constrained in the choice of which quoting verb to use. Since the text producers aim to convey to their readers the extent of doubt in the claims being made, they need to use an appropriate quoting verb through which to distance themselves from what has been asserted. In this case, the verb also connotes doubt as to the accuracy of that assertion, and thus a potentially negative stance towards the party making the assertion. The second instance of a negative quoting verb in the AFP article is in line 38, where the text quotes the French Foreign Minister. The minister first “said” he was “deeply shocked” by the Israeli raid and “insisted ‘nothing can justify’ such violence”. The text here has two quoting verbs, the first is the neutral

“said” followed by “insisted”, which is used here as a negative quoting verb. It is clear that the text producers could have used neutral verbs in both instances, but their choice to use the negative “insisted” could suggest that the minister, although trying to appear determined in what he is saying, is defensive and there is some doubt being expressed (at least on the part of some) about what he is saying.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was only quoted in the AP and

Reuters texts, but it is nevertheless interesting to look at how each report presented his

140 feelings towards the incident. The AP in line 53 stated that “Netanyahu expressed

‘regret’ for the loss of life”, while Reuters in line 17 reported that he “also voiced regret”. It is clear that each article presented Netanyahu’s apology, but it is the choice of the quoting verb that marks a difference in meaning. AP used the more positive quoting verb “expressed” to frame Netanyahu’s apology for the loss of life as clear and sincere. The AP is presenting Netanyahu’s regret as an accepted apology here.

However, Reuters used a neutral quoting verb “voiced” to present his regret and it does not make it clear to the readers what he is actually regretting, whether it is the actual attack or the loss of life or both. Notably, Reuters’ use of the neutral quoting verb presented Netanyahu as not truly apologising as he used “regret” instead of

“apologise”, which is considered by Kampf (2009) to be a common strategy for making public non-apologies. Kampf (2009: 2261) claims that “the necessity to issue a response for the collateral damages sets an avoidance conflict” for the Israeli Prime

Minister, since not apologising at all “would be a second order transgression and would violate the international expectation to display appropriate feelings after such a grave offense”. Yet outright apologising “would be an admission of violating an international law (killing civilians in armed conflict) and may expose Israel to liability in future litigations”, and so this is avoided through the term “regret”.

Table 5-7 lists all of the quoting verbs in each of the news reports according to their type:

News Type Quoting verb producer

141 Neutral said, told, called, cried out, voiced, added AP Positive demanded, expressed, announced, condemned, declared, called on

Neutral said, voiced, asked, told, called Reuters Positive vowed, dismissed, condemned

Negative admitted

Neutral said, shouted, called, responded, told AFP Positive demanded, urged, warned, declared, condemned

Negative claimed, insisted

GDN Neutral said Positive rapped, addressed, called on, called, condemned Table 5-7: Quoting verbs used in the news reports

As shown in the above table, the positive quoting verb “condemned” is used by all four news reports and it is a different person reported in each report conveying the condemnation. By choosing the quoting verb “condemned”, it seems that the text producers of the four news reports have taken a similar viewpoint towards the Israeli actions, as they implicitly criticise the attacks. For example, in line 103 of the AP, the

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “condemned the Israeli ‘massacre’”; in line 82 of Reuters text, the Arab League “condemned what it called a ‘terrorist act’”; in line

26 of the AFP article, the Kuwaiti Parliament speaker “condemned the storming of the flotilla”; and in line 32 of the GDN report, the 27 EU countries “condemned

Israeli’s use of violence”. In each of the examples provided, the text producers used the positive quoting verb “condemned” to criticise the Israeli actions that have been presented negatively as well.

142 The text producers at the GDN understand that local readers would also expect an official statement by their country’s leaders, so they ensured that they reported what the Prime Minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, and the Crown Prince and

Supreme Commander, Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, said about the raid both directly and indirectly. It is interesting to look at how the article presented the indirect quote in line 13: “The killing and wounding of activists aboard the flotilla was strongly condemned by …”. As was discussed in the previous paragraph,

“condemned” is used as a positive quoting verb, but the text producers tried to make it more positive by adding the premodifier “strongly” to show the readers that the Prime

Minister and the Crown Prince were serious in their words by increasing the illocutionary force of this condemnation.

Attribution is another vital component of quotation that needs to be looked into as part of a quotation analysis. Duffy and Freeman (2011) argue that offering full attribution provides an implicit promise to the reader that the information provided is true. Attribution is a means by which journalists ensure that their reporting is

“credible”, and the more “elite or authorative” the source, the more newsworthy the story is perceived to be (Jullian, 2011). However, journalists do not always provide full attribution to the quoted words they provide in their reporting, and sometimes they attribute the quotes to anonymous or unnamed sources.

Table 5-8 below shows the number of times each type of attribution was used in each of the four news reports. It is clear that both the AP and Reuters used unnamed sourced quotes more than AFP and GDN. Stenvall (2010: 78), in his study of unnamed sources in news agency reports, also found that, although both AP and

143 Reuters clearly point out the “weakness” of unnamed sources, “anonymous speakers appear frequently” in their reporting.

Type of AP Reuters AFP GDN attribution

Named 10 8 10 7 individual

Unnamed 14 10 3 1 individual

Named group 5 3 6 2

Table 5-8: Types of attribution in the news reports

The AP and Reuters reports used many quotations attributed to Israeli officials, while

AFP and GDN did not include any quotations from any Israeli officials. AP explained this in line 14 by saying that “most of the information about what happened on the single ship where violence broke out came from Israel” and also Reuters stated in line

35 that “accounts of the predawn operation … were sketchy and limited to those from the Israeli side”. Therefore, most of the unnamed sources used in the AP and Reuters were labelled “a soldier”, “the military” and “Israeli officials”. The following table lists all the sources used in each of the news reports, categorised according to their type:

144 News Type Source of quote producer

Netanyahu, Greta Berlin, Turkey’s Foreign Minster Ahmet Davutoglu, Obama, Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman Named Sabine Haddad, Dr. Arnon Afek deputy director of Chaim individual Sheba Medical Center, Palestinian President Mahmoud

Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh leader of the rival Hamas government in Gaza

AP one passenger who identified himself as American, a soldier, an Al Jazeera journalist, a Turkish television Unnamed reporter, a voice, the military, activists, a spokeswoman for individual the Free Gaza Movement, a commando, the militants and the Israeli military

Named the Israelis, Jordan, Ankara, the White House, the British group foreign secretary

145 President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Named Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Trade individual Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Prime Minister Tayyip

Erdogan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Reuters Israeli officials, some Israeli commentators, an Israeli Unnamed minister, one marine, Israeli military, one senior Israeli individual officer, military officials, the military, some

Named Israel, the Arab League group

The UN’s rights chief Navi Pillay, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Palestinian President Mahmoud Named Abbas, the Arab League chief Amr Mussa, French Foreign individual Minister Bernard Kouchner, Germany’s Foreign Minister

Guido Westerwelle, Maen Bashur a Lebanese activist, a AFP Cyprus MEP Kyriacos Triantafyllides Unnamed protestors, a written statement, Kuwait’s parliament individual speaker

Named the European Union, Hamas, Turkey, Ankara, Israel group

Bahrain’s Ambassador to Turkey Hassan Murad, Prime Named Minister Prince Khalifa and Prince Salman Crown Prince, individual UN chief Ban Ki-moon, UN Special Rapporteur for the

Occupied Palestinian Territories Richard Falk GDN Unnamed Muslim leaders individual

Named NATO, ambassadors from the 27 EU countries group Table 5-9: The sources of quotes used in the news reports

The Reuters article went one step further to boost the standing of one of its unnamed sources by adding the premodifier “senior” to label an “Israeli officer” in line 53. This strategy, according to Stenvall (2010), is used by text producers to add an “elite” and

“authoritative” status to the unnamed source.

146 Another interesting strategy related to the use of unnamed sources is to present the first quote with an unnamed source and then present the following one with a clearly named source. This strategy was used by both the AP and Reuters articles. In line 58 of the AP report, for instance, a quote is presented with the unnamed source “a spokeswoman for the Free Gaza movement”, but the following quote in line 61 was attributed to a named source “Greta Berlin”. Another example of this strategy is used in line 42 of the Reuters article when the first quote was attributed to the unnamed source “an Israeli minister”, but the following quote was clearly named “Trade

Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer”. Stenvall (2010: 90) claims that the “step-by-step” presentation of sources “conforms to the conventions of news writing”, which usually starts with general information and proceeds from general to specific. Another interesting finding here, is that when both texts used the unnamed source with the first quote, it was used with an indirect quote, while the clearly attributed source was used with a direct quote.

The quotation analysis shows that although quotations were not the largest constituent of the news reports, they provided valuable insights into the implicit stance of the text producers of the four articles. Text producers can use indirect quotes or paraphrase to air their opinions or as Moore (2008: 191) explains they “control” or modify the actual speech “by virtue of … verbal projection”. According to Moore (2008: 191), verbal projection involves “a sayer; a verbal process; a receiver; verbiage; target; and matter”. If the text producer uses the quoted person as the sayer along with the verbal process “say” or a variation of it, then the quote is “direct and unambiguous” (Moore,

2008: 191). However, modifying the speech through “narrator control” involves

“blending of direct quotes with reported voice” which causes “ambiguity as to the

147 boundary of” the quoted person’s voice and that of “the journalist” (Moore, 2008:

192). When text producers use partial quotes, they aim to signal to the readers that the words between quotation marks are not theirs and they take no responsibility for them. Text producers can also use the quoting verbs to indicate their stance towards what is being quoted. The analysis found out that these quoting verbs could be neutral, positive or negative. Only Reuters and AFP used instances of negative quoting verbs. The analysis also showed three types of attribution, that is, quotes from clearly attributed individuals, unnamed sources, and those from clearly attributed groups. AP and Reuters use more unnamed sources in their reporting, while AFP and

GDN use more clearly attributed quotes.

5.1.4. Participation analysis:

Since the news articles report on the Israeli raid on the flotilla, it is interesting to start the participation analysis by looking at how each news report presented the Israeli

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As shown in the previous sections, it was only the AP and Reuters that included his voice in their texts. The quotation analysis showed that both articles presented Netanyahu’s expressing his “regret”. It can be seen here that Netanyahu fills the three footings of the speaker as set out in Goffman’s

(1981) participation framework. He is the animator of the apology expression, its author and also the principal, although in the latter case, his words are also meant to represent Israel’s position. However, what exactly Netanyahu on behalf of Israel is held accountable for, is not entirely clear. Netanyahu’s expression of regret can either be considered an apology or a non-apology (as discussed earlier in the quotation analysis). If the expression is considered a clear, proper apology, then his words represent him as taking responsibility for the raid and the killing, and therefore he can

148 fill the principal footing. On the other hand, if he used the expression as a public non- apology to avoid taking full responsibility for the incident, then his footing vis-à-vis that of the principal is less straightforward.

All four reports presented the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas describing the

Israeli raid as a “massacre”. This presentation of the Palestinian President allows him to take all three speaker footings. He is the animator and author of the words, since all four texts place the remarks between quotation marks to signal that it is he who uttered them. He is also the principal on behalf of others, given that his words represent the feelings of Palestinians and also Muslims more generally. This wider principal footing is made explicit in the GDN report where it is clearly stated in line

35 that “Muslim leaders condemned what Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called a ‘massacre’”. This indicates that the president’s words are meant to represent the feelings of the Muslim leaders as well.

It is also interesting here to look at a number of speakers in the news reports where it is difficult to ascertain any of the speaker footings. Such examples include “Ankara” in line 71 in the AP report, “the Arab League” in line 82 of Reuters, “the European

Union” in line 5 of the AFP and “NATO” in line 32 of the GDN article. These speakers cannot be identified and therefore it is difficult to assign the roles of animator, author and principal to an identifiable person. When the news producers attribute a stance to a large organisation, such as the Arab League for instance, it is implied that the views of everyone in that organisation are unanimous and therefore any possible disagreement in presenting the views as being clearly and unanimously

149 against the Israeli actions, is backgrounded. This strategy makes it difficult to contest or challenge the reporting of that stance.

5.1.5. Grounding:

The overall text order for each of the news reports shows that both AP and Reuters begin their articles by highlighting the Israeli raid on the flotilla. The AP’s first sentence states that “Israeli commandos rappelled down to an aid flotilla sailing to thwart a Gaza blockade on Monday, clashing with pro-Palestinian activists on the lead ship in a botched raid that left at least nine passengers dead”. Reuters starts with,

“Israeli marines stormed a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on Monday and at least nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed”. The AFP article starts with a different angle on the story by highlighting the global reaction to the Israeli action in stating

“Shock and outrage swept the globe Monday after Israeli commandos stormed a flotilla of aid bound for the Gaza strip”. The GDN report, however, was more concerned with the local reaction to what Israel did, as the report starts by stating

“Bahrain yesterday called for an immediate international investigation into Israel’s deadly raid on the Freedom Flotilla, in which four Bahrainis were seized”.

It is also interesting to compare the information each lead sentence provides to its readers. AP, Reuters and AFP state that “Israeli commandos” and “Israeli marines” performed the raid, thereby primarily implicating specific persons from Israel in the raid, and only secondarily the state of Israel. However, the localised GDN report attributes the raid to “Israel”, thereby implicitly attributing primary responsibility to the state of Israel. The three reports of AP, Reuters and AFP also state that the flotilla was heading to Gaza, while this information is not included in the GDN’s first

150 sentence, as it seems likely that the local readers are already aware of this information. The AP and Reuters include information about the number of killed, while the GDN article highlights that “four Bahrainis were seized”.

5.1.6. Concluding remarks:

The above analysis reveals that there are clear differences as well as some similarities in how each news report represented the events of the flotilla raid. The following is a brief summary of what the analysis has shown.

The naming analysis showed that all the reports were similar in focusing on the main topic, which is the Israeli raid on the flotilla ship. However, it also revealed that there was a significant difference in how the international news agencies report and view

Israel in contrast to how the localised GDN version deals with it. All the news agencies referred to a number of Israeli officials in their reporting, whereas the GDN news report barely referred to Israel as a country and did not include or mention any

Israeli officials in its reporting.

The quotation analysis also showed that there was a difference in the types of quotes used in each news report. The analysis showed that the GDN used more instances of indirect and partial quotes as these two types enable the text producers to air their own voices, and the GDN producers aimed to further represent the Israeli actions in a negative way. The GDN also had local voices appear in its report to further embed the article within a local set of understandings and thereby indicate a more localised stance on those events.

151 The participation analysis results supported the findings of the naming analysis, as the

GDN report did not include any Israeli voice in its article.

The grounding analysis also showed that the GDN producers aimed to give their report a local flavour by foregrounding the fact that Bahrainis were among the seized activists on the flotilla ship.

The next section will examine whether such similarities and differences in the reporting of the international news agencies and the GDN occur in their coverage of another topic, namely, Obama’s speech in Cairo.

5.2. Case study 2: Obama’s speech in Cairo:

On June 4, 2009 President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the Muslim world at

Cairo University. The speech was widely anticipated as the “New Beginning” speech as Obama aimed to bridge the gap between the relations of the United States and the

Muslim world after they were severely damaged during the presidency of George W.

Bush. This made the speech a global attraction and media all over the world ensured that they covered it. Refer to Appendix Three for the news reports.

5.2.1. Word frequency analysis:

As with the previous case study, the following table shows the total number of words of each news report:

News report Total number of words

AP 1142

152 Reuters 679

AFP 688

GDN 1 176

GDN 2 536

Table 5-10: Total number of words of each news report

It can be seen from the above table that AP’s article is the longest, while the other three news producers produced somehow similar reports in length. Since the GDN had its report divided into two different pages, one of its reports appeared on the front page and was only a short summary report. The front page summary is expected to be shorter as with most of news reports that appear on the front pages of almost all newspapers.

The word frequency analysis for the three international news agencies reveals that their main focus in their news reports is President Obama and what he said in his speech. The following table shows the 10 most frequently used words in each of the news reports:

153 No AP Reuters AFP GDN 1 GDN 2

Type Token Type Token Type Token Type Token Type Token

1 he 19 said 14 Obama 12 Muslim 7 Muslim 14

2 Obama 19 he 10 speech 12 his 5 said 12

3 said 16 Obama 10 said 10 he 3 he 11

4 Muslim 16 world 8 new 9 said 3 his 11

Middle 5 his 13 speech 7 7 U.S. 3 Obama 9 East

6 president 8 Muslim 7 U.S. 7 world 3 speech 9

7 speech 8 interest 6 world 6 action 2 U.S. 9

8 America 7 leader 5 hope 5 all 2 we 7

9 war 6 policy 5 Islamic 5 Obama 2 world 7

10 Islam 5 America 4 Arab 4 speech 2 much 6

Table 5-11: Top 10 words in the news report

As shown in table 5-11, the word “Obama” is used 19 times in the AP’s report, 10 times in the Reuter’s report, and 12 times in the AFP’s report. The word “Obama” is among the top three most used words in each of the three articles. This makes it clear that Obama is the focus of the news reports. This, however, is notably not the case with the GDN news article as the word “Muslim” is the most frequently used word in both reports, with the word being used 7 times in GDN 1 and 14 times in GDN 2.

This reveals a shift in the focus of the GDN reporting of the topic in comparison with that of the other news agencies. This focus on Muslims (and their reaction to Obama’s speech) in the reporting of the localised versions, is perhaps to be expected since

154 Obama delivered his speech to the Muslim world and his speech was considered important to Muslims.

The verb “said” is also another word that is used repeatedly by all of the news articles.

It was used 16 times in the AP’s report, 14 times in Reuters’ report, 10 times in the

AFP’s report, 3 times in GDN 1 and 12 times in GDN 2. This indicates that all of the news articles were reporting what Obama was saying in his speech and also signals the fact that each of the articles has a large number of quotations, either direct or indirect.

The word frequency analysis indicates, however, that the two localised versions are different in other respects from the ones produced by the news agencies. These differences will be analysed in more detail in the following sub-sections.

5.2.2. Naming analysis:

As was mentioned in the previous section, all the news articles used the word

“Obama” many times and it was the most frequently used formulation in referring to

President Obama. It was used in all five news articles. However, this was not the only way the President was referred to in the texts. In the AP, Reuters and AFP news reports, the word “President” was used to modify “Obama”; and in the Reuters, AFP and both GDN reports, his first name was used to further modify “Obama”, as in

“President Barack Obama”, for instance. However, the AP article included Obama’s

“rarely used” middle name in its first sentence referring to him as “Barack Hussain

Obama”. This seems to be an attempt taken by the text producers to highlight the fact that Obama has connections with Muslims and his visit to the Middle East and his

155 speech to the Muslim world during his first days as president signals a “new beginning” in relations between the US and the Muslim world. Moreover, the report provides more information about Obama’s Muslim roots by referring to him as “the

Christian son of a Kenyan Muslim father and a Kansas mother” in line 35.

It is interesting to point out that the reports from the international news agencies apparently tried to be as objective as possible in their reporting of the speech as they refrained from describing it either positively or negatively. Their way of doing so was by referring to it as “Obama’s speech”. However, the GDN’s localised news reports seemed to explicitly take a more positive stance towards the speech as important to the Muslim world. In GDN 1, the speech was referred to as “the highly anticipated speech” in line 10, while the report in GDN 2 went further to describe the speech as

“a major” one in line 2.

One of the important topics Obama discussed in his speech was the issue of Palestine and Israel and this was the focus of news reporting about the speech as well. All of the news reports focused on how Obama addressed this topic, but there were a number of differences in how this was done.

First of all, how the news agencies described the issue of relations between Palestine and Israel is interesting. The AP reported the issue as a “dispute” between Israelis and

Palestinians in line 46, stating that “Obama addressed the Israeli-Palestinian dispute pointedly in his address”, whereas Reuters described it as a “conflict” in line 37 by stating that Obama “affirmed his commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict”. Although both words “dispute” and “conflict” refer to a

156 disagreement between two parties, “conflict” indicates a stronger degree of clash and disagreement than “dispute”, with the former possibly involving a greater degree of violence. So the AP’s choice of word of “dispute” to describe the situation between

Palestinians and Israelis would therefore be inappropriate to appear in the GDN’s localised version, given the commonly held views there about the more-than-40-years of disagreements between Palestine and Israel. Reuters’ choice of the word “conflict” to describe the situation is thus more suitable for the GDN‘s localised news article, and it can be observed that this paragraph is copied without any changes.

Another interesting point to focus on is the words used to characterise Israel, although it should be noted here that the following analysis focuses on how the views of Israel are represented in the news report itself, and does not include the views of Obama or other people quoted in the texts. For example, in line 17 in the AP article, it was reported that Obama “did not note the suffering in Gaza following the three-week

Israeli incursion earlier this year”. This line seems to be paraphrasing what a Hamas spokesman said, in describing the Israeli action using the word “incursion”. However, it does not specifically indicate that these are the words of the spokesman rather than those of the report producers. It seems to show that the report actually takes a negative stance on the Israeli actions. To further emphasise this point, the report at line 44 described the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with the word

“hawkish”, which has negative connotations of being uncompromising, taking a hard line and aggressive. The report indicated that Obama “calls for settlement freeze in the West Bank and the creation of an independent Palestine state”, however, these calls and demands are rejected by the “hawkish” Israeli Prime Minister. Both words,

“incursion” and “hawkish”, include the suggestion of violence, and therefore Israel’s

157 actions are presented in the news report as potentially violent. This view seems to contradict how the AFP news article described Israel. In line 17, the AFP calls Israel

“the top US ally in the region” - where the word “ally” suggests that the two countries have friendly associations. Describing a country as an “ally” of the United States seems to be a positive trait, at least from the perspective of many western readers. It is interesting to notice that although the GDN 2 report affirmed that such a bond does exist between the US and Israel, it went on to explicitly clarify (in line 19) that this bond is “the source of much Arab distrust of the US”.

Despite the fact that there are differences in the stance the news agencies take on

Israel or its actions, they all seem to present a comparison between Israel and Iran.

The first instance of such a comparison appears to be explicitly done in the AP news article in lines 64 - 66. The article states that Obama’s speech was broadcast on “all radio and television stations in Israel”, whereas the Iranian government “jammed signals to block satellite owners from watching” the speech. This statement shows how the Iranian people’s rights and freedoms are obstructed by the government to the extent that they not only did not broadcast the speech on the national channels, but ensured that people were not be able to watch it on other satellite channels by jamming signals. Another example of comparing the two countries is presented through the reporting of both Reuters and the AFP. The Reuters article labels Iran as the US’s “long-time foe” in line 6 and its “regional arch foe” in line 23, whereas the

AFP article labels Israel as “the top US ally in the region”. It is made clear by these two agencies’ formulations of both Iran and Israel, that the former has a very negative relationship with the US while the latter has a very positive one. The GDN localised reports seem to be more neutral in this respect as there were no comparisons made

158 between Israel and Iran, and neither of those two nations was referred to by any words apart from their official names.

The naming analysis reveals that the text producers of the localised news reports tend to be more explicit in revealing their stance toward the speech by describing it positively in the text rather than remaining more neutral as in the reports by the news agencies. They are also selective in the vocabulary they use and they appear to only copy the vocabulary and characterisations they believe to be appropriate for their readers. Therefore, the choice of which foreign news agency reporting is to be used is based on the localised news bureaus’ decisions about appropriateness for the local context, with the removal of comparisons between Israel and Iran being the most prominent amongst these. Even when the information is copied from the reports of the news agencies, the text producers of the localised version add comments that reflect the likely opinions of the local readers, as shown in the GDN’s comments on the US-

Israeli bond.

5.2.3. Quotations analysis:

Given the reports were about a speech, it is no wonder then that quotations represented more than 50 per cent of the total word count in almost all the news reports under analysis in this research. The following table illustrates the quotations percentage in each of the news articles:

159 AP Reuters AFP GDN 1 GDN 2

Total word 1142 679 688 176 536 count

Total quotation 660 (57%) 387 (57%) 547 (80%) 77 (44%) 329 (61%) Table 5-12: Quotations percentage in each news report

The above table clearly shows that the AFP’s article depends mainly on quoting in its reporting of Obama’s speech, as 80 per cent of its words are quoted. Stenvall (2010) argues that the extensive use of quotations in news reports is an attempt by the text producers to background their own voices, a strategy that appears most prominent in the case of the report by the AFP. The GDN 1 news report, on the other hand, is the least dependent on quoting, as only 44 per cent of the total word count was quotations.

The quoting strategy used by the four news producers here can be categorised into three different types: direct quoting, indirect quoting (paraphrasing), or a mixture of both. The following table illustrates which of the three types is used more in each of the five news reports:

160 AP Reuters AFP GDN 1 GDN 2

Total quoted words 660 387 547 77 329 Direct quoting 292 207 182 202 - (44%) (54%) (33%) (61%) Indirect quoting / 186 121 151 77 96 (29%) paraphrase (28%) (31%) (28%) (100%)

Partial quoting 182 214 59 (15%) - 31 (10%) (28%) (39%) Table 5-13: Types of quoting used in each news report

According to the above table, direct quoting is apparently preferred by three of the four news producers, possibly because it is seen as more objective, given that through direct quoting, the reporters are distancing themselves from the people being quoted.

However, it can be seen that this is not the case with the AFP news report where the partial quoting was used more than any other type, and in the case of one of the GDN articles where direct quoting did not feature at all. It is interesting to point out that the

AFP’s news article was the only one which covered Obama’s speech event based on the response it received globally instead of reporting what the speech was about.

However, this does not seem to be reflected in the distribution of different types of quotes, as it is not so different from either Reuters or AP. The ones that are radically different in distribution are the two GDN reports, and especially GDN 1.

The naming analysis showed that the reports by the international news agencies were seemingly objective in describing the speech and did not use positive or negative modifiers to the same extent as did the localised GDN ones. However, there were a number of instances where implicit judgments nevertheless crept into their texts.

According to Paltridge (2006: 45), ideologies are often not stated explicitly, but tend

161 to be rather “hidden” in the sense that they are “often communicated through assumptions or presuppositions, implications, and the strategic use of footing through quoting”. In the reports by the international news agencies, some ideological viewpoints are expressed through the use of quotations, possibly so that the news producers could not be held responsible for these positions. Jullian (2011: 767) argues that news text producers may be able to convey their views through the “choice of information they choose to include or exclude from external voices”. For example, the

Reuters article quoted an Egyptian analyst in line 55 describing the speech as “very inspiring”. More examples are found in the AFP’s news report, where the EU foreign policy chief was quoted in line 13 describing the speech as a “remarkable speech” and the Israeli Prime Minister’s office describing it as an “important speech”. Such words used in collocation with the “speech” reflect the news producers’ implicitly positive stance towards Obama’s address.

Another interesting finding shown in table 5-13 is how the GDN 1 news report used only indirect quotation. That this article appeared on the first page of the newspaper means that it contained what the text producers believed to be the most striking news and the most important information for their readers. Presenting all that information with indirect quoting seems to be a localisation strategy, as the focus is always placed on “who” rather than “what”. For example, the text begins in line 1 with “Muslims around the world said President Barack Obama’s outreach in a speech yesterday was a positive shift in US attitude”, so the focus here is first on “Muslims” and their reaction, and only second on Obama’s speech itself being “a positive shift in US attitude”.

162 As part of the quotation analysis, it is important to look into another vital component of the quotation, namely, the quoting verb, as it is one of the linguistic strategies available for the text producers to encode their own world views in the news reports

(Chen, 2005).

Table 5-14 below shows the total number of quoting verbs used in all of the news reports along with the total number for each of the three subcategories. It shows that the neutral quoting verbs were the most common type and that negative verbs were the least used with only two instances of negative quoting verbs in all of the five news reports.

Type of quoting verb Number of incidences % of total quoting verbs

All types 98

Neutral 67 68%

Positive 28 29%

Negative 2 3% Table 5-14: Incidence and percentage of the quoting verbs in all the news reports

Table 5-15 shows the number of incidences of each of the three quoting verb types in each of the five news reports:

Type of Number of incidences

quoting verb AP Reuters AFP GDN 1 GDN 2

All types 29 24 25 6 14

163 Neutral 23 16 15 3 10

Positive 6 7 10 2 3

Negative 0 1 0 1 0

Table 5-15: Incidence of the quoting verbs in each of the news reports

According to table 5-15, the neutral quoting verb is the most commonly used type, which shows that news text producers aim to present the information to their readers as objectively as possible without casting it relative to their own opinions or beliefs.

However, the use of positive and negative quoting verbs reveals, as Jullian (2011) argues, that the reporting of news is nevertheless loaded with the producers’ views and beliefs, even when they try to remain neutral. Table 5-16 below lists all the quoting verbs used by each news report.

News producer Type Quoting verb

AP Neutral call, said, added, quoted, asked

Positive declared, called, demanded, remarked, explained

Reuters Neutral called, said, expressed, added

Positive pledged, offered, welcomed, warned, affirmed,

urged

Negative denies

AFP Neutral expressed, said, told

Positive hailed, called for, greeted, warned, welcomed,

urged

164 GDN 1 Neutral said

Positive assured, promised

Negative insisted

GDN 2 Neutral said, reiterated

Positive affirmed, rebuked, evoked

Table 5-16: Quoting verbs used in the news reports

Since verbs that were categorised as negative quoting verbs were the least used type in the news reports, it is interesting to look at this category first. Both the GDN and

Reuters news reports had one instance each of negative quoting verbs. Looking at the negative quoting verb used in the Reuters text in line 29, namely, “denies”, however, it appears that there is no alternative quoting verb that the text producers could have substituted for it, given the co-text: “Tehran denies any such aims”. The sentence explains Iran’s response to claims made by the US that Iran’s nuclear plan is to build atomic bombs. The Reuters text producers did not have much choice other than to use the verb “denies”, and although it is categorised as a negative quoting verb here, it is not revealing much about the producers’ own attitudes. However, the negative quoting verb used in the GDN text seems to be of a qualitatively different type. In line

13 of the GDN 1 news report, the verb “insisted” is used: “He insisted Palestinians must have a state”. The text producers could have substituted “insisted” with another quoting verb, such as ‘said’, without affecting the meaning of the clause. However, choosing “insisted” here, reveals the text producers’ attitude towards what Obama has said. It implies that the text producers cast an element of doubt over whether Obama will eventually turn his words into reality and Palestinians will have a state or not, or at least it alludes to the existence of people, most likely local readers, who are

165 sceptical about this.

It is also interesting to compare the quoting verbs used by the GDN and Reuters articles to report Obama’s promise to pursue the Palestinian statehood. The Reuters news report stated that “Obama pledged to pursue Palestinian statehood” in line 4.

The quoting verb “pledged” can be categorised as a positive quoting verb here, as it conveys the impression that Obama is confident and in a position to turn his promise into reality; however, as shown in the previous paragraph, the GDN 1 article used the negative quoting verb “insisted” to cast some doubt on whether the promise will turn into reality or not.

A look at the first sentence in both the AFP and the GDN 1 articles in which they report the world reaction to Obama’s speech also reveals differences in the use of quoting verbs. The AFP stated in line 1 that “International leaders hailed President

Barack Obama’s speech on ties with the Muslim world as opening a ‘new page’”. The quoting verb “hailed” has positive connotations as it shows that the AFP text producers believe that Obama’s speech was welcomed by the world leaders without them having any criticisms directed towards it. The GDN 1 article, in contrast, used the neutral quoting verb “said” to report that “Muslims around the world said

President Barack Obama’s outreach in a speech yesterday was a positive shift in US attitude”. The text producers could have used a positive quoting verb, such as

‘welcomed’, ‘greeted’ or ‘hailed’, but instead, used the neutral verb “said”, which indicates a potentially less positive response amongst Muslims to the speech

(compared to that reported in the AFP text), as well as that something that was expected by Muslims in Obama’s speech was missing. This missing element, namely,

166 a “breakthrough”, is made explicit in the comment in the second part of the sentence,

“but fell short of a breakthrough”. This shows that the GDN text producers refrained from using a positive quoting verb and used a neutral one because there was some negative reaction to Obama’s speech amongst those whose views were being focused upon (that is, Muslims around the world).

Another important part of the use of quotations is attribution. Almost all of the quotations are clearly named and attributed in all of the news reports. The only unnamed quoted was used in the AP’s news report in line 4. The AP used a direct quote, but attributed it to an unnamed source: “An Iranian cleric called the president’s speech “an initial step for removing misconceptions.” This speaker was referred to again in line 24 and he was named as “Mohamed Ali Abtahi, a cleric who was vice president under reformist President Mohammad Khatami”. According to Stenvall

(2010), since news reports start with general information and proceed from general to specific, sources can also be used unnamed at the beginning of the report and then named in the second quote. Another reason that could explain the use of the source unnamed in the first paragraph is that the text producers were more interested in the nationality of the speaker than in his identity, in order to support the statement that

Obama’s speech was “welcomed in unlikely quarters”. In this case they are referring to Iran.

It is also interesting to look at some of the ways in which the attributed sources were named in the news reports. For example, the AP quotes Fawzi Barhoum and referred to him as “a spokesman for Hamas”, but in line 20 it comments that this is a “group the US considers a terrorist organisation”. Adding this negative comment to further

167 identify the quoted person seems to be a strategy used by the text producers to show the readers that although this is a terrorist group, Obama’s speech was still welcomed by it. Another interesting quotation in the AP’s report is in line 96 where the words were attributed to “Zahid Hussain Gardezi, a landowner in the Pakistani city of

Multan”. The first question that the reader might ask here is ‘who is Zahid Gardezi, and why is he being quoted here?’ It seems that the text producers are convinced that

Obama’s speech was positive and everyone welcomed it, even “everyday people” such as Zahid Gardezi. Therefore, this quotation and the other positive ones in the text, represent the AP’s overall stance towards Obama’s speech, which is a positive one. In other words, the news report is “being shaped and informed by the voices it reports” (Barkho, 2010: 123). This also shows that when somebody is quoted in a news report, even everyday people, then he is a competent knower or observer and contributes to the newsworthiness of the report (Stenvall, 2010).

In summary, the quotation analysis shows that text producers have a number of discursive tools that enable them to voice their opinions in the texts. One of these tools is using indirect quoting. Quoting verbs is another tool through which text producers are able to indicate to the readers their stance toward the quotation. In this analysis it has been shown that while the three international agencies took a more positive stance on Obama’s speech, the GDN localised versions represented responses as positive, but measured, thus taking an arguably less positive stance on it.

5.2.4. Participation analysis:

This section of the analysis will focus on identifying the various participants in each of the news reports.

168

Since the focus of the news articles was reporting Obama’s speech, we may expect them to have Obama as an obvious participant in almost every text. However,

Obama’s voice is not available in the AFP news report mainly because its topic was reporting the global response to his speech. Looking at the reports of AP, Reuters and

GDN 2, Obama’s voice is given more space than any other participant since his speech was the focal point of the reporting. According to Goffman’s participation framework (1981), Obama occupies the three speaker footings. He is the animator who utters the words, he is also the author of these words (although as a President he might have other people help to write his speech), and he is the principal whose position is established by the words he speaks, although since he speaks in the name of the United States government, he also represents the American people. As for his audience, he was speaking at Cairo University and his “addressed recipients” are the people attending the university. However, the speech was not only addressed to them; it obviously had other “unaddressed recipients” since the speech was broadcast almost worldwide. These “unaddressed recipients” include other people towards whom the speech was targeted, including Muslims, Arabs, Israel and the world in general.

Obama’s voice was not the only one presented in the four news reports, and other participants were also apparent. It is interesting, though, to find a voice representing

Palestinians in almost all of the four texts, with Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for

Hamas appearing in AP, AFP and GDN 2, and Palestinian official, Nabil Abu

Rdainah, in Reuters. Both the participants occupy Goffman’s three footings of the speaker, the animator, the author and the principal. In marked contrast, the Israeli voice is not available in these reports, except for the AFP, which had quotations from

169 the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. This could mainly be due to the fact that the speech was directed towards the Muslim world and therefore all the reports avoided quoting the Israeli voice to keep their reporting more focused on the

Muslim world and their reaction.

It is interesting to see how the AFP’s article, which focused on reporting the global response to Obama’s speech, included Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali

Khamenei, as a speaker in its text, although the quotations used in lines 45 - 46 were not actually related to Obama’s speech. This strategy of using “old text” in news reports was identified by Barkho (2010: 122) who states that “there is little that is

“new text” in news apart perhaps from the event that is being reported. Even quotations are old and usually are framed to be part of the general thrust of the report”. In the AFP text, the report clearly states that Khamenei did not mention

Obama’s address and made some generally negative statements about the United

States in his speech on the 20th anniversary of the death of the revolutionary leader

Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini. There is no mention, however, if Khamenei’s speech was made before Obama’s speech, or after it. In being included in a report on reactions to Obama’s speech in the Muslim world in this way, however, it is implicitly suggested that this is the reaction, or at least would be the expected reaction, from the Iranians to Obama’s speech.

The above analysis looked at the speakers who had voices presented in the text via direct quotes which made it easy to identify that they are the animators, authors and principals of their words. However, there are a number of instances where the news report presented information using indirect or partial quotes. One example that

170 illustrates this is found in the GDN 1 article, which was discussed earlier in the previous section. Line 13 stated “He insisted Palestinians must have a state”. The

GDN text producer is the animator here who is quoting what Obama - who is a figure here as well as the author and principal - said, but the use of the negative quoting verb

“insisted” shows that the text producer is casting some doubt about what is being quoted. This doubt is not just the feeling of the GDN producers, but it also reflects the feelings of some people in the Muslim world about Obama’s claims and promises for a Palestinian state, given the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the same promises being made by all new US presidents at the beginning of their presidency.

It should be noted though that this application of the Goffman’s (1981) framework in media discourse is not always straightforward. One of the main difficulties that it raises is the question of who the real author of the words written is. In the example above it was clear that “Palestinians must have a state” were the words of Obama and he is the real author, but if we look at lines 9-10 of the AFP article where the text producers are quoting UN chief Ban Ki-moon indirectly, the words “positive impact” were placed between quotation marks so it is easy for the reader to identify that these were words actually said by Ban Ki-moon and he is the author, but the text also includes “the moribund Middle East” without any quotation marks. The quotation analysis has shown that quotations is one of the discursive tools that text producers have to air their voices in a less explicit manner (Barkho, 2010). This means that the

AFP text producers could possibly be the real authors of the word “moribund”, and yet it is implicitly attributed as the responsibility of someone else, in this case being linked to Ban Ki-moon.

171 The participation analysis shows that direct quotes in news reports clearly indicate that the person being quoted is the author, animator or principal of those words and the text producers have nothing to do with these words, although the use of different quoting verbs can frame the stance of the text producer towards the quote. Indirect or partial quotes leave even more room for the text producers to insert their stance and make it appear as part of what is actually being quoted.

5.2.5. Theme (grounding):

This section will look at two things. The first part will focus on the marked themes found in the news reports, and the second part will compare the overall text order among all the news reports.

It is interesting to see that the AP’s report started in the first sentence with a marked theme: “Invoking the Quran and his rarely used middle name”. The news report aims to attract the readers’ attention from the beginning by foregrounding that Obama did a number of unusual things in his speech, such as quoting the Quran and using his middle name. Another marked theme in the Reuters article appears in line 4:

“Speaking to the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims from Cairo” is an attempt by the text producers to highlight that Obama’s speech is addressed to a large audience and not just the people attending the speech in Cairo. In the GDN 1 news report, the marked theme, “Aiming to repair ties with the Muslim world” in line 7 is used to clarify the purpose of Obama’s speech. It is interesting to point out that the marked themes found in both the AP and Reuters articles, highlight things related to Muslims

– “the Quran” in the AP, and “more than 1 billion Muslims” in Reuters. It seems that the text producers in these two news agencies write for a general and international

172 audience. The AP article reflects this point in the marked theme above by showing that quoting the Quran is an unusual thing to be done by a US president. The Reuters article provides its readers with the information that there are more than 1 billion

Muslims around the world. On the other hand, the localised GDN article highlights more specific information in its marked theme, which implies that the ties between the Muslim world and the US are not good and the speech is aiming to improve those ties.

The overall text order of the news reports shows that the first paragraph in both the

AP and Reuters texts foreground what Obama’s speech is about, while backgrounding the reaction it received. This is not the case with the GDN 1 news report as, in its first paragraph, the reaction of the Muslim world to Obama’s speech is foregrounded, while what the speech was about, was backgrounded. It seems that the GDN text producers used the strategy of foregrounding and backgrounding on the text order level in producing their localised version, especially as they foregrounded and gave prominence to Muslims and their reaction in their report. For example, the AP report’s first paragraph started by highlighting what Obama said in his speech:

“Obama declared Thursday that America has a common cause with Islam”. The second part of the first sentence of the first paragraph stated how the speech was welcomed by Muslims. This was not the case with the GDN 1 news report as the order was shifted and the Muslim reaction was highlighted at the beginning of the first paragraph: “Muslims around the world said Obama’s outreach ... was a positive shift in US attitude”. This shows that the GDN text producers, in order to adapt their text to a more localised readership, shifted the focus of the first paragraph and

173 foregrounded the Muslims’ reaction to Obama’s speech instead of what the AP foregrounded, which is what Obama’s speech was about.

5.2.6. Concluding remarks:

The analysis in this section showed that the GDN newspaper made a number of changes to the news reports produced by the news agencies in order to produce its localised version.

The word frequency analysis shows that the localised version focused primarily on the reaction of Muslims to Obama’s speech rather than on Obama himself and the content of his speech. According to the naming analysis, the localised version also tended to be more explicit in indicating the text producers’ opinions of the various points reported.

The quotation analysis revealed that the text producers of the localised versions insert their views and opinions in the text through quotations, either by using non-neutral quoting verbs, or through the use of indirect quotes.

Finally, analysing the overall text order of the news reports showed that the localised version used foregrounding and backgrounding strategies to change the focus of the introductory paragraph.

Some of the findings in this section support the findings in the first case study on the flotilla raid. However, it is important to analyse yet another topic in order to find out whether these similarities and differences in the reporting of the international news

174 agencies and the GDN newspaper are common among all their reporting or whether there are special cases where some changes need to be made by the GDN in order to produce their reports.

5.3. Case Study 3: Bush shoed at in Iraq:

On December 14th, 2008, the Ex-US President George W. Bush made his last visit to

Iraq before handing the White House to the newly elected president, Barack Obama.

The visit was aimed at thanking the US soldiers for their services in Iraq. During a press conference with the Iraqi President, an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at Bush, although without hitting him. This unusual incident was made the focus of the international media and it was reported worldwide. Refer to Appendix Four for the news reports.

5.3.1. Word frequency analysis:

Almost all of the news reports on this topic were short, with Reuters producing the longest article. Both AFP and GDN produced short reports. The following table shows the total number of words of each news report:

News report Total number of words

AP 541

Reuters 815

AFP 218

GDN 316

Table 5-17: Total number of words of each news report

175 The word frequency analysis shows that all the news reports focused on Bush, as it is one of the most frequently used words among the four texts. Table 5-18 shows the top

10 used words in the news reports:

No AP Reuters AFP GDN

Type Token Type Token Type Token Type Token

1 al-zeidi 9 Bush 16 journalist 4 Bush 9

2 Bush 8 Iraq 13 president 4 said 8

3 being 5 Iraqi 8 Iraqi 4 security 5

4 said 5 people 6 bush 4 Iraq 5

5 Monday 5 visit 6 said 3 pact 4

6 Shiite 5 security 6 shoes 3 president 3

7 shoes 5 war 6 threw 2 visit 3

8 Iraqi 4 troops 5 statue 2 necessary 2

9 Arab 4 military 4 ducked 2 way 2

10 release 4 said 4 shoe 2 Washington 2

Table 5-18: Top 10 words in the news reports

The table also shows that “Iraq” is another word used frequently in the texts. It can be seen that the AP and AFP have the words “al-zeidi” and “journalist” as the most frequently used words in their texts respectively. This reflects the other topic that these articles focused on, which is Bush getting a shoe thrown at him by an Iraqi

“journalist” who was identified as “al-zeidi”. It can be seen that most of the top ten words in both the AP and AFP articles were related to the shoe-throwing incident.

176 The reports by Reuters and GDN, however, do not have any words related to the shoe incident in the top ten most frequently used words. Most of the words in their lists are related to Bush’s visit to Iraq and its importance to the “Iraqi” “people” as mentioned in Reuters and the “security” of “Iraq”, as shown in the GDN.

This analysis shows that although the four news articles reported the same incident, each one had a different primary focus in its reporting. The following sections reveal these differences as well as any similarities between them in more detail.

5.3.2. Naming analysis:

The word “Bush” was used a lot in all of the four reports to refer to the US President

George Bush, as it is normal to refer to the President by his last name in news reports.

Other common ways to refer to him were “President George W. Bush” and “the president.” However, the AP referred to Bush in a markedly negative way. In line 4, the AP text characterised Bush as “the unpopular U.S. president”. On the other hand, the Reuters article seemed to present Bush in a positive way. For example, in line 37 the text quotes the Iraqi president referring to Bush as a “great friend” of the Iraqi people who helped liberate Iraq. Although this positive view was presented through the eyes of the Iraqi officials, the text producers seem to be implicitly endorsing that positive view of Bush through the very fact they are including those quotes (in contrast to other news reports). Reuters provided comparisons between Bush and his successor, the “President-elect Barack Obama” as he was referred to in line 4. A clear comparison was made by referring to Bush as “the republican president” in line 8 and

Obama as the “democrat” president in line 52. Although this categorisation of the two presidents does not reveal which one the text producers support, it is interesting to

177 look at how the report frames Obama’s attitude to the war on Iraq. The text in line 52 clearly states that Obama “was an early opponent of U.S. military involvement in

Iraq”. However, now that he is the newly elected president, the report states in line 4 that Bush will “bequeath” the “unpopular Iraq war” to Obama. It is interesting how the text producers used the words “bequeath” and “unpopular” together since bequeath is usually used to refer to something passed to another by will and it is usually a good thing. But in this instance, Bush is bequeathing the “unpopular Iraq war” to Obama. Therefore, the report shows that Obama is now given the task of dealing with a war he opposed and it is “now left to Obama ... to sort out an exit strategy after he takes office”.

The event of Bush being ‘shoed at’ was reported on by all the four articles, despite the differences in details provided in each one. All the reports identified the person who did the shoe throwing as “an Iraqi reporter” or “journalist”. However, the reports of the AP and AFP were the only ones that provided more details to identify him. They both provided his full name, “Muntadar al-Zeidi” in AP, and “Muntazer al-Zaidi” in the AFP. The AP’s report went a bit further by providing more details about the journalist by naming him as “the Shiite journalist, who is in his late 20s” in line 11.

Both the AP and AFP also identified the reporter as working for the Al Baghdadia channel.

The reports of the three news agencies, AP, Reuters and AFP, included more details about what the act of shoe throwing means in the Arab culture. For example, the AP wrote at line 35: “Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the Arab world is a sign of extreme disrespect, and striking someone with them is even worse” Reuters

178 also explained in line 12 that “Throwing shoes at somebody is supreme insult in the

Middle East”, while the AFP stated that “Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture”. According to these news agencies, this information is necessary for their readers to understand why the reporter threw his shoes at Bush. On the other hand, the localised version that appeared in the GDN newspaper did not include this information, mainly because its readers are already aware of this cultural background and the significance of this act as they live in an Arab country.

The other topic that was discussed by the news reports was the war on Iraq. The

Reuters article quotes the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani as thanking Bush for liberating his country in line 37, and the Iraqi PM Nuri Al-Maliki thanking Bush for his help in “getting rid of the dictatorship” in line 40. According to the views of these two top Iraqi officials, the war was necessary and had positive results. However, this view does not represent the stance that the news producers at the AP, Reuters and

GDN appear to take about this war. The war was named an “invasion” in the news reports produced by these three, thereby framing the war as an unwanted one

(presumably by the Iraqi people). In the AP text, this was described as “Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003” in line 30. This makes the invasion and the war even more negative as it frames the invasion as having been based on the decision of one man. Reuters portrays this negative framing of the war on Iraq by explaining that this war “has killed more than 4,200 American military personnel and tens of thousands of

Iraqis” (line 55).

The naming analysis shows that the news reports produced by the three news agencies provided more detailed reporting than the localised version produced by the GDN

179 newspaper. The AP text was more open in criticising Bush by referring to him in explicitly negative ways. The AP and AFP reports also provided specific details about the journalist who threw his shoes at Bush. It seems that the GDN news producers, on the other hand, preferred to offer a summary news report about the incident instead of providing a full, detailed one like the news agencies did.

5.3.3. Quotations analysis:

Quotations were not the largest constituent of any of the four news reports. Table 5-19 shows that quotations constituted less than 50 per cent of the total word count of each of the four news articles.

AP Reuters AFP GDN Total word 541 815 218 316 count Total 242 (45%) 187 (23%) 51 (23%) 128 (40.5%) quotations Table 5-19: Quotations percentage in each news report

Analysing the quotes according to their type shows that direct quoting was the most frequently used type amongst the four news reports. Direct quotes have always been viewed as the means by which news reports can achieve objective reporting and a way through which text producers distance themselves from these expressions

(Barkho, 2008). Table 5-20 below shows the types of quotes used in each news report.

The AP article was balanced in using direct and indirect quotes with six instances of each. The Reuters article did not have any indirect quotes, but it had instances of partial quoting. The GDN had instances of all the different quoting types. It is interesting to note that while GDN had a higher percentage of quotes in the article, they had a smaller total number of quotes than the Reuters article. This is due to the

GDN’s article being shorter than the other three reports, including the Reuters article.

180 AP Reuters AFP GDN Direct quoting 6 9 3 5

Indirect 6 - 1 2 quoting

Partial quoting - 2 - 2 Table 5-20: Types of quotes used in each news report

Looking at the quoting verbs used, indicates that all the news reports relied mainly on neutral verbs, whereby the text producers of the four news reports oriented to a display of being “objective” in their reporting, as they presented the quotes without revealing an implicit stance on what was being quoted. According to Chen (2005: 36), verbal processes can “reveal a lot about the journalist’s attitude or stance toward those whose words or actions are being reported” and it is the choice of one particular verb rather than another that is important to analyse. Table 5-21 lists the quoting verbs used in each news report according to their categories in order to identify the stance of the text producers.

Verb AP Reuters AFP GDN type

Times Times Times Times Verb Verb Verb Verb used used used used

said 5 said 4 said 3 said 7

yelled 1 shouted 1 added 1 cited 1 Neutral told 1 called 1 joked 1

chanted 1 joked 1

declared 1 Positive praised 1 Table 5-21: Quoting verbs in the news reports

181

The above table shows that Reuters is the only article that had instances of non- neutral quoting verbs. The text used positive quoting verbs twice, with the first being in line 7 when it is reported that Bush “declared the war “not over” despite recent gains”. The verb “declared” is a positive one in this context, as Chen (2007: 491) noted with reference to a similar case. The text producers use it to present Bush as a determined, committed and powerful person. The choice of the positive quoting verb

“declared” by the Reuters text producers seems to support the idea that was presented in the naming analysis regarding presenting Bush in a positive way. It is important here to look at how the localised news report of the GDN reported the information about the war in Iraq. In line 1, the GDN stated that Bush “said during a surprise farewell visit to Baghdad yesterday that the war in Iraq was “not over””. The text producers here used the same information provided in the Reuters text, but changed the positive quoting verb and used the neutral quoting verb “said” instead. According to Chen (2005: 38), using a neutral quoting verb makes it “impossible” to tell whether the text producers agree with what is being quoted or not, and in this case it appears the GDN is attempting to take a more neutral stance on Bush’s comments and on

Bush himself.

Analysing the attribution part of the quotation reveals some interesting findings. Bush seems to be the main speaker in the reports of Reuters, AFP and GDN. However, the

AP article reports other speakers without including any quotes from Bush. Two of the people quoted in the AP included comments on the shoe-throwing incident and they described Bush negatively. For example, in line 33, Abel-Bari Atwan, the editor of

Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, described the incident of throwing shoes at Bush as a

182 “proper goodbye” and went further to describe Bush as “a war criminal”. Another quote in the AP in line 38 by Abdel-Sattar Qassem, a political science professor at a

Palestinian university, also hailed the incident by describing it as a “great Arab shoe”, and described Bush negatively by calling him “the criminal Bush”.

The AP article also included other unnamed sources, namely “an official” in line 2.

Stenvall (2010: 82) argues that “officials are quoted in news reports because of their official capacity”, although it is not always clear that all of them hold a position of authority. The AP text also stresses the anonymity of the official by pointing out that he was “speaking on condition of anonymity” and explained the reason for this by stating “he was not authorised to talk to the media”. This explanation of the reason for anonymity, Stenvall (2010: 86) claims, makes the quote even more “newsworthy” as it shows the text producers managed to get exclusive information.

Barkho (2008: 128) argues that reporters occasionally “assume the role of narrators changing position from outside the text to within the text”, and that this is one of the major sources of bias in news reports. An example of this is presented in the AFP article in lines 9-11, as the text quotes an AFP journalist saying that the “journalist,

Muntazer al-Zaidi from Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo, was frogmarched from the room by security staff”.

The quotations analysis shows that quotations were not used as much in the news reports compared to the other case studies, as they formed less than 50 per cent of the total word count for each of the four texts. Direct quoting was the most used type of quoting as the text producers appeared to aim at providing as objective reporting as

183 possible. Objectivity was further stressed in the reporting of the four news reports by the use of neutral quoting verbs. The AP text producers used unnamed sources and gave reasons for the anonymity of the sources to make their quotes seem more newsworthy, while an AFP journalist was used as a source in the AFP text, and this is considered one source of bias in news reports.

5.3.4. Participation analysis:

According to the quotations analysis, Bush was a major figure and source of quotes in the Reuters, AFP and the GDN news reports, while he was not involved in the AP’s text. Looking at Bush’s quotes using Goffman’s (1981) participation framework, one can see that Bush fills all the three footings of the speaker. He is the animator who utters the words, he is also the author of these words, and he is the principal whose position is established by the words he speaks. For example, when Bush was quoted by Reuters in line 26 talking about his visit saying, “I consider it an important step on the road toward an Iraq that can sustain itself, govern itself and defend itself” and again quoted in the GDN in line 3, “the work hasn’t been easy but it’s been necessary for American security, Iraqi hope and world peace”, it can be seen that these words are said by Bush “animator” and these are his words “author” and he is talking as the

US President on behalf of all Americans as the “principal”. The other part of

Goffman’s framework is the audience. Since Bush was talking to reporters, these are his “addressed recipients”. However, his words were also broadcast all over the world, so Bush’s words have other “unaddressed recipients”, including Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims, and people all over the world more generally.

184 As shown above, when Bush was quoted, he took all three footings of speaker in

Goffman’s framework, but when he was not the one speaking, but rather someone about whom people talked, he became a new character, called “figure”. The figure is a character depicted in the animator’s talk (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin and Goodwin,

2004). For example, in line 34 of the AP, the article quoted Abdel-Bari Atwan describing Bush as “a war criminal”. In this quotation, Bush is a figure whom the animator “Atwan” described as a “criminal”. An interesting point to look at is that when Bush was the animator, author, and principal of the quotes, his words about the

US and the US-Iraqi relations were positive. However, when the quotes were about

Bush, they were negative.

There is another voice that appears in the three news reports produced by the news agencies, but which does not appear in the GDN newspaper’s localised version, namely, the words that Al-Zeidi said as he threw his shoes at Bush, which appear in the reports by AP, Reuters and AFP. The reporter is both the “animator” and the

“author” of the words, but he does not fully occupy the last footing. While his implicit claim is that he represents the footing of Iraqi people in general, this is not a straightforward claim to be making. He cannot be considered as a representative

“principal” mainly because the words he uttered represent himself only and not the

Iraqi people or the TV channel he works for. He does not represent the Iraqi people because in the AFP text, Bush was quoted thanking the reporters for “apologising on behalf of the Iraqi people” in line 18. Al-Zeidi’s words were targeted at Bush only, and he is the addressed recipient of his words.

185 Reuters’ report has two participants that take all of the speaker footings in Goffman’s framework, namely, the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani and the Iraqi PM, Nuri Al

Maliki. Both of them were addressing Bush directly as their addressed recipient when they were thanking him for helping them to liberate Iraq and get rid of the dictatorship. The report also shows another speaker who has less authority than these two, but still takes all three speaker footings, being the animator, author and principal.

He is the spokesman for the parliamentary bloc loyal to the anti-American Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his words are taken to represent that bloc. He appears to have spoken to a reporter, and while that reporter can be counted as the addressed recipient, his words are mainly targeted at the unaddressed recipients, mainly Bush, the US government and Americans, as well as Arabs and Muslims more generally. He and his bloc reject Bush’s visit to Iraq as it is “still under the U.S. occupation”.

Since all the speakers mentioned above were quoted directly in the news reports, it is important to look at the indirect quotes to identify the figures and see if the text producers indicated any (implicit) evaluations of what these figures said. It was mentioned in the quotation analysis that the AP text reported quotes by the unnamed source, namely, “an official”. Since the report attributed the indirect quotes to an anonymous speaker who is “speaking on condition of anonymity”, then the animator here is the AP text producers, while the official is regarded as the author. Although as

“an official” who is supposed to hold a position of authority, the official can also be regarded as the principal, given he remains anonymous and that his words are assumed to represent the stance of a wider group of Iraqis; however, the actual main principal here is left somewhat open-ended. Stenvall (2010: 85) found in his study of unnamed sources in news agency reports that the most popular way of stressing a

186 speaker’s wish to remain anonymous, is using the expression “on condition of anonymity”. He also stated that this expression is ambiguous and does not clearly shows the relationship between the speaker and the condition of anonymity. This can show that the text producers might be trying to make their article more exclusive by using the unnamed source “an official”, as Duffy and Freeman claim (2011: 302).

The participation analysis reveals that direct quotes point to the author, animator and principal of the words being quoted, while indirect quotes make identifying these roles a bit more challenging, and so, a number of interpretative possibilities arise.

5.3.5. Grounding:

The AP, Reuters and AFP reports started their texts by foregrounding the “Iraqi reporter” and backgrounded Bush’s visit to Iraq. Although the AP’s article had a slightly different focus from the other reports, its first paragraph also highlighted the reporter’s actions by stating that “An Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at President

George W. Bush was being held for questioning”. Reuters focused on what the reporter said to Bush: “An Iraqi reporter called President George W. Bush a “dog” and threw his shoes at him”, and the incident was also the focus of AFP’s first paragraph where it began, “An Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes and an insult at

George W. Bush”. It is clear that all three news agencies consider this incident to be a major one and that is why it is foregrounded in the first paragraph. It might be expected that the GDN news report would copy this focus in its first paragraph since it is an unusual incident. However, the GDN decided to focus on the seemingly less important event (at least according to the other reports), namely Bush’s visit to Iraq.

187 The report’s first paragraph stated that Bush said during “a surprise visit” to Baghdad that the war in Iraq was “not over”.

The GDN news producers thus decided to focus on Bush’s visit being a surprise one, and his declaring that the war was not over, rather than on the shoe throwing incident.

It is also interesting to find that the newspaper article only mentioned the shoe- throwing incident in line 7 and did not include a lot of information other than stating that “Bush got a size-10 reminder of his unpopularity when a man, said to be a journalist, hurled two shoes at him during a news conference”. This strategy of backgrounding this incident was unexpected, especially given that the report did

(implicitly) criticise Bush by describing him as unpopular.

5.3.6. Concluding remarks:

The analysis in this section showed that the localised GDN news report differs from the reports of the news agencies in a number of ways.

First, according to the word frequency analysis, the GDN news article placed more focus on Bush and his visit to Iraq and what it represents for the security of Iraq. The news reports of the news agencies focused on Bush being ‘shoed at’ during a press conference. This finding was also supported by the findings of the naming analysis as the GDN report identified the person who threw his shoes at Bush as a journalist, without offering further details about him, in contrast to such details being provided in the reports of the three news agencies.

188 The quotations analysis revealed that the GDN report was the only one that used all three types of quoting in its report and most of its quotes were attributed to Bush. The analysis also showed that the GDN report tried to be as objective as possible, as it used neutral quoting verbs.

According to the participation analysis, the GDN report did not include the Iraqi journalist as a speaker in its report, while Bush was the main voice quoted.

The findings of the grounding analysis also supported the findings of the word frequency analysis and the naming analysis by showing how the news report foregrounded the information about Bush’s visit to Iraq and provided little information about the journalist who threw his shoes at Bush.

5.4. The three case studies: interpreting the results of the analysis:

The above analysis of the data of the three case studies reveals that the reports produced by the three news agencies tend to frame these events in the Middle East in a western ideological perspective, which according to van Dijk (1988a: 34) “leads to highly stereotyped accounts”. The three case studies report events that happened in the Middle East, but the three news agencies produced news articles that eticised these events to suit their western readers. As part of their eticisation process, the news agencies injected their reports with various ideological perspectives on the Middle

East or the events, as has been identified in the preceding data analysis. Since the

GDN newspaper relies on the reports of the news agencies to produce their foreign news reports as well as the reports on events in the Middle East, as is the case with most of the English newspapers in the region that “rely nearly entirely on the

189 transnational agencies for their foreign coverage” (van Dijk, 1988a: 37), the analysis found that the GDN reports on the topics of the case studies relied heavily on the reports on the news agencies. However, the eticised news agencies’ reports about the local Middle Eastern events, such as the three topics of the case studies, are stripped of their western ideological perspectives that contradict the local ideologies of the newspaper, and get injected with ideological perspectives that suit the local interests of the news producers as well as the readers. The localisation of news reports thus involves the process of stripping out etic perspectives and re-injecting an emic perspective.

The following section reveals in more detail the ideologies hidden in the reports of the three news agencies as well as the GDN’s news reports.

5.5. Hidden ideologies uncovered:

The analysis of the news reports of the three topics clearly showed that there are significant differences in how the news agencies as well as the GDN perceive social reality and thus produce their articles. This section will look at the various ideologies hidden within the reporting of the four news producers. These ideologies represent, on the one hand, the etic perspectives of the international news agencies towards the events being reported, and, on the other hand, the emic perspectives of the GDN text producers towards these events. Identifying and understanding these hidden ideologies will help in understanding the reasons behind the GDN’s transformation of the etic perspectives of the international news agencies into a localised, emic perspective, and how the GDN maneuvers the hidden ideologies of the news agencies and uses various strategies to produce its localised reports.

190

The reporting of the flotilla raid showed a great difference in the positions taken by the international news agencies and the GDN towards Israel. It was clear that although the reporting of the three international news agencies covered the global condemnation of the Israeli actions, they ensured that they also presented the readers with the Israeli side of the story by quoting and referring to a number of Israeli officials. This was arguably done to implicitly defend the Israeli actions. For example, the AP report quoted an Israeli soldier in line 24 claiming that the activists on board the flotilla ships ‘were armed with knives, scissors, pepper spray and guns’ while he and his fellow commandos were armed with paintball rifles. Providing such a quote from the Israeli side without being able to provide the other side of the story can be seen as an attempt to partly justify the Israeli actions. On the other hand, the GDN was more explicit in showing its stance towards Israel. The GDN text producers are aware of the Bahraini political affairs with the international world and thus have an insider’s understanding of how to deal with issues that might be sensitive to local readers. Therefore, the GDN did not present any Israeli voice in its reporting, and when Israel was mentioned once or twice in its report, it did not to refer to the country itself. This is because Bahrain – where the GDN is located – has consistently

“opposed recognition of Israel” as a nation state (Joyce, 2012: 114), but instead considers it an illegal force occupying Palestinian lands.

The reports on Obama’s speech in Cairo also revealed a lot about the underlying ideologies and stances of the four news producers towards a number of things. For example, all the reports showed clearly that the new US president, Obama, is viewed positively in comparison to the ex-president, George Bush. It is also interesting to

191 point out how the news agencies viewed Iran as an enemy of the US. This reveals the negative view of Iran on the part of the international agencies. This view, however, was not mentioned in the localised version of the GDN. Iran was only mentioned once in the GDN’s report, which shows that the GDN news producers wanted to make sure not to affect the ties between Bahrain and Iran by reporting any negative views of

Iran. This might be part of the GDN’s compliance with the government’s political rules, given the long history of tension between Bahrain and Iran. It seems that

Bahrain does not want anything to affect its current good relationships with Iran so that no further Iranian claims can be revived, and this might have been made clear to all media outlets. It is clear, then, that the perspective of the GDN is mediated through the fact that Bahrain is itself involved in a difficult relationship with Iran, a relationship on which international agencies themselves are reporting as outsiders.

That is, from an emic, localised perspective, any comments on Iran in the press in

Bahrain need to be treated as a delicate matter.

Since Obama’s speech also focused on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, all the reports made sure to cover what the US president said, but each with its own ideologies underpinning the reporting. For example, the AP report listed quotes by a Hamas spokesman commenting on Obama’s speech before the article mentioned anything about what Obama did actually say about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The quotes were not totally supportive of Obama’s speech, although the spokesman mentioned that there were positive things in the speech. The most striking thing in the AP reporting of the quotes is the comment it made about the Hamas group. AP wanted to show its readers that Hamas is a “violent” Palestinian group by commenting that it is a “group the US considers a terrorist organisation”. On the other hand, the AP article

192 mentioned that the “Israeli government issued a statement saying it, too, hoped for a new era”. This shows that the AP is comparing how the Israeli side welcomed

Obama’s speech, while the violent Palestinian group was not totally happy with everything in the speech. A similar position towards Palestinians can be found in the

Reuters report. Reuters first reported Obama’s “commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, and then it quoted Obama calling on Palestinians “to abandon violence”. A similar comparison between how Israel welcomed Obama’s speech and how the Palestinians “cautiously welcomed” it appears in the AFP report.

The article first showed how Israel praised Obama’s “important speech” that “will bring an end to the conflict”. The report then quoted that Hamas called for Obama’s words “to be followed by action”. AFP also mentioned that Obama “urged the militant group to recognise Israel’s right to exist”. By referring to Hamas as a militant group and following it by references to Hezbollah as “another Islamist movement on a

US list of terror organisations” and quoting Hezbollah saying that the speech offered

“no real change”, AFP gives the readers the impression that although Israel wants to put an end to the conflict, it is the Palestinians (or at least radical ones) who are perpetuating the cycle of violence that they do not want to end.

However, this position towards the Israeli-Palestinian issue is completely different from how the GDN presents the situation. The GDN position was explicit from the beginning, given it was put in the first paragraph, mentioning that while Obama’s speech was a positive one, it was lacking in terms of turning those words into action.

The report added that Obama’s words should be turned into action “particularly in standing up to Israel”. Although the report highlighted that Obama “insisted

Palestinians must have a state and said continued Israeli settlement in the West Bank

193 is not legitimate”, it went on to cast some doubt about what Obama said regarding the

Israeli-Palestinian issue. The way the GDN dealt with the issue reflects its text producers’ attempts to localise the international agencies fundamentally etic perspectives towards the Israeli-Palestinian issue. This was achieved by the GDN reminding its readers that there are strong relations between the US and Israel, in order to lower their expectations about what the speech could actually achieve.

The reporting of the Bush shoe-throwing incident also shows major ideological differences between the international news agencies and the GDN. All the international news agencies placed a focus on the shoe-throwing incident and provided a lot of information about the reporter who threw his shoes at Bush as well as reporting on how Bush reacted to the incident. The GDN newspaper, however, downplayed the incident itself, as the focus of its report was on Bush’s last visit to

Iraq. Only two or three sentences of the GDN’s report were about the shoe throwing incident and it was backgrounded in the middle of the story. This strategy adopted by the GDN seems to reflect what the 2012 Freedom of the Press report on Bahrain referred to when it stated that the newspapers in Bahrain avoid covering sensitive issues such as Bahrain’s “relations with surrounding countries” (FreedomHouse,

2012). Bahrain has good relations with the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government and it has historically strong relations with the US as has already been discussed.

Since throwing shoes at someone shows total disrespect, the GDN might have backgrounded the incident to avoid disrespecting Bush and the US community living in Bahrain.

194 Having uncovered some of the underlying ideologies in the reporting of the four news producers, the next section will show the strategies employed by the GDN newspaper to work around the ideologies of the news agencies and produce its own localised versions.

5.6. Localisation strategies:

The analysis of the three topics in the previous section indicates that news reports are underpinned by certain ideologies (albeit often in an implicit or hidden way). The analysis also showed that although news agencies claim that they aim to be objective in the news they produce, their underlying ideologies crept into their reporting in a number of instances. These ideologies are considered here to be an etic or outsiders’ perspective on these events, given the focus on localisation. Since the GDN used the news agencies’ reports to produce the articles that were published in the local newspaper, a number of changes have been made to the original reports, arguably in order to deal with this implicit etic perspective by reframing the reports from a localised, emic perspective. Some of these changes were discussed in the previous sections, so this section aims to summarise these changes and categorise them according to the strategies used by GDN to produce their localised versions. The strategies will be divided into three main categories based on the changes made. The first category will look at the text as a whole, and look into the changes made at this level, then it will look at changes made at the sentence level, and finally at the word level.

5.6.1. Holistic localisation strategies:

5.6.1.1. Local emphasis and addition of local voices:

195 Since “understanding and identifying the receiving audience is essential in the selection and production of news” (Lams, 2011: 1854), the GDN news producers emphasised different information compared to that emphasised in the reports of the news agencies. The following is the first paragraph of each of the news reports on the flotilla raid topic:

• AP: Israeli commandos rappelled down to an aid flotilla sailing to thwart a

Gaza blockade on Monday, clashing with pro-Palestinian activists on the lead

ship in a botched raid that left at least nine passengers dead.

• Reuters: Israeli marines stormed a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on

Monday and at least nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, triggering a

diplomatic crisis and an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.

• AFP: Shock and outrage swept the globe Monday after Israeli commandos

stormed a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip, as the Jewish state's

foes and allies closed ranks in condemning the deadly raid.

• GDN: Bahrain yesterday called for an immediate international investigation

into Israel's deadly raid on the Freedom Flotilla, in which four Bahrainis

were seized. The Foreign Ministry was also ordered to investigate the fate of

Shaikh Jalal Al Sharqi, Khalid Bucheeri, Hassan Murad and Yousif

Mahmood.

The first paragraph of the GDN is clearly different from those of the three news agencies. It shifts the focus of the reporting of the flotilla raid incident from the international level and looks at the story from a local perspective. This localisation strategy used by GDN here aims to provide its readers with international news from a

196 “domestic viewpoint” (Ruigrok and Atteveldt, 2007: 69). Instead of starting to inform their readers about the flotilla raid and who undertook the raid, the GDN text producers decided to start with the local Bahraini response to the flotilla raid and also highlight the fact that there were a number of Bahrainis among the people on board the flotilla. In this way, GDN highlights the high stakes for Bahrain, and thus for local readers, in this international event.

Closely related to the local emphasis strategy is the addition of local voices in the reports. This is a strategy used by the GDN text producers in which they add familiar local and domestic context to integrate the global event and to make the event more meaningful for the readers (Ruigrok and Atteveldt, 2007), by contextualising it relative to their own local governance and concerns.

This strategy was used in the reporting of the flotilla raid as the text producers added quotations from elite local officials. For example, the GDN article quoted the

Bahraini Ambassador to Turkey, Dr. Ebrahim Yousif Abdulla, saying “the Bahrainis were not among the dead or wounded”. It was important for the newspaper to quote a high ranking official such as the ambassador to clarify the situation of the four seized

Bahrainis on the flotilla ship. This aims to make the readers feel more comfortable, knowing that officials are doing their duties in following up on the issue. The GDN also quoted the Bahraini Prime Minister and the Crown Prince, both condemning the

Israeli actions and requesting that the international community take actions against

Israel, which reflects the local political concern in Bahrain, given the lack of diplomatic relations between Bahrain and Israel.

197 5.6.1.2. Foregrounding and backgrounding:

The “inverted pyramid” structure of news reports stipulates that the information and sentences occurring at the beginning of the article are emphasised or foregrounded and what is reported later in the text is de-emphasised or backgrounded (Huckin,

1997: 82). Text producers are aware of the importance of the first paragraph in news reports, as readers assume that the most important information is presented to them in the first paragraph. Based on this fact, it is interesting to see that the GDN news report on the “Bush shoed at” topic differs from these of the news agencies in the information it foregrounded and backgrounded. The following is the first paragraph of each of the four news reports:

• AP: An Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush was

being held for questioning by the Iraqi prime minister's guards, an official

said Monday, as Arabs across the Middle East hailed the incident as a proper

send-off to the unpopular U.S. president.

• Reuters: An Iraqi reporter called President George W. Bush a "dog" and

threw his shoes at him on Sunday, sullying a farewell visit to Baghdad meant

to mark greater security in Iraq after years of bloodshed.

• AFP: An Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes and an insult at George W. Bush,

without hitting him, as the US president was shaking hands with the Iraqi

premier at his Baghdad office on Sunday.

• GDN: US President George W Bush said during a surprise farewell visit to

Baghdad yesterday that the war in Iraq was "not over" but on its way to be

won. He said America's involvement in Iraq had been difficult but necessary.

"The work hasn't been easy but it's been necessary for American security,

198 Iraqi hope and world peace," Bush said on his fourth visit to Iraq since he

ordered the March 2003 invasion.

As can be seen from the first paragraphs above, all three international news agencies foregrounded the actions of the Iraqi journalist, as to them, this information is the most important in the news report and it would attract their readers’ attention.

However, the GDN text foregrounded Bush’s visit to Iraq. The report also backgrounded the information about the Iraqi journalist as it was only provided in the later paragraphs. This strategy reflects the local political concerns in Bahrain since the country has strong relations with the US and the GDN could be avoiding foregrounding the insult in order to not affect its relations with the US.

5.6.1.3. Omission:

This strategy, according to Huckin (1997), is the ultimate form of backgrounding as the text producers leave certain things completely out of the text. Lams (2011: 1855) states that the process of selecting and rejecting information is part of a larger process of “knowledge negotiation” which depends on “personal experience and the ability to prioritise information”. There are a number of examples where the GDN text producers did not include certain information from the news agencies articles. This selection of what information not to include in the news report involved the choice of people to quote or not to quote, and to present certain views and omit others. The following is a list of some of the information that was omitted in the GDN reports:

• Omission of redundant information:

The reports produced by the news agencies about the incident of Bush being ‘shoed

199 at’ by an Iraqi reporter included certain information about the cultural significance of shoe throwing in the Arab world. The following is how each article explained this:

• AP: Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the Arab world is a sign of

extreme disrespect, and striking someone with them is even worse.

• Reuters: Throwing shoes at somebody is a supreme insult in the Middle East.

• AFP: Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After

Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many

onlookers beat the statue’s face with their soles.

Such information was necessary to include in the reports of the three agencies as they are written for international readers who need to understand why the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at Bush and what it meant. However, the GDN text producers evidently found such information to be redundant and unnecessary as the newspaper is circulated in an Arab country and so its readers are presumably aware of the meaning of shoe throwing. Therefore, this information was not included in the GDN news report.

• Omission of quotations:

It is argued that news discourse is “a blend of voices” (Barkho, 2010: 42), but not all voices enjoy equal access to power, emphasis and authority. Indeed, this access is to some extent locally determined, as we can see reflected in the way in which the GDN text producers selected the voices to present and which ones not to include in their articles from the voices presented in the reports of the news agencies.

200 For example, it is interesting to look at how the GDN report on the flotilla raid did not include any quotes from any Israeli officials, whereas the reports of AP, Reuters and even AFP presented the incident, drawing from information provided by the Israeli officials. Both AP and Reuters pointed out clearly that the information about the raid was only available from Israel. Therefore, most of the quoted voices in their reporting were those of Israeli officials and Israeli commandos. The GDN text producers, on the other hand, did not include any quotes from any Israeli officials or commandos, as its report aimed to condemn the Israeli raid. Since Bahrain has no diplomatic relations with Israel, there are also no communications allowed between Bahraini citizens and

Israeli officials. Therefore, the Bahraini media is also prohibited from making direct contact with any Israeli officials. Due to this, the GDN report avoided including any comments made by any Israeli official that was included in the reports of the news agencies, which was originally used by the news agencies to implicitly defend the

Israeli actions. This enabled the GDN report on the incident to frame itself with a more negative stance towards the Israeli actions and thereby condemn them strongly.

5.6.2. Sentence-level localisation strategies:

5.6.2.1. Topicalisation:

Topicalisation is a form of “sentence-level foregrounding” in which text producers create a perspective through what they choose to put in the initial position (Huckin,

1997: 83). It is interesting to look at the first sentence of the GDN article on Obama’s speech:

• GDN: Muslims around the world said President Barack Obama's outreach in a speech yesterday was a positive shift in US attitude but fell short of a breakthrough because it lacked concrete proposals to turn the words into action.

201

GDN text producers used “Muslims around the world” as the topic of their first sentence in order to point out that the report is going to highlight Obama’s speech and its importance to Muslims. Since the newspaper is produced in a Muslim country and for readers that include Muslims, it was important to shift the focus to cater to the interests and concerns of its readers. The GDN’s focus is different from the reports of the news agencies as the topics of the first sentences of each of them were different.

The AP and Reuters used “Obama” as the topic of their first sentences, while the AFP focused on “International leaders” and their reaction to Obama’s speech.

5.6.2.2. Same source, different quotation content:

Since text producers are responsible for the selection and presentation of the news, they also make “a complex reality understandable to or accessible for their readers”

(Ruigrok and Atteveldt, 2007: 68). As part of the selection process, text producers select who and what is to be quoted in their reports. It is interesting when two or more texts use the same source, but each one highlights different parts of what the quoted speaker says. This strategy can result in the same talk giving readers different meaning and different impressions (Kuo, 2007).

An example of the use of such a strategy is found in the news reports on Obama’s speech. AP, AFP and GDN all quoted Fawzi Barhoum, who is a spokesman for

Hamas. However, each one provided different parts of his speech, which in a way had an influence on the contextualised meaning of the quotation. The following are the quotes of Bahroum in each of the three texts:

202 • AP: “There is a change between the language of President Obama and

previous speeches made by George Bush,”

“So all we can say is that there is a difference in the statements, and the statements of today did not include a mechanism that can translate his wishes and views into actions”

• AFP: “This address must be judged not on its form, but by the policies that

Obama will apply on the ground to respect the freedom of people and their

democratic choices and the right of Palestinian people to its land,”

“It had many contradictions, all the while reflecting tangible change”

• GDN: “It had many contradictions, all the while reflecting tangible change”

The quotes of both AP and AFP showed that Hamas did not fully welcome Obama’s speech, but they welcomed it with some criticism. The way the GDN presented the

Hamas quote, by providing the comment “the Gaza Strip’s rulers gave a conciliatory response to the speech” before the actual quote. By describing their response as

“conciliatory” GDN makes the reader feel that Hamas wanted to accept and welcome

Obama’s speech, despite its “contradictions”.

5.6.2.3. Addition:

Since the GDN text producers use a number of sources to produce their localised versions and do not only rely on the AP, Reuters and AFP, certain articles can include more information that was not included in the texts of the three news agencies. For example, in the Obama speech news report, the GDN used some quotes for Obama that were not included in the reports of AP, Reuters or AFP. The following is one example:

203 • GDN: He said the US bond with Israel, the source of much Arab distrust of

the US, was unbreakable and rejected “ignorant” rants by those who deny the

Nazi Holocaust.

This quote aims to highlight the fact that although Obama’s speech was focused on

Muslims and he affirmed his support for a Palestinian state, the US policies and ties with Israel are strong and cannot be changed. This will in turn lower the readers’ expectations about what the speech will accomplish. It is interesting to find out that this added quote was placed immediately after a paragraph that was copied from the

Reuters report with no change in which it stated that the US administration “tried to lower expectation in recent days about what would be accomplished by the speech”.

5.6.3. Word-level localisation strategies:

5.6.3.1. Different quoting verb:

Chen (2005) suggests that choosing certain quoting verbs rather than others enables text producers to foreground certain meanings and suppress others. The quotation analysis in each of the three topics in the previous section showed that the choice of quoting verbs reveals much about the text producer attitudes or stance towards what was quoted. There are a number of examples that showed GDN text producers use different quoting verbs from the ones used by the news agencies. The following is one of the examples:

• Reuters: Obama pledged to pursue Palestinian statehood.

• GDN: He insisted Palestinians must have a state.

204 Both quotes are indirect and they both discuss Obama’s promise to Palestinians. The interesting part of the quotes is the quoting verbs used in each one. Reuters decided to use a positive quoting verb “pledged to” to show Obama as a confident person, while the GDN used the negative quoting verb “insisted”, which cast some doubt over what

Obama said. The quoting verb used by the GDN presupposes that the text producers doubt Obama’s strength of conviction, whereas the quoting verb used in the Reuters report does not have this presupposition.

5.6.3.2. Connotations:

Some words can carry additional or special meanings and this can either be positive or negative. It is interesting to look at how the GDN text producers used a word with positive connotations to describe Obama’s speech in the first sentence. Obama’s speech was described as an “outreach”, a word that means the speech provided things beyond the conventional limits. This word summarised the idea of comparing

Obama’s speech and the speeches of the previous president Bush, as it shows that

Obama’s speech offered a lot of positive points for the Muslim world.

The previous two sections (5.4 and 5.5) have uncovered the implicit ideologies in the reporting of the major international news agencies as well as the GDN in the course of analysing how the GDN produces localised versions of the reports of the international news agencies. The next section thus aims to focus more on why the GDN actually produces such localised versions in more detail.

205 5.7. A framework for analysing the localisation of English news in the Middle

East:

The previous sections discussed in some detail the various localisation strategies employed by the GDN to produce its localised versions of news reports. However, the above analysis only alluded to the reasons that led the local English newspaper to produce those localised versions. It was thus considered necessary to supplement the comparative analysis of the source texts themselves with a number of interviews with news producers as well as readers of English newspapers in order to find out the underlying motivations for the localisation process. This section will provide a summary of the main reasons the interviewees provided for producing localised news reports.

The interviews with news producers of a number of English newspapers in the Middle

East as well as with readers of the GDN newspaper were analysed and grouped according to the main themes provided regarding the reasons for the localisation process (see Appendix Five and Six). The aim, however, was to develop a framework that can be applied to the localisation of English news in the Middle East more generally and not just specific to the GDN.

5.7.1. Ideologies:

As the previous chapter showed, the news produced by the international news agencies are loaded with certain ideologies and news producers in the Middle East are aware of this. According to the editor of the Bahrain Tribune, news agency reports

‘often contain biased views or personal judgments’ and the editor of GDN states that the events they report are sometimes ‘interpreted through western eyes’. Therefore,

206 editors of English newspapers in the Middle East make the necessary localisation changes to remove any western ideologies and at the same time, they inject their localised versions with some local ideologies. Readers sometimes are able to identify these local ideologies: for example, when a number of readers were asked about how they felt about Obama’s speech after reading certain extracts from the GDN’s report on the incident, one stated that the GDN is a ‘pro-government, conservative and moderate newspaper’ and claimed that it was normal for it to focus ‘on Israel’s settlement in the West Bank as most Arab moderate countries believe that settlement is the main obstacle facing the peace process in the Middle East’.

It can be claimed here that although ideologies are found in the news reports produced by the news agencies and the localised reports of the GDN as discussed in Section

5.4, it should be noted that each has its own ideologies and so they do not necessarily overlap.

5.7.2. Business aims:

Newspapers nowadays are owned by financial institutions and they are considered to be business products. Like any other product, they need to satisfy market demand

(Stevenson, 2005) and therefore their content needs to appeal to and suit the target readers in order for them to be sold. The editor of 24x7 News and reporter of the

Daily Arab News online newspapers claimed that no one would read the newspaper if

‘you write a story nobody understands’ and therefore it is important, as the editor of the GDN stated, to ‘remember that we are in the business of direct communication with ordinary people. It is pointless making them reach for their dictionaries after every sentence’.

207

Since the newspaper is a product, the financial institution that produces the newspaper aims to have greater profits while lowering the costs involved in producing the newspaper. One part of the costs is subscribing to news agencies to get news reports, and as the GDN reporter said, ‘using news agencies has finance involved in it’. He explains this by stating that the newspaper ‘depends on which news agency would provide a better rate as well as better analysis for the purpose of publishing’. This means that some English newspapers might not draw equally from the “big three” international news agencies when they produce their localised versions of the news reports.

5.7.3. Editorial lines:

Every newspaper has its own editorial line or policies and according to the editor of

Bahrain Tribune, these editorial lines ‘are usually decided by the board of editors who agree on them based on the general policy followed by the newspaper’. The editor of

Gulf News also stated that the ‘Editor-in-Chief in coordination with senior staff and the board of trustees set the rules which are enshrined in a very clear editorial policy which all employees must follow’. These rules, according to the editor of Bahrain

Tribune, can be related ‘to serious political issues or significant social matters, but they can also be linked to seemingly smaller issues, such as whether to use British or

US English’. He gives an example of ‘not to take all the adjectives in the news agency versions as they reflect a specific point of view’. He also stressed the importance of not taking sides when reporting an event and insisted on their refusal to ‘associate religion with acts of terrorism, be it Islam, Christianity or Judaism’. The editor of Gulf

News also gave other examples as she stressed that some news agencies use ‘more

208 sectarian and religious attributions’ and these need to be removed, as it is not what they ‘want to promote’ in their newspaper. She also explained that they remove

‘excessive references to Sunni, Shiites and other sectarian attributions’ that they find unnecessary to explaining the event. The GDN reporter also stated that when the news agency report uses unnecessary religious references, ‘you just remove the religious aspect from it so not to offend the readers’. He also gave another example of the editorial line used in the GDN that is related to how it refers to certain designations and names. He said that ‘the news agencies would normally refer to the Bahrain’s

Crown Prince as “the King’s son Shaikh Salman”, but in our newspaper we have rules for royal names, and this would appear as “the King’s son His Highness the Crown

Prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa”’.

5.7.4. Societal discourses:

Closely related to the editorial lines are the societal discourses. The editor of Bahrain

Tribune stated that the editorial lines could be related to certain ‘significant social matters’ and according to the editor of GDN these depend on ‘changing circumstances’ and that ‘local sensitivities apply’. For example, he states that ‘much of the street violence, bombings etc. in Bahrain at present is seen as being influenced by Iran / Hezbollah, so they are terrorist acts’. Closely related to the local and societal sensitivities is what the editor of Gulf News said regarding how they refer to the

‘Arabian Gulf’ instead of using the ‘Persian Gulf’. Since the newspaper is intended for an Arab audience or English readers in an Arab country, therefore, it is important to stress that this gulf is part of the Arab countries and does not belong to Iran.

209 It seems that the Palestinian-Israeli issue is the main concern for almost all the editors interviewed as they all stressed the importance of how to deal with references to this issue. For example, the editor of GDN stated that ‘Palestinian commandos would be referred to as freedom fighters, given Israel’s brutal oppression’. The editor of

Bahrain Tribune stressed the importance of not to ‘pepper an article with “terrorist” whenever we refer to a Palestinian or Israeli group’. The editor of Gulf News said that they ‘use the term “colonies” instead of “settlements” when talking about Israeli occupation’ and they ‘use the term fighters or militants to describe armed struggles against Israel’. Readers are also aware of how sensitive this issue is, as one reader stated that ‘the occupation of Palestine since 1948 is a central issue for the Arabs and

Muslims’, so it is expected that English newspapers in the Middle East refer to the issue in a sensitive way that pays heed to the feelings of the Arab and Muslim people.

5.7.5. Government policy line:

Although newspapers in the Middle East are mostly owned privately and not financially sponsored by their governments, they usually follow the government’s policies, especially in how they deal with the government’s political relations with other countries. Readers are aware of such a fact, one explaining, for example, that the main reason for the GDN not reporting Israeli officials in its article on the flotilla case is that ‘there are no official diplomatic relations between Bahrain and Israel’ and

‘GDN should abide with such a status’. Another reader said that ‘it would be provocative for Arab readers’ to find a local newspaper interviewing Israelis and if the reports have any interviews with Israelis, then it is assumed that ‘foreign reporters’ are the ones who conducted them.

210 5.7.6. Local common knowledge:

It is a fact the news agencies’ reports are written and intended for an international audience, but the main problem with some of their reporting is that they lack the local background. The GDN editor stresses that ‘foreign agencies are guilty of farming out stories for editing’. He explains this by claiming that ‘AFP reports of what is happening on the ground in say Bahrain, Saudi, Iraq, Syria etc. are sent to Paris to be edited, often by someone with little knowledge of the Middle East. The result is sometimes a sense of sensationalised sound bites that in no way reflect reality’. The editor of Bahrain Tribune supported this idea, as he said that ‘some agencies are better at covering the Middle East, for instance, as they have better ground and background knowledge’. He also stated that some agencies ‘parachute their reporters into the area with knowledge often drawn from the Internet websites or social networks and micro blogs’. He said that he ‘met journalists whose knowledge about events in a country was based on what they were told by the taxi driver who took them from the airport to the hotel’. Therefore, in localising reports, text producers take account of what is already regarded as “common knowledge”.

The above points summarise the main findings from the interviews with the editors of

English newspapers in the Middle East and the readers of the GDN newspaper. They explain the main reasons for producing localised versions of the reports obtained from the international news agencies. The following figure summarises these points in a framework for analysing the localisation of news reports in English newspapers in the

Middle East.

211

Figure 5-1: A framework for localisation of news reports

In this framework, it is proposed, based on the analysis in this chapter, that the ideologies embedded in reports from international news agencies are localised from an emic ideological perspective. It is further proposed that these localised emic ideologies are influenced by the business aims of those newspapers, editorial lines, government policy, societal discourses more broadly, and perceived local common knowledge.

212 Chapter 6 Globalisation of news reports: (Mis)reporting the Events in Bahrain

in the Arab Spring

6.1. Introduction:

The events of 2011 have changed the Arab world, events that no one would have ever predicted for this part of the world. Protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya were successful in ending the regimes of long-ruling leaders that were expected to remain in power for even more years. Bloody struggles are still happening in Syria in the hope of ending Bashar Al Assad’s regime and Shia Muslims in Bahrain took to the streets in the hope of overthrowing the Al Khalifa ruling family and establishing an Islamic republic that follows Iran. Other countries in the region also saw protests, including Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. These events have had significant impact on the politics and media systems of the Middle East, as discussed briefly in Chapter Two. This chapter thus attempts to address these recent events, and in particular examines their impact on how the Western media or the international news agencies provided a globalised perspective on these local events.

This chapter will look at the unrest that hit Bahrain in February 2011, mainly because what happened in Bahrain is regarded as “a special case among the Arab Spring uprisings” (Black, 2012). It is a special case because the situation in Bahrain has been largely misunderstood or misreported by the Western world. Therefore, by focusing on this special case, more light can be shed on the central issue of this thesis: the interplay of localisation and globalisation through domestic and international media organisations in the Middle East. In other words, this chapter with its focus on the

213 process of ‘globalisation’ of news reports, complements the focus on ‘localisation’ in the previous chapter, given that localisation and globalisation are dialectically related.

The focus of this chapter differs from the focus of the previous chapter in that it looks at how the international news agencies eticise the emic perspective of the Bahraini people involved in the uprising events and present it to the western readers. In their process of eticising these emic perspectives, this chapter claims that the news agencies sometimes fail to broadcast the actual events as local people see them, which results in reports that are inaccurate and biased to a certain degree.

Since the chapter is interested in investigating the eticisation process used by the international news agencies (Reuters, AP and AFP) in their reporting of the Formula

One race in Bahrain and how they focused on reporting the political events more than the sporting event itself, the researcher decided not to include any reports from the local English newspaper in Bahrain (GDN). Furthermore, the GDN reports of the events were focused on the race itself and did not cover any of the other political events, although this fact could be interpreted as a sign of ideological orientation ‘by omission’.

Some contextual information is essential in understanding the recent uprisings in

Bahrain, and the subsequent analysis vis-à-vis the relative (in)accuracy of the global coverage of those events. A key point is that the Bahraini Shia publicised that they are the ‘majority’ and are ruled by a ‘minority Sunnis’ and that their uprising was to demand democracy and freedom. However, this thesis argues that the situation in

Bahrain is in fact somewhat more complex than that. There has been no recent census conducted in Bahrain that has identified the size of religious sects in the population

214 other than the first ever census, undertaken in 1941. In that year, the government decided to conduct the first census for food control purposes and the population was less than 90,000 at that time (Qubain, 1955). The Shia accounted for 53 per cent of the population at that time and since then this information about the majority and the minority has become a myth believed by the Shia, who today claim that they account for over 70 per cent of the population in Bahrain, and broadcast potentially misleading information to other countries. Although there are no recent official statements about the actual percentage of Sunnis and Shia in Bahrain, a recent study by Gengler (2011) which is available online, offers more accurate numbers than those speculated by the Shia. His study estimates that Sunnis make up approximately 37.7 to 47 per cent of the population, while the Shia make up around 52.9 to 62.3 per cent.

The figures still show that the Shia are the majority of the population, but they are not the 70 per cent majority claimed. Being the small majority in the country and leading the uprising and the opposition, proves that their movement “is not a national movement representing the general will, but a sectarian movement serving a sectarian agenda” (Gengler, 2013). However, it should be noted that not all Shia are part of the opposition and that is one reason that the uprising events in Bahrain do not represent the views of most Bahrainis. Shia have always been part of the Bahraini community and they have always contributed in the development of the country in all areas, as many of them have held various ministerial positions and most of them are well- known businessmen who contribute to the economic development of Bahrain.

Another reason that the events in Bahrain constitute a special case, is the international media’s failure to recognise Iran’s role in inspiring the events (Belfer, 2011).

215 This chapter will first discuss the history that led to the uprising and then will highlight the main events that have happened in the country since the 14th of February

2011. The stance adopted in this chapter is that the foreign media published misinformed, biased reports that did not reflect many pertinent facts relevant to those events. To give one example of the misinformation in the reports of the foreign media, Robert Fisk (2011) wrote in the early days of the uprisings, on the 19th of

February, that “up to 60 corpses had been taken from the Pearl Square on Thursday morning and that police were seen by crowds loading bodies into three refrigerated trucks”. However, the total number of deaths in the Bahraini events since they started in 2011 and up to February 2013 is estimated to be 35 (Henley, 2013). So a possible reason for the foreign media providing incomplete and sometimes misleading information to their readers about the situation in Bahrain would be to put more pressure on the Bahraini government and to back the opposition movement in their attempts to topple the Al Khalifa ruling family. By doing so, the media can manipulate the events in Bahrain so that they fit the wider narrative of the other events of the Arab Spring. In order to show how the foreign media misreported the

Bahraini events and were biased in reporting them, this chapter will analyse a number of news reports published by international news agencies regarding the Formula One race that took place in Bahrain in 2012.

6.2. A history of division leading to the 2011 uprisings:

Bahraini Shia have always believed that they are the real citizens of Bahrain and that the Al Khalifa family and all the other parts of the population, including the Sunnis, hail from other parts of the Arab or the Muslim world. However, Qubain (1955) claims that it is difficult to identify the Shia’s ethnic origin and since they now speak

216 Arabic, they are regarded as Arabs. Therefore, based on Qubain’s claims, Bahraini

Shia might not have been Arabs in the first place, but they are nonetheless “the oldest group among the present inhabitants” of the country and have witnessed a number of conquests (Qubain, 1955: 271). Historically, Bahrain used to encompass not only today’s thirty-three islands, but also stretched from Qatar to southern Iraq. The

Portuguese invaded Bahrain in the sixteenth century, but were expelled by the Iranian

Safavids in 1602 who ruled the country until the eighteenth century when the Al

Khalifa family entered Bahrain (Noueihed and Warren, 2012). The Al Khalifa family, with their tribal background, dialect and history, has always been regarded as conquerors by the Bahraini Shia, and Iran has always claimed that Bahrain is its fourteenth province – as has already been discussed in Chapter 2. Therefore, Bahraini

Shia are more loyal to the regional Shia in Iran than they are to the Al Khalifa ruling family of Bahrain. Their religious affiliation and source of emulation can be either to an Iraqi or Iranian Shia jurist or cleric, who does not limit himself to issuing religious edicts, but also issues political edicts such as advising his followers to join or boycott elections (Noueihed and Warren, 2012).

With the rise of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and Khomeini regime gaining more power among Shia all around the world, an Iranian-backed plot to overthrow the

Al Khalifa government and establish an Islamic republic was discovered by the

Bahraini authorities in 1981. This attempted coup, as well as the Iran-Iraq war, led the

Arab Gulf countries to establish more joint security and defence arrangements in order to face any future Iranian threats. The 1990s saw massive Shia unrest following the Bahraini government’s arrest of three Shia clerics who were accused of attacking scantily clad runners in a relay race. The 1994 unrest took place mainly in the Shia

217 villages, with protestors demanding more jobs, an increase in income, as well as restoring the constitution, which had been suspended in 1975. The government cracked down heavily on the protests and violence continued until the end of the

1990s.

When Shaikh Hamad came to power in 1999, he brought new hope and put forward the National Action Charter constitution, which was voted for by the majority of

Bahrainis. Bahrain became a monarchy in 2001 and the Amir became the King of

Bahrain. King Hamad also announced that in 2002 the first municipal elections since

1957 would be held, and a Parliament would be established (Joyce, 2012). The King also provided amnesty for exiles and allowed them to return to Bahrain, in addition to eliminating the State Security Law that had been in force since 1973. As part of the

King’s reform project, opposition activists were allowed to form political societies and by 2002 there were eleven political societies. The reform project also led to the creation of independent human rights groups in Bahrain (Noueihed and Warren,

2012), including the main Shia political group in Bahrain, Al Wefaq, led by Sheikh

Ali Salman, who was one of the Shias exiled in the 1990s.

However, in spite of the new 2002 constitution, many Shia were disappointed to see that although they were now given greater opportunity for political participation, power over the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government still remained in the hands of the Al Khalifa family, as the King retained the right to accept or reject the laws passed by the parliament. Despite the fact that the King’s reforms contributed to an economic boom in Bahrain, Shia continued to express their dissatisfaction with the parliamentary election process and the government’s

218 naturalisation process. They claimed that the government granted citizenship to Sunni

Arabs or Pakistanis and hired them to work in security jobs. The Shia also complained about the housing services provided to them by the government, and claimed that the government provided the newly naturalised Arabs with housing units while they had to wait years to get a unit (Fahad, 2012; Joyce, 2012; Noueihed and Warren, 2012).

As a result, Shia youths engaged in riots and burnt tyres in the streets throughout the

2000s in their attempts to express their dissatisfaction.

So when the events of the Arab Spring happened in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011,

Shia youths saw that as an opportunity to take to the streets and call for a new constitution as well as demand “investigation into claims of high-level corruption and political naturalisation” (Noueihed and Warren, 2012: 152). They chose 14 February,

2011 as the date for their “peaceful protests”, which coincided with Bahrain celebrating a “full decade since the National Action Charter” (Noueihed and Warren,

2012: 152).

6.3. The events of the 2011 uprising in Bahrain: peaceful protests or terrorist

acts?

The uprisings in Bahrain started when Shia youths, inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt, called for demonstrations and protests via social media outlets to take place on the 14th of February, 2011. As has already been mentioned, they chose this date as the country was getting ready to celebrate ten years since the National Action

Charter was voted for by 98.4 per cent of Bahrainis. Protests broke out on the 14th of

February in almost all Shia villages with people demanding more job opportunities and democratic changes in the government (Fahad, 2012; Joyce, 2012). The protestors

219 claimed that they were peacefully demonstrating and asking for their rights. When security officials attempted to disperse the crowds, they were faced by some of the protestors throwing rocks and metal rods. The security officials were forced to use tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. The first day of the protests resulted in the death of one of the protestors and during his funeral on the second day, more protests took place, and security officials also faced down these protests, leading to another death.

The news of these deaths angered the Shia who became more determined to get involved in the protests and they started to gather at the Pearl Roundabout in the capital, Manama. Seeing the events escalating in such a short time, and hoping to lead the crowds, the Al Wefaq group announced its resignation from the parliament and took part in the protests (Fahad, 2012; Noueihed and Warren, 2012). Given the roundabout’s strategic location as a link between the capital Manama and all the other parts of the country as well as being close to the Bahrain Financial Harbour and the country’s major shopping malls, the government had to intervene to disperse the protestors and ensure traffic flow. So on the 17th of February, security forces cleared the protestors from the roundabout and five people were killed, three protestors and two security officials. The security forces also found a large number of knives and swords hidden in the protestors’ tents, which, it could be argued, revealed the reality of the protestors’ ‘peaceful’ demonstrations.

With a large number of protestors wounded, they marched to the Salmaniya Medical

Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital, and with the support of the medical staff and doctors, more demonstrations were held in the hospital. The hospital became a

220 demonstration location and all the medical staff became preoccupied with contacting the foreign media in their attempts to spread their side of the story to the international press. It was reported that a number of Sunni patients were “denied medical attention at the Salmaniya hospital” (Noueihed and Warren, 2012: 157).

Images and videos of the government’s crackdown on the protestors circulated widely all over the foreign media and online, and the US pressured the Bahraini government to withdraw its troops from the roundabout and allow the protestors to return and demonstrate. Bahrain’s Crown Prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa announced that the government was willing to engage in talks with the protestors and a National Dialogue was offered. The Crown Prince’s dialogue offer was based on seven principles, including a representative government and a parliament with full powers (Doran and Shaikh, 2011). Al Wefaq and other opposition groups feared that if they agreed to take part in the talks, they would lose their control over the crowds.

Therefore, these groups prepared a list of pre-conditions for them to enter into the talks (Fahad, 2012; Noueihed and Warren, 2012). The government did not accept these conditions and the talks were never held.

With time passing by and the protestors remaining in the Pearl Roundabout, no hint of any developments was seen. The foreign media also lost interest in covering the

Bahraini uprising as they were diverted to the more bloody uprisings in Yemen and

Libya. Opposition leaders started to realise that they either had to accept the talks or escalate the events (Noueihed and Warren, 2012). They decided to escalate the events and Al Wefaq and the other opposition groups called for a number of protests throughout the country. On the 6th of March, protestors marched to the Prime

221 Minister’s office and demanded he step down, and two days later a number of opposition groups held a news conference at the Pearl Roundabout and called for the overthrowing of the monarchy and the creation of a democratic republic. Two days later, on the 10th of March, the Bahrain’s Teachers’ Society called for a protest at the

Ministry of Education and demanded the minister resign. On the 11th, a large group of

Shia protestors marched to the Royal Palace in Riffaa, an area that is home to the royals, members of the armed forces, and other Sunnis. On the 12th of March, the

Teachers’ Society called for teachers and students to strike and even primary school students were involved in the protests.

However, the real escalation happened in the early morning of Sunday the 13th of

March, which was the first day of work after the weekend. The protestors did not allow employees to enter the Bahrain Financial Harbour. They also blocked the country’s main highway that connects Bahrain International Airport in Muharraq to the financial district and the shopping centres as well as to the King Fahad Causeway, which connects Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. This cutting off of the main highway made many employees unable to go to work and the opposition’s main aim of creating a country-wide strike to affect the economy became successful. Security officials intervened and attempted to clear the protestors and open the highway. However, they were faced by rock-throwing protestors who managed to force the security officials to retreat and leave the highway blocked. This meant that the highway was under the control of the protestors, who rolled barrels and bins onto the streets creating their own checkpoints to allow or prevent people from crossing. The same day saw a massive Shia attack on the University of Bahrain, leading to clashes between the Shia and Sunni students and the burning of a computer lab in one of the buildings as well

222 as the injuring of a number of Sunni students. This was a sign that the country was going into a sectarian or civil war, and after almost a month of chaos and control in the hands of the protestors, the government had to intervene to restore order. The

Bahraini government asked the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) to send troops to help in protecting strategic locations in the country, and on the 14th of March, around

1000 Saudi troops entered Bahrain through the causeway as part of GCC’s Peninsula

Shield Force. These troops were also bolstered over the next couple of days with security officials from Kuwait and the UAE. The troops were used to protect the financial district and other important facilities (Fahad, 2012; Joyce, 2012; Noueihed and Warren, 2012), but the real reason for calling in the GCC troops was to send a message to Iran that “any attack on one Gulf Arab ruling family would be considered an attack on all” (Noueihed and Warren, 2012: 156).This led the opposition groups and protestors to call these troops invading troops, and even Iran denounced the GCC troops entering Bahrain. On the 15th of March, the King announced a three-month period of emergency or martial law, and the Commander of the Armed Forces, Shaikh

Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, was given full control to ensure the safety of the country. Bahraini troops cleared the Pearl Roundabout of protestors and on the next day, the Pearl monument on the roundabout was removed and a traffic interchange replaced the roundabout. A nighttime curfew was imposed and checkpoints were set up all over the main roads. The Salmaniya hospital was also cleared of protestors and a number of expat workers were released after being detained by the protestors in the hospital (Fahad, 2012; Noueihed and Warren, 2012). The troops also found many weapons hidden in the hospital and discovered that the protestors had stolen a large number of medications.

223 The above is a brief summary of the main events of the worst conflict in the history of

Bahrain, which is still not over today, with the protests growing into more violent acts against security officials. The Bahrain protests and protestors labelled themselves as peaceful at the beginning, but with time their peacefulness turned into violence. The

Bahraini government was widely criticised in the foreign media for its way of dealing with the protestors, mainly because of the international media’s failure to fully understand the complexity of the various perspectives of the Bahraini people towards these events. Another problem was the way in which the international media represented only one perspective (that of the opposition) in representing these locally situated events for a global (primarily western) audience. In that sense, what was initially a complex array of emic local perspectives on local events was

(over)simplified in order to produce a seemingly coherent globally-relevant perspective on those events. And in that sense, it can be claimed that producing globalised versions of those news reports itself involved a process of “eticisation”

(that is, taking an “outsider’s” perspective) of events that were understood in different ways from an emic (that is, localised or “insider’s”) perspective.

However, it is worth noting that it appears the global media has subsequently come to realise that the real agenda underlying the uprising was that Shia protestors wanted to overthrow the government and thereby expand Iranian power into the Gulf countries.

To give an example of the international world recognising the truth of the Bahraini events, the UK Ambassador to Bahrain has recently labelled the protestors

“terrorists”, and revealed that the UK has evidence of Iranian support for the violence in Bahrain (GDN, 2013).

224 The next part of this chapter will focus on how the international media failed to present a balanced perspective on the events in Bahrain by analysing a number of news reports by the international news agencies on the Formula One race that was held in Bahrain in 2012.

6.4. Reporting the 2012 Formula One in Bahrain: biased reporting?

6.4.1. The Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix race: a background:

As part of the King’s reform project that started in 1999, the Crown Prince Shaikh

Salman envisioned the potential for staging an international sporting event in Bahrain.

The Bahrain International Circuit, where the Formula One race is hosted, was built in

2002 and the first race took place in 2004. The Formula One race contributed to showcasing Bahrain as a progressive Gulf country that is open to the West (Law,

2013). Since 2004, the race has kept returning to Bahrain every year, becoming better and attracting a greater audience. However, the 2011 uprising events in Bahrain forced the government and the Formula One organisers to cancel the race that was due to be held in March 2011. The 2012 race was held successfully in April, but the opposition groups tried to overshadow the event by staging more protests during the event. Given the race’s special circumstances, global media ensured that the race, as well as the other events of the protestors, were both reported on. However, the question that is raised here is whether the media were able to balance their reporting on the race and the political situation, or were they biased towards or focused on reporting the political events? This section will analyse the news reports of Reuters,

AP and AFP on the 2012 Bahrain Formula One race to investigate whether their reporting was biased in some respects. Please refer to Appendix Seven for the news reports.

225 6.4.2. Analysing the reports on the 2012 Bahrain Formula One Race:

The following analysis of the news reports of Reuters, AP and AFP is based on the analytical framework of this study that has already been explained in the methodology chapter. However, this section will only focus on three parts of the framework, given these yielded the most relevant findings: word frequency analysis, naming analysis and quotation analysis.

6.4.2.1. Word frequency analysis:

Since the news reports were about the Formula One race in Bahrain, the two most frequently used words in almost all three articles were, perhaps not surprisingly,

“Bahrain” and “race”. However, there were some telling differences among the three reports that are revealed through a more refined word frequency analysis. The following table lists the top 10 most frequently used words:

AP Reuters AFP No Type Token Type Token Type Token

1 Bahrain 18 race 9 team 6

2 race 9 team 8 Bahrain 6

3 Shiite 8 One 7 said 5

4 force 7 say 6 force 5

5 political 5 Formula 6 member 4

6 prince 5 car 5 Kingdom 4

7 crown 5 police 5 prix 4

8 group 5 paddock 5 India 4

9 country 5 Saturday 4 race 4

226 10 year 5 driver 4 grand 4

Table 6-1: Top 10 words in the news reports

The results shown in the above table reveal that the AP’s report appears to have focused on other events as well as the race. First of all, it is the only report of the three that used the word “Shiite” eight times and also used the word “political” five times.

This indicates that the AP report was not simply reporting about the Formula One sporting event, but appeared to be more focused on reporting about the “Shiite” uprising and the “political” situation in Bahrain. The other interesting, frequently used word by the AP report is the “crown prince” which was used five times. An examination of how the AP’s text referred to the crown prince shows that references were used when providing negative information about him. This will be further explained in more detail in the naming analysis section.

The results of the word frequency analysis discussed above show that the news agencies varied in their reporting of the Formula One event, with the AP evidently more focused on the political events in Bahrain rather than the sporting event itself. In other words, reporting on the sports event was seemingly a pretext for reporting or commenting on the political unrest in Bahrain. The next section will discuss the naming analysis and will reveal further evidence of the differences between the articles.

6.4.2.2. Naming Analysis:

The news reports used various ways to refer to the Formula One race, such as referring to it as “Sunday’s race” in the AP in line 8 and Reuters in line 3. Along with

227 the normal naming of the Formula One event, the news reports used other interesting ways to refer to it. For example, the AFP in the first line referred to the race as

“Bahrain’s controversial Grand Prix race”. It was called ‘controversial’ mainly because a year earlier, the race was cancelled for security reasons and the opposition were trying to show that the situation in the country was still too critical to stage the race again. On the other hand, the AP in line 13 described the race as “the country’s premier international event” in order to show the readers how important this race is to

Bahrain. It seems that the AP news producers are trying to link the race’s importance to the Bahraini leaders. For example, the above sentence was mentioned as part of the report stressing that the Bahraini Crown Prince “vowed” that the race would go ahead. The AP also stated in lines 30 and 31 that the Bahraini “rulers lobbied hard to stage this year’s” race as they believe that it will “portray stability” in the country.

This presupposes that there is some instability in Bahrain and that the rulers are trying to hold the race in order to show the world the opposite. This view is further supported in lines 70 and 71 where the report stated that the “rulers have depicted the race … as an event that will put the divided society on the path of reconciliation”. The

AP text producers’ statement here possibly reflects their belief that Bahrain is unstable, that the society is divided and that the race is only supported by the Bahraini rulers who think it will bring about good in the country. This belief, held by the AP text producers, seems to be the same belief of the opposition groups and protestors in

Bahrain, which the Reuter’s article made explicit in line 11. Reuters stated that the protestors in Bahrain clashed with the police nightly “denouncing the Formula One

Grand Prix … as a lavish spectacle glorifying a repressive government”.

228 To further explore the proposition that the AP text producer endorses the opposition’s beliefs, the researcher will look at how the text refers to the Bahraini leaders in an implicitly negative way, so showing that the proposition can be proved. The text in line 3 described the Bahraini leaders as struggling to contain the “opposition anger while under the world’s spotlight”. By using the word “struggled”, the text producer implicitly suggests that the government is responding to the protestors in a possibly violent way. The text also refers to the Bahrain leaders as “Western-backed rulers” in line 7. This could be taken as implying that the rulers are not fully supported by the

Bahraini people and it is only because they are backed by the West that they are still the leaders of the country. This view is further supported in the text in line 19 when it mentions that the Shia protestors’ aim was to “weaken the near monopoly of the

Sunni dynasty that has ruled for more than 200 years”. This statement positions the

Bahraini Shia’s protests as aimed at toppling the government, as if the rulers have already been there for a long time and it is time for them to move on.

The word frequency analysis also showed that the AP article referred to the Crown

Prince a number of times, and looking at how the report used the Crown Prince’s name shows that a number of negative characteristics were attributed to him. For example, in line 24 the article stated that the Bahrain leaders are “the main backer of the F1 race” and then stated “the crown prince owns rights to the event”. One interpretation of this second statement about the Crown Prince is that it constitutes an attempt by the text producers to show the readers that the Bahraini leaders are supporting the race and want it to be held in order for them, and the Crown Prince in particular, to make more money as he owns some of its rights. The AP also, in line 82, referred to the Crown Prince and stated that he “is also the commander of the

229 Kingdom’s armed forces”. Although it might seem normal to refer to the different roles the Crown Prince undertakes in the country, the AP’s aim here in mentioning that he is the commander of the armed forces appears to be to build a particular image of him. This is revealed in the second part of the sentence where the report states that the opposition believes that the Crown Prince was involved in “enforcing the crackdown” on the protests, hence alluding to the prior mention that he is the commander of the Bahraini armed forces.

Looking at how the report positioned the protestors and the security officials and how each was named or described, offers further support for the position that the AP’s reporting is somewhat biased in favour of the protestors. The report described the protestors in the first sentence as ‘flooding the main highway’ and also in line 15, their protests were described as a “wave”. However in each of these references, the report stresses that they (the protestors) were faced by security officials who were using tear gas and cracking down on their protests. To make the picture of the violent police and the peaceful protestors clearer to their readers, the AP stated in line 10 that the riot police used “volleys of tear gas and stun grenades” while the protestors took

“refuge in a mall”. The other two reports were more balanced in referring to the protestors and the security officials. For example, Reuters reported that the protestors used violence against the police, who replied with birdshot. For example, the first sentence of the Reuters report mentions that the protestors were more violent, stating that they “hurled petrol bombs at the police”. The AFP report also reported the violence on the part of the protestors when it stated in the first sentence that, a

“firebomb exploded” near an F1 team’s members, and that the violent clashes

230 between the protestors and the security officials were an answer to calls by the opposition groups for “three days of rage” during the race event.

It appears that the AP took the position that the opposition constitute the majority of the Bahraini people, as this is reflected in the words they used to describe the protestors. It has already been noted above that they were described as ‘flooding the highway’ and that ‘they marched in waves’. These words connote large size. Another example of words that were used by the report to show the opposition’s large number, is found in line 21 stating that there were “tens of thousands of opposition supporters”.

As was mentioned earlier in this section, the Shia regard themselves as the clear majority in Bahrain, and broadcast this position to the international media – a position that this thesis takes to be misleading. For example, such misleading information is found in the reports of both the AP and Reuters. The AP stated in line 15 that the protests were carried out by the country’s “Shiite majority” and went even further in line 47 to claim that “Shiites account for about 70 percent of Bahrain’s population”.

However no evidence is provided for such claims. Reuters also followed such misleading information by stating in line 9 that the protestors were “mainly from the

Shiite Muslim majority”.

Another interesting point to mention here, is that the AP article was the only one to link the Bahrain protests to the events of the Arab Spring. It started by stating in line 6 that the Bahrain protests have become the “hallmark of the Gulf nation’s 14-month uprising”, and then stated in line 18 that it is “the longest-running in the Arab Spring”.

231 However, the Reuters report seems to contradict the AP’s claims that the situation in

Bahrain is still unstable, and the uprising is still going on. For example, Reuters stated in line 45 that the demonstrations are “confined to Shiite areas outside the city centre” and also stressed in line 46 that Bahrain is “experiencing business as usual, with people going to shopping malls and tourists sunning themselves by hotel pools”.

In summary, the discussion above indicates that the AP’s news report was biased towards a particular political line, since it presents the opposition in a positive light, or at least attempts to evoke sympathy towards their plight, and presents the Bahraini rulers in a negative light. A question arising from this analysis is, ‘Why was such a position adopted by a leading news agency?’ One possible reason is evident in sentence 36 in the AFP report. The AFP stated “two Associated Press journalists are being prevented from covering the race because they have not received visas to enter the Gulf Kingdom”. The fact that the AP’s writers were authorised by the Formula

One governing body to cover the event, but the Bahrain government did not issue them visas, seems to be a reason for having a report that hits out at the Bahraini government and its leaders without being objective in reporting about the sporting event. According to some statements by Bahraini officials that were published in the local Arabic newspapers, some international reporters were not issued visas to enter the country during the Formula One race mainly because they were not sports reporters in the first place. The next section, on quotation analysis, reveals further evidence of bias in the AP report compared to the other two news agencies in their reporting of the Formula One event.

6.4.2.3. Quotation analysis:

232 This section aims at revealing whether the AP report used quotations to create a more biased stance in its reporting of the Formula One event and whether the other two agencies’ reporting was more balanced, or whether there are examples of bias in their use of quotations as well.

First of all, it is essential to identify the percentage of quotations in comparison to the total words in each of the three news reports. The following table summarises this information:

AP Reuters AFP

Total word count 999 861 471

Total quotations 351 (35%) 237 (27.5%) 165 (35%)

Table 6-2: Quotation percentage in each news report

According to the table, quotations were not the major part of the reporting in any of the three news agencies’ reports, as the percentage of quotations in each of the three articles was less than 50 per cent, which means that the three reports used more statements than quotations. Statements might reflect, in some cases, the opinions of the text producers rather than information from official sources, although even quotations can sometimes voice the text producers’ points of view, such as through indirect quotes or through using direct quotes from unnamed sources. To better understand how quotations were used in each of the reports, it is important to identify the percentage of each type of quotations used in them. The following table illustrates the quotations types used in each news report:

233 AP Reuters AFP Total quoted words 351 237 165

Direct quoting 158 (45%) 156 (66%) 25 (16%)

Indirect quoting 77 (22%) 23 (10%) 76 (46%)

Partial quoting 116 (33%) 58 (24%) 63 (38%)

Table 6-3: Types of quoting used in each news report

Both the AP and Reuters relied more on direct quotes than the other quoting types, whereas the AFP relied more on indirect and partial quotes. The AFP’s article had four quotes, with two of those being partial quotes, one indirect and the other direct.

The indirect quote was the longest one in regards to the number of words. The AFP appeared somewhat balanced in its quoting as the two partial quotes were from people involved in the race and were speaking about the situation in Bahrain, with one stating that safety was “not a concern” in line 7 and the other quoted person stating that “he still felt safe”. The other two quotes were from opposition figures with the indirect quote denouncing the security forces’ use of “tear gas and sound bombs to disperse dozens who protested in Manama” in lines 20 – 23. The AFP also quoted in lines 28 –

30 a Bahraini rights activist directly, as he was describing the importance “to take advantage of the presence of (international) press” by the opposition to focus on their demands.

On the other hand, Reuters quotes were all from people involved in the racing event and all of them described the situation in Bahrain as safe. For example, the world champion Sebastian Vettel was quoted indirectly in line 23 as saying that “much of what was being reported was hype”. Another direct quote from the FIA President,

Jean Todt, questioned “all that has been reported” and whether it “corresponds to the reality of what is happening in this country” in line 61 – 62. This indicates that the

234 Reuters article focused primarily on covering the racing event and what the people involved in the race thought about the situation in Bahrain, rather than reporting the events in Bahrain from a political viewpoint and providing the views of the opposition.

The quotations used in the AP report were different, however, from those used in the other two reports. Most of the quotes used were voicing the opposition’s point of view and denouncing the government. For example, the report quoted some of the slogans chanted by the protestors to make the readers aware of the demands of the opposition.

Protestors chanted that they “demand democracy” and wanted the King to step down

(they were quoted directly in line 21). The report also quotes international groups to show its readers that the Bahraini government’s actions are criticised worldwide. For example, it quoted a US human rights group directly in lines 40 – 42 stating that the group investigated “the Kingdom last year”, but “the Government’s excessive use of force” has increased. The article also quotes a US government spokeswoman who stated the US government’s concern about “the increase in violence in Bahrain”. It is clear that the report tried to show its readers that the situation in Bahrain is critical and that the race should not have been held that year, in line with the demands of the opposition groups. It can even be said that the text producers appeared to be acting as a mouthpiece for the opposition to voice their views about the situation in Bahrain, views that do not reflect a balanced view of the actual situation in the country as reported by the other two news agencies.

Even when the report tried to be balanced, and quoted the Crown Prince in a direct way, stating the importance of the race in lines 65 – 67 and in lines 79 – 80, the report

235 included indirect quotes from the opposition group, Al Wefaq, in between the Crown

Prince’s two quotes. So when the Crown Prince stated that the race was an attempt “to navigate a way out of this political problem” in line 66, the report quoted Al Wefaq as stating that “at least 50 people have been injured in the past two days”. This strategy used by the text producers appears to be aimed at showing that if the government wanted to solve the situation, it should not have used violence and injured the protestors. However, the most striking quote used in the AP report was at the end of the article, quoting the Iraqi hard-line Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr denouncing the

Bahraini government and the race, while providing support to the Bahrain protestors.

This quote appears to support the view that while the opposition groups in Bahrain and all their actions are labelled as part of the Arab Spring, they are in fact supported by Shia hard-liners in Iraq and also in Iran. This supports claims that the protestors’ main goal is to overthrow the Al Khalifa family and establish an Islamic republic that is connected closely to the Shia in Iran and Iraq.

The quotation analysis supports earlier findings in the word frequency and naming analysis that the AP’s report was biased towards commenting on the political situation in Bahrain and presents the protestors there in a sympathetic light. Its reporting was more focused on supporting the opposition than on reporting on the Formula One race.

6.5. Concluding remarks:

The February 2011 events in Bahrain were widely regarded as part of the other uprisings of the Arab Spring that brought down the regimes of a number of long- ruling Arab leaders. However, with almost two years passing since the start of those

236 events in Bahrain, the protestors have shown that their actions were heavily backed by

Iran, which has always had ambitions to take control in Bahrain. For Bahrainis, the actions of the Shia were clear from the beginning, since the situation in Bahrain was different from that in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, as the Bahraini Al Khalifa family are not similar to the Syrian rulers. A look at the numbers of killed civilians in all these countries can reveal that the situation in Bahrain was completely different. However, the Western media were seemingly entranced by the events of the Arab Spring, and so were not able to discern the complexity of the situation in Bahrain, and this resulted in reports that were somewhat biased towards the opposition.

This chapter has provided a brief overview of the situation in Bahrain before the 2011 events and highlighted the main events that occurred between February and March of that year. With such a background on the Bahraini Shia and a detailed look at the protestors’ actions during those two months, the chapter suggested that Bahraini Shia who claimed that they demanded more democracy, in fact aimed to establish a connection to Iran. The chapter also showed the failure on the part of the AP news agency to provide objective reporting of the Formula One race that was held in

Bahrain in April 2012. The AP’s report was explicitly biased towards the protestors, and so acted as a mouthpiece for the opposition in Bahrain, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

By looking at how the international news agencies provided an internationalised or globalised perspective of the events in Bahrain, the chapter showed that the international news agencies failed to accurately understand or portray the emic perspectives of Bahrainis. This yielded oversimplified and often biased reporting of

237 the events for an “outside” global audience in particular ways. It is also important to point out that the framework proposed at the end of Chapter 5 for the localisation of news can be productively extended from an account of localisation processes to an account of globalisation processes. However, such an extension lies outside the scope of this thesis, mainly due to the difficulty in accessing the views of “insiders” editors or journalists from the international news agencies.

238 Chapter 7 Conclusions

This thesis was carried out to delve into the nature of news production in English newspapers in the Middle East, with a main aim to investigate the process of localising news reports. Since English newspapers in the Middle East have not been the subject of much research to date in linguistics and discourse analysis, this current study aimed to provide insights of mainly the linguistic production of news in the

English newspapers in the Middle East, as well as the broader social and political environment in which these newspapers operate. The thesis mainly set out to answer two vital questions regarding the localisation of news reports: how the localisation process is carried out, and why it is done in the first place. These two questions opened the door to investigate the related process of the globalisation of local events.

In this way, the thesis aimed to answer a third question concerned with how the localisation process contrasts with the globalisation process.

7.1. Summary of the thesis:

Chapters 2 and 3 were aimed at locating the current study within the field of media discourse analysis. Chapter 2 was concerned with identifying the scene where English newspapers operate in the Middle East as it provided a detailed overview of the rules and regulations governing media in all the Middle Eastern countries in general and in

Bahrain specifically. Chapter 3 reviewed available literature on the analysis of media discourse in order to provide theoretical background for the analytical framework adopted by the study in its analysis of the news reports.

239 The multidisciplinary analytical framework developed for the analysis of the various news reports selected in this thesis was then explained in detail in Chapter 4 and

Chapter 5 provided the results of the analysis. The results were mainly divided into two parts: the first explained the results of the analysis of the news reports based on the various analytical components of the analytical framework. This part helped in clearly exposing the various hidden ideologies underpinning each news report produced by the three news agencies and the GDN. The second part of the results was devoted to identifying the strategies utilised by the Middle Eastern English newspaper in producing its localised versions of the news reports under analysis. This part was the answer to the first question the thesis aimed to find out. The results showed that the newspaper made use of various strategies in order to produce its localised versions, with some changes being made at the text-as-a-whole level, others at the sentence level, and some at the word level. The third part of the chapter could be seen as the contribution this thesis made to previous studies that were concerned with analysing media discourse, as it provided insights into the process of text production and reception. Using interviews with news reporters and editors from the Middle East as well as interviews with English newspapers readers, the chapter developed a framework that lists the various possible reasons that lead English newspapers in the

Middle East to produce localised versions of the news reports obtained from the international news agencies.

Chapter 5 presented an attempt to keep pace with the various unpredictable events of the Arab Spring that swept across most of the Middle Eastern countries at the time of writing the thesis, as well as the dialectically-related process of “internationalisation” of local reports that inevitably arises vis-à-vis the localisation of international reports,

240 that was the main focus of this thesis. The chapter was not concerned with how international news reports are localised, but instead was focused on how international news agencies reported local events in the Middle East and how their reporting was often out of sync with the actual events, as they did not reflect the complexity of local or emic perspectives on those same events. The case of the events in Bahrain was used as an example to indicate that such a claim may have merit, with parts of the analytical framework being used to analyse a number of news reports to support these claims. Despite the fact that most of the international news agencies claim that their aim is always to provide reports that reflect the facts and are objective, the analysis showed their failure to do so in regards to reporting parts of the events in Bahrain.

7.2. Research questions revisited:

Chapter 3 stated that this thesis aims to answer three questions. It is of great importance to go through the questions here and find out how they have been addressed.

• How do English newspapers in the Middle East produce localised versions of

the news reports they receive from the major international news agencies?

As it has been stated in the above summary of the thesis, the analytical framework used in the thesis was developed to provide answers to this question. The analysis of the data revealed that the GDN, the Bahraini English newspaper, used a number of strategies to localise the international news agencies’ reports. These strategies include shifting emphasis of the reporting to a relevant local event, adding local voice to the article, foregrounding and backgrounding, omission, topicalisation, providing

241 different quotation content, additions, using different quoting verbs, and connotation.

These strategies were discussed in detail in section 5.5 in Chapter 5.

• Why do these newspapers produce these localised versions instead of using

them as is?

Supplementing the data analysis with ethnographic interviews with news producers as well as readers contributed in finding answers to this question. It has been found that newspapers produce localised versions to overcome certain western ideologies that contradict with the local ideologies. The localisation process also occurs due to business aims, editorial lines, societal discourses, government policy lines and local common knowledge. These reasons were discussed in section 5.6 in Chapter 5.

• How do these localisation processes contrast with the “internationalisation” of

events in the Middle East for “western” audiences?

By using some aspects of the analytical framework, the thesis extended its focus on the localisation process to investigate how international news agencies report local

Middle Eastern events for their readers. This analysis, found in Chapter 6, focused on the reporting of a controversial event in Bahrain in 2012, the Formula One Grand Prix race. The results revealed that most of the international news agencies reports on the event failed to provide a balanced reporting and therefore were biased in their news reports.

242 7.3. Limitations of study and suggestions for future research:

The results of this thesis could be extended to apply to other English newspapers in the Middle East and future research could benefit from the analytical framework established in this study. This would help to analyse the localisation process of news reports in English newspapers in other countries in the Middle East, mainly because this thesis investigated one English newspaper in the Middle East in one country only.

The current state of the media in the Middle East, especially following the Arab

Spring events, deserves further research as the landscape of media, as well as the political environment, has become complex, and the relationship between politics and media is more complicated than ever before, as a change in one affects the other.

In addition, although this thesis provided insights into the production and reception of

English news in the Middle East, its ethnographic contribution towards understanding the way news is received by readers in this part of the world was limited to only three interviews with three readers. Future studies would benefit from focusing more on the reception aspect and how readers accept or reject the various ideologies presented to them by the newspapers.

Another suggestion for future research was presented in Chapter 6, which is to focus on how international news agencies report events that happen in the Middle East and to what extent their reporting reflects the actual events. The thesis looked into the eticisation process by focusing on only one topic that was covered by three news agencies and future studies can extend the scope of the investigation by looking into more topics.

243 This thesis has focused on the interplay of localisation and globalisation in the print media and examined how local English newspapers in the Middle East attempt to localise international or global perspectives, and contrasted this with how the international news agencies globalise the local or emic perspectives of those experiencing events to their international readers. This interplay between globalisation and localisation is arguably essential to better understand how media institutions operate and produce news in an increasingly interconnected world.

244

Appendix 1: Preliminary study: a case study of the Pope’s 2006 controversy

245 o Introduction

In September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI included in his address at the University of

Regensburg, Bavaria certain statements that inflamed the Muslim World, bringing with it reactions ranging from responses of outrage to death threats. Quoting

Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, and referring to the concept of jihad or holy war, the Pontiff issued a challenge: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” (Pope, 12 September 2006). The Pope later indicated the remarks were taken out of context and that he was merely quoting statements made by the medieval emperor, for which he later apologised: “These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” (Pope, 17 September 2006). This controversy had been widely reported all over the world. Making use of such rich data, this study examines how the

Gulf Today newspaper produced different versions of the news reports issued by international news agencies to make them more localised and suitable for the Middle

Eastern readers. The study, in the first part, will examine how ideologies were produced in the news reports of three of the top news agencies in the world (Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France Presse). Two news reports were selected from each agency, one reporting the reactions to the Pope’s speech and the second reporting the Pope’s apology. In the second part of the study, the major strategies used by Gulf Today to localise these news reports will be highlighted.

The sample of six news reports used in this study was analysed using the description stage of CDA, adopted from Paltridge (2006) and Fairclough (1989). The analysis was based on the following features:

246 o Framing: how the content of the text is presented and the sort of angle or

perspective the writer is taking. This also includes foregrounding (what

concepts and issues are emphasised) and backgrounding (what concepts or

issues are played down). According to Fairclough: ‘Ordering in newspaper

articles is based upon importance or newsworthiness, with the headline and

first paragraph in particular giving what are regarded as the most important

parts, and the gist, of the story,’ (Fairclough, 1989: 137).

o Connotations and implicit meaning: it is the meaning that is conveyed but not

explicitly stated.

o Presupposition: it is ‘the information that is accommodated by the addressee

as part of the non-controversial background necessary for utterance to be a

sensible or an appropriate thing to say,’ (Grundy, 2008: 48).

o Analysis of news agencies’ news reports

§ Reuter’s news reports

Reaction to the Pope’s speech: The news report here starts off showing Muslims engaged in violent actions and protests throughout the Muslim world: “Indians set fire to an effigy of the Pope as a wave of protests ripples through the Muslim world,”

(Reuters). This idea is then followed in line 3 by identifying the cause of such violence and protests, which is brought at the topic of the sentence “words written more than 600 years ago,” in an attempt to show the readers that old words still cause problems in the Muslim world. This implies that Muslims’ violence and protests are unjustified.

247 Throughout the report, a comparison is made between the Pope’s actions and the

Muslim world. The Pope is being described with words that have positive connotation, such as describing him, in line 5, as a “caring” person to point out that he was quoting someone else. Whereas the Muslim world’s actions are associated with words that have negative connotations, such as “wave of protests” in line 1, “offense” in line 3 and “attacked” in line 10. These words have violent connotations. Readers can come to the conclusion that the Muslim world’s reactions are violent while the

Pope is someone who is caring and peaceful.

The report also quotes the then Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in lines 7 and

8, who in the report represents the Muslim world, demanding an apology from the

Pope because of his “ugly” statements. Placing the quotation right after the sentence in which it stated that the Pope was quoting someone else (line 5) implies that the

Muslim world is asking the Pope to apologise for words he did not say and that

Muslims are unreasonable.

The text reported the reaction of the Muslim world towards the Pope’s statements; it reported the actions of Indian Muslims, protesters in Jamu and Kashmir, but the last paragraph highlights the attacks on the church in Basra in Iraq. By stating that “The church in Basra is Christian Orthodox and not aligned with views of the Pope,” it reinforces the notion that the Muslim’s are violent people and the attacks are unreasonable, a view that was stressed throughout the text by the choices of the words describing the Muslims. The reader is left to question the Muslims’ behaviors and would end up with a negative attitude toward Islam and Muslims.

248 The Pope’s apology: The text starts off reporting that the Pope is issuing an apology under extra security at his summer residence. Stating that “this time in person” presupposes that there was an apology before this time. While it shows the Muslims, in spite of an apology, continued their violent actions.

Analysing the Pope’s apology which is quoted in the news report in lines 4 to 6, it can be regarded as a “non-apology” (Kampf, 2009). The Pope’s non-apology uses a number of methods and strategies in which he managed to comprise responsibility and guilt in his apology utterance.

The first obvious method the Pope used in his apology is that he apologised for the outcome and not for the act in saying: “I am deeply sorry for the reaction…” This is a non-apology because the Pope escaped full responsibility for his action that led to the

Muslims’ reaction. This strategy used by the Pope for apologising for the Muslims’ feelings and not for his statements puts the blame on the Muslims’ over- sensitiveness

(Kampf, 2009). Instead of directly apologising for the statements and the quotations he used in his speech, the Pope apologised for the Muslim world’s reactions. By doing so, the Pope perhaps implies that what happened was not caused by his statements, but by the Muslim’s “over-sensitivity”.

A second tactic or method the Pope used in his apology is omitting or blurring the agent by saying: “I am deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages…” Instead of apologising for saying those passages, the Pope attempted to personify the passages and attributed the responsibility for the reactions solely to them and thus avoided personal responsibility.

249

The Pope also denied his responsibility for the reactions by saying: “… which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.” The Pope here is apologising, but stressing that he was not aware that these passages would be considered offensive and therefore leaves the responsibility upon the Muslims who could not understand that the passages were merely quotations from 600 years ago.

The report then goes on to show how the Christian citizens’ felt toward the issue

(lines 7 to 10). They think that the issue was caused by the Muslim’s over-sensitivity and that they are over-reacting. This idea supports the Pope’s action of only apologising for the reaction of the Muslim world. This also presupposes that the

Pope’s apology is sufficient and more than enough for the situation.

This presupposition is then compared to the Muslims reaction toward the Pope’s apology – which is seen to Christians as sufficient. However, a representative of the

Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and in this report serves to represent the point of view of the Muslim World, sees that the apology is not complete “not a clear apology” and his words imply that the Pope should undertake more actions in order to satisfy the

Muslims: “this is a good step towards an apology,” so Muslims do not think and do not regard the Pope’s “apology” as an apology.

The last paragraph leaves the readers wondering about Islam and Muslims by stating that in spite of the apology made by the Pope himself, Muslims are not happy and continue their violent attacks. Readers would be wondering about how violent, unreasonable and difficult to deal with Muslims are.

250

§ The Associated Press news reports

Reaction to the Pope’s speech: The report starts with drawing a picture of the

Muslim world with the use of the word “unmoved” (line 2) which implies that the

Muslims are difficult to deal with especially that the Vatican is explaining the situation to them. This picture of the Muslim world is given more negative connotations and implicatures throughout the report. For example, in line 5, the

Muslims reactions were described as “torrent of rage” which has a negative connotation of violence and being uncontrolled. Other such words with negative connotations found in the text are “outpouring of Islamic anger” in line 31, and

“angrily protested” in line 42.

The report quotes the Malaysian Prime Minister stating that the Pope “has not shown leadership in promoting good relations between religions,” and that the Pope’s statements would hinder the good relations between Islam and Christianity (lines 22 to 29). The report, in lines 31 to 33, leaves the readers to question these “good relations” by pointing out to a recent incident where the Muslim world was engaged in violent actions against the western world. The way that this incident is described is interesting. It describes the Muslim world’s violence as “outpouring” (line 31) which implies that it is uncontrolled. It also states that it is “the last” which presupposes that there had been a series of violent incidents between the Muslims and the west before this one. The report also compares Muslims and Christians. Christians are presented as wise people in the quotations of the Roman Catholic priest in Nablus “the wise should not accept such acts,” and therefore it is implied that Muslims are not wise.

251 Using the adverb “notably” to start a paragraph (line 52), the report implies that what is included in the paragraph is not expected. The paragraph discusses the reactions in

Turkey to the Pope’s statements and therefore presupposes that these reactions are exaggerated and should not have happened and this is explained by the fact that

Turkey is “a moderate democracy seeking European Union membership.”

When the report lists the Pope’s speech that caused the Muslim world’s anger (lines

91 to 98), it commented on it by stating that the “Pope did not explicitly agree with nor repudiate the comment.” This implies that the Pope took a position of neutrality.

This idea is further built on in the last paragraphs of the report as it shows the western world’s reactions to the Pope’s speech. The Muslim world’s negative picture is reinforced in the last paragraphs as well. “Violence in the name of faith is never acceptable in any religion” while framed as a universal statement of truth, it is directed through its placement here at the Muslim world. The Muslim world’s violent response is thus contrasted with the Pope’s urge to dialogue and peaceful methods.

The Pope’s apology: The report begins with stating that the Pope has made a personal apology, but it does not quote the actual apology statement. It comments that this apology is an “unusual expression of papal regret” (line 2). It implies that the

Pope admitting fault on his part (even indirectly) is a very marked act (presupposing readers know what is made explicit later about apologies from previous popes) and so should be accepted gracefully. It also alludes to the Pope’s own face / honour as head of the Catholic Church. The report implicitly supports the Pope, first by not including his actual apology quotation, and then by showing that the Pope “regretted causing offense” by quoting a Medieval text that did not reflect his own opinions (line 6). The

252 presupposition here is that the Pope is a sincere and respectful man who respects the

Muslim world’s feelings as he apologised for something that does not reflect his opinions. Instead of quoting the part in which the Pope apologised, the report quotes another part of his speech in which the Pope is presented as a caring person who respects dialogue between religions (lines 13 to 16).

The report also reinforced the point that the Pope should not have made the personal apology and it also presents the Pope as a great leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

This is done by stating that the apology made by the Pope is an “unusual step for a leader of the Roman Catholic Church” (line 17). The report also reinforces that the apology made is more than sufficient by comparing Pope Benedict’s apology with his predecessor’s apologies which are described as apologies that “dealt with abuses and other missteps by the church in the past rather than errors on his own part”. This strategy has been found to be used by politicians in which they apologise for events which happened many years if not centuries before they came in power so that they avoid any direct responsibility (Harris, Grainger and Mullany, 2006).

A comparison is also established throughout the report between the Pope, who is shown as a sincere and caring person, and the Muslim world that are described with violence and anger. It reports the attacks on churches in the West Bank (line 29) and the shooting of an Italian nun in Somalia (line 32). The shooting of the nun came following a Somali cleric condemning the Pope’s speech. The report positions

Christians as people who take matters in a more civilised way “Let’s hope that it will be an isolated fact”, while the Muslim world is full of “hate” and poses “grave danger” to the church (lines 38 to 40). The negative attitude of the report towards the

253 Muslim world is then shown explicitly as they are described as “terrorist” in line 42 by stating that the security measure were brought to the highest levels to stop any

“Muslims / terrorists” attempts to attack churches: “Police across Italy were ordered to step up security out of concern that the anger could cause Roman Catholic sites to become terrorist targets”. Whereas the Christians are described as “faithful” in line

44, a word that has a connotation of peace.

§ Agence France Presse

Reaction to the Pope’s speech: The report starts off with the most important news and information. It is about the Muslim leaders asking the Pope for an apology. The presupposition here is that the Pope had done something wrong or offended the

Muslims and therefore an apology is requested from him. There is no mention at the beginning why the apology is requested so the presupposition here is that everyone already knows why an apology is required. What really matters for the readers to know is that the Pope is an offender who needs to apologise for his wrong doing.

The Pope is then presented in lines 10 to 13 in the words of a Turkish official as a bad person. Words like “enmity”, “grudge”, “hatred”, “prejudiced” and “biased” all have negative connotations that draw a bad image of the Pope. The Pope is represented as an unjust hating person towards Islam and Muslims.

The report introduces the reason for the Muslim world’s call for an apology from the

Pope in line 14 and follows that by stating that the Vatican is defending the Pope’s statements without mentioning that they are apologising on his behalf. This implies that the Vatican belong to the same “bad” group that the Pope belongs to.

254 In lines 36 to 57, the report goes on adding onto the Pope’s bad image by quoting two high-ranking Islamist officials from Kuwait representing the different sects of Islam and therefore implying that Muslims, no matter how different they are, are united and offended by the Pope’s statements. The Pope, who is presented as an unjust person in the two officials’ statements, is also compared to Islam, which preaches “peace, tolerance, justice and equality” (lines 28-29).

In lines 59 to 80, a Pakistani Islamist compares the Pope with his predecessor which presupposes that the Pope’s predecessor was a better person than him. “We expect the

Pope to play a positive role” presupposes that the Pope’s current role is not enough or he is not playing any role are all. Another official links the Pope to George Bush, who represents to the Muslim world a bad example of a leader and therefore the Pope’s

“bad” image reaches its climax point. The last quotation presupposes that Muslims and Christians have good relations and are united in a war against Israel, but the Pope with his statements attempts to break this unity.

The Pope’s apology: The report begins with stating that the Pope has said that he was

“deeply sorry” and he expressed that the remarks does not reflect his opinion. The report does not mention that the Pope has apologised, but rather quotes the words

“deeply sorry” and explains that the motive for this was to “mollify” – a word that has in its connotations that the Muslim world’s demands for a personal apology are not mature or reasonable. This presupposes that the report has some limitations towards the Pope’s “presupposed apology” and it does not consider it as a real apology. So at the beginning of the report, the reader’s minds are triggered to the fact that although the Pope said that he was “deeply sorry”, this apology is not complete and lacks the

255 constituents of a real apology. This idea is further reinforced later, in line 18, by describing it as “expression of regret” because “regret carries no acceptance of responsibility or accountability,” (Harris et al. 2006: 730). This implies that the

Pope’s apology is insufficient and incomplete. This implication is then made explicit by showing the group of the Muslim world who rejected the Pope’s apology describing it as “falling short of the full personal apology” and “inadequate” (line

21). It also quotes an official of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt describing the

Pope’s apology as “a good step towards an apology” (line 51).

The text also reports some violent attacks carried out by some Muslim groups in lines

67 to 74, which are presented as non-official actions and therefore implies that they are unjustified and open to question. The reports position towards these unjustified violent actions is made explicit by stating “though it was not clear if the threats took the Pope’s most recent public expression of regret into account” and it then compares these non-official actions with the official reactions by reporting the head of the

Palestinian government calls to his people to exercise restraint and the radical Islamic

Jihad guarding a church against attacks (line 88).

o Localisation of the news agencies’ news reports

The first point that needs to be highlighted regarding the news reports produced by the UAE English newspapers Gulf Today and Gulf New is that the newspaper’s staff reporters do not produce them, but they are referenced from ‘agencies’. Therefore, these news reports are put together from a number of news texts produced by the various international news agencies. In doing so, the newspaper did not just simply copied and pasted the ready-to-use news agencies’ texts, but certain changes were

256 employed in the production of these news reports. The following analysis will examine some of the strategies used by the newspapers in their attempt to ‘localise’ the news agencies’ texts and make them suitable for readers in the UAE and the

Middle East. Some of these strategies are based on Huckin’s CDA analysis of news reports (1997). Throughout the analysis, a link will be made between the parts that are localised and the original correspondent parts from the news agencies’ reports and an explanation of the changes, if available, will be made.

§ Gulf Today news reports

Reaction to the Pope’s speech: The report begins by stating that the Pope regrets how the Muslim world reacted to his speech. Using the verb ‘voiced’ in line 1 implies that this feeling of regret is not expressed directly by the Pope himself, but rather indirectly through his representatives. This implied meaning that the report tries to reach by its use of the verb ‘voiced’ is made explicit in paragraph 3 (lines 7 – 9), and will be explained later. The report, in line 2, also comments on the Pope’s voicing his regret, stating that he did not regret his comments that caused the Muslim anger and he did not retract his remarks. After making this point clear, the report, in line 3, shows the Pope ‘arguing’ that his comments were misinterpreted by Muslims and that is the real cause of their anger. In other words, the report in the first paragraph sort of distance itself from believing the sincerity of the Pope’s apology, first because it was not made directly by himself – although this point was not made explicitly in this paragraph, and because he did not retract his comments, but puts the blame on

Muslims themselves for misinterpreting the comments.

257 To support its viewpoint, the report in the second paragraph (lines 4 – 6) shows how the Muslim world reacted to the Pope’s remarks. It reports violent attacks on churches in the West Bank and Gaza. This sentence is an example of a strategy used by editors in localising the news report, which is ‘summarisation’. The information that churches were violently attacked in the West Bank and Gaza was presented in detail in the AP report, but Gulf Today editors simply decided not to provide too much detail about such attacks and only stated that there were attacks. The report then states that

Morocco recalled its ambassador to the Vatican. Although the report here shows that

Muslims reacted violently, it goes on to draw a parallel with the Pope, describing his remarks in line 6 as ‘offensive’ and therefore justifies the Muslim world’s violent reactions. It is of great importance here to mention that the Gulf Today editors are not adding the negative adjectives attributed to the Pope themselves to ensure that they maintain objective reporting. The word ‘offensive’ in line 6 of the news report is used between quotation marks to indicate that this is a quotation and does not represent the newspaper’s point of view. The sentence in which this word is used is about Morocco recalling its ambassador to the Vatican and the report explains that this move was due to the Pope’s remarks, which the Moroccan authorities described as offensive in their press releases.

The next paragraph reiterates and explicitly reveals what had been implicitly foregrounded in the first paragraph, which is that the Pope regretting his remarks was not made directly by the Pope himself. Lines 7 – 9 quote the Vatican Secretary of

State apologising on behalf of the Pope.

258 The quotation continues in lines 10 – 12 and here the Pope’s representative calls on all Muslims to understand the correct meaning of the Pope’s remarks and put an end to their violent and angry reactions because the Pope respects Islam and Muslims.

Lines 13 – 15 provide information about the actual Pope speech that caused the

Muslim world’s angry reaction. The report adds honorific ‘PBUH’, which is the abbreviation for ‘Peace Be Upon Him’, after the mention of the Prophet Mohammed.

This honorific is not used in the original news agencies’ reports, but added in the Gulf

Today news report to make it more localised as some Muslims believe the use of this honorific after the mention of the Prophet is obligatory.

The report then shows in lines 16 – 17 that all Muslim leaders condemn the Pope’s remarks. This information was the opening paragraph of the AP news report, but in the Gulf Today report it has been moved to the middle of the news report. This is an example of the foregrounding/backgrounding strategy identified by Huckin. He states that newspaper reports normally have an inverted pyramid structure with information presented in descending order of importance and what the reporter chooses to put first, will be interpreted by most readers as most important. In the Gulf Today news report, the editor found that the information of Muslim leaders condemning the

Pope’s remarks is not the most important information for the reader, and therefore backgrounded this information, which was foregrounded in the original news report issued by the AP.

More reactions to the Pope’s remark are reported in lines 21 – 25 as the report quotes the head of Cairo’s Al Azhar university, who is one of Islam’s top authorities describing the Pope as having ‘clear ignorance of Islam’. The Pope has also become

259 the target of Muslim groups, as a hardline cleric of Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement called to kill the Pope, while an Iraqi group threatened to attack Rome and the Vatican. Line 26 also reports that Taliban linking the Pope’s remarks with the west and stating that they are in war against Islam.

The report then shows that the Pope’s indirect apology and feelings of regret were not welcomed by Muslims, as it shows how the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood reacted to it. They believe that this feeling of regret is incomplete and an apology is still sought by Muslims. The report quotes on of the group’s officials stating that the Pope made a mistake by his remarks and he should admit the mistake and apologise.

The Pope’s apology: The report starts by stating that the Muslim leaders have mixed reactions to the Pope’s apology, but in line 3 it shows that many of the leaders believe this apology was not clear and they demand a clear one. This information was also presented in the first paragraph of the AP news report, but Gulf Today news report did some editing to it and made use of the foregrounding/backgrounding strategy at the sentence level. The AP started its sentence with ‘Pope Benedict XVI said …’ and then presented ‘Some Muslim leaders accepted … others said it wasn’t enough…’ but Gulf

Today rearranged the information in its opening sentence and foregrounded the

Muslim leaders while backgrounding the Pope’s apology.

Line 4 provides an example of an aspect covered by SFG, namely, using an agentless passive. Gulf Today here reports the killing of an Italian nun in Somalia: ‘An Italian nun was shot dead in Mogadishu …’. When compared to the original sentence from the AP news report, it can be seen that the AP text uses an active sentence (AP: the

260 Pope’s apology, line 70): ‘Gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun …’, although the subject of the AP sentence is not identified, gunmen is not specific and does not refer to a particular entity. The Gulf Today, however, preferred to use an agentless passive structure. Both sentences indicate that an Italian nun was killed by a group of angry Muslims, but the use of the active sentence by the AP news report seems to add more responsibility to the ‘actor’ or the person who carried out the action of shooting and killing. Although the report here in lines 4 – 6 show some of the violent reactions of Muslims to the Pope’s remarks, Gulf Today prefers to use an agentless passive structure to focus on the action being carried out rather than the people who did it. In this way, it reduces reduce the focus on who is responsible for this action.

This violent image of Muslims is immediately followed by how the Egyptian

Muslims Brotherhood group welcomed the Pope’s apology as they stated that the relationship between Muslims and Christians should remain ‘good, civilised and cooperative’ (lines 7 – 9). This information was sourced from the AP news report, but

Gulf Today omitted a comment provided by the AP about the Egyptian Muslim

Brotherhood group ‘a banned group but still the largest Islamic movement in that country’.

The report then ends the report by providing background information about the

Muslim’s reaction to the Pope’s remarks, reporting the attacks on churches in

Palestine (lines 24 – 28). Gulf Today’s reporting again makes use of an agentless passive structure, as in line 25 it mentions that ‘two churches were set afire’ and in line 27 ‘a 170-year-old stone church … was torched before dawn’. The report here does not attribute responsibility for the attacks on these churches to any person or

261 group. However, the AP news report, as mentioned in the previous example about the

Italian nun, uses an active sentence structure when reporting this incident (AP: the

Pope’s apology, lines 83-85): ‘… unknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails and a burning tire at two catholic churches in the northern West Bank’, which once again highlights someone being responsible for these attacks.

§ Gulf News news reports

Reaction to the Pope’s speech: The report starts with an introduction in which it summarises its content: Turkey and Kuwait calling on the Pope to apologise for his remarks on Islam.

The reader is then presented with the Pope’s remarks in lines 3 – 9. The report shows how these remarks are against Islam and the Prophet. It is also noticed here, just like it was mentioned earlier with the Gulf Today news report that the honorific (PBUH) after mentioning the Prophet is added by the newspaper to make the report become more localised and sound more familiar to its readers.

The report then quotes a Turkish official who comments on the Pope’s remarks, stating that the remarks are ‘worrying’ (line 10) and could have negative results on the peace of humanity around the world.

Following these comments from the Turkish official, the report reveals that the Pope is scheduled to visit Turkey (lines 16 – 19), but according to the Turkish official, his visit is not welcome following his remarks. Structuring the information in such a way, the newspaper seems to support the views of the Turkish official and leaves the reader

262 to question the usefulness of such a visit. The Turkish official then questions how the

Pope attacks Islam and accuses it of being violent, while neglecting the violence of the Roman Catholic Crusaders of the middle ages in the name of faith (lines 20 – 27).

This shows that the Pope contradicts himself and his remarks are not justified.

The report then turns to the reaction in Kuwait (lines 28 – 39) where an Islamic

Nation official calls on the Pope to apologise immediately. The report also quotes the official linking the Pope’s comments to the Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and

Lebanon. This serves to reiterate the comments made by the Turkish official that it is the west that are violent and not Islam, as the Prophet and Islam ‘preaches peace, tolerance, justice and equality’ (line 38). Gulf News copied this part of the report from the report by AFP with no editing at all, except for changing one word and adding the honorific (PBUH) after the Prophet. The word ‘denounced’ in the AFP ‘Al-Mutairi denounced the Pope’s …’ was changed by the use of the word ‘hit out at’ in Gulf

News ‘Al Mutairi hit out at the Pope’s …’. There is no change in meaning in this minor change carried out by the newspaper, as it seems that this part of the AFP was written in a way that matches the criteria set by the newspaper for publishing news reports.

The Pope’s apology: The report starts by stating that the Pope has made an apology in person and this apology is an attempt to calm down the Muslim anger at his remarks, which he also stated were not his personal views (lines 1 – 3). This first paragraph was also the first paragraph of the AFP news report and the newspaper did very minor changes to it. Gulf News changed AFP’s ‘sought to mollify’ by ‘tried on

Sunday to calm’. This change has no change in meaning, but changing AFP’s ‘for the

263 outrage sparked by his recent remarks on Islam and stressing they did not reflect his personal opinion’ by ‘about the reaction and that the medieval quotes he used on holy war did not reflect his personal views’ removed the word ‘outrage’ which might have a negative image and replaced it with ‘reaction’. Gulf News’ sentence does not have that image that the AFP is drawing about the Muslim reaction as having anger or negativity. Gulf News also changes ‘his recent remarks’ and adds more information for its readers by saying ‘the medieval quotes he used on holy war’. This addition of information seems to be due to the fact that it is the first paragraph and the newspaper is trying to provide the reader with as much background information as possible about the Pope’s remarks.

Then the report comments that the Pope’s apology was not complete as it ‘stopped short of a full apology’ and in line7 it questions whether this incomplete apology would be enough to end the Muslim anger.

Lines 8 – 10 come to answer the question as the report first shows that the apology was regarded as ‘sufficient’ in Egypt, but in Somalia it was rejected as an Italian nun was killed.

The report then draws a picture of the Pope while he was delivering his speech in which he apologised for his remarks. Lines 11 – 19 are copied from the AFP news report as they are the quotations of the Pope’s apology speech. Then the report states that the Pope ‘smiled’, ‘relaxed’ and was ‘smiling’ to his followers who were applauding for him (lines 20 – 23). The report, by using such words which show happiness, tries to show the readers that the Pope seems to be unmoved by the

264 consequences of his previous remarks which caused the Muslims anger and this is one of the reasons he did not issue a complete apology. Using the conjunction ‘but’ to link between ‘Benedict looked relaxed as he greeted…’ (lines 20 – 23) and ‘he faces his worst crisis…’ (lines 24 – 25) is effective in making this idea explicit.

Lines 26 – 27 serve to confirm the seriousness of the crisis the Pope is facing as the report states the Vatican also attempted to apologise to Muslims and clarify the

Pope’s remarks before the Pope himself issued his apology.

The report then shows that while the Muslim world was united in condemning the

Pope’s remarks and reacted angrily as a consequence, there were other people who defended the Pope and explained that his remarks were misunderstood (line 28 – 33).

The report then goes back to the question it raised at the beginning and shows that some Muslims were satisfied by the Pope’s apology. It gives an example of a Turkish official who previously regretted the Pope’s remarks and now thinks the Pope’s apology is good (lines 43 – 47).

Lines 52 – 59 draws a negative picture of the Pope as it states that although he always called for dialogue with Islam, he opposed Turkey joining the European Union. It also states that the Pope is the closest modern-day pope to issue an apology for a personal wrongdoing and compares him with his predecessor who issued public apologies but for some historic issues. This idea of comparing the Pope with his predecessor was mentioned in the AP news report. The AP report reads ‘Benefict’s predecessor, Pope

John Paul II, issued a number of apologies during his papacy, but they dealt with abuses and other missteps by the church in the past rather than errors on his own part’.

265 Gulf News report used this information with some changes and addition. Their sentence adds ‘public’ to describe the apologies and also gives example of the church’s errors ‘the Inquisition and its failings in the Second World War’.

The report brings the reader attention to the huge crisis the Pope caused by stating that the Vatican did an unusual step in that it issued press releases translations in English and French (lines 72 – 74).

o Conclusion:

Using the description stage of CDA to analyse the six news reports proved to be useful in identifying the underlying ideologies of the three news agencies (Reuters,

AP and AFP). The analysis showed that no news report is free from ideologies and none of the news agencies managed to achieve their goals and missions of providing objective news without incorporating their ideologies in a hidden way.

The study also shows that English newspapers in the Middle East use international agencies news reports as sources for their reports and they often carry out some changes to the agencies’ parts that are sourced to produce localised versions of news reports. These changes might include using strategies such as foregrounding and backgrounding; addition and omission, and summarising. The analyses of the news reports of Gulf Today and Gulf News show that some parts of their reports are sourced from the AP and AFP, but there seems to be other sources for their news reports.

Combining the analysis with SFG revealed that the localised version of the news reports of Gulf Today tends to use agentless passive structures to report the violent actions of Muslims, while the original sourced text uses active sentence structures.

266 One major limitation of this preliminary study is that the results cannot be taken as representative of the news agencies’ news reports, as the results are only reflective of the current issue under analysis. The results also do not reflect the strategies used for localising news reports as the analysis was done on only two newspapers. In order to support the claims raised by the results of this study, or refute them, further analysis should be conducted on the news agencies’ news reports dealing with other issues. In addition, more English newspapers from the Middle East should be included in order to come up with more generalised strategies for localising news reports. It would also be useful to identify which news agencies are used more in the localised versions and provide a link between the localised versions news items and the original news agencies’ texts.

As it can be seen from the analysis, the framework used for analysing the news reports helped build an awareness of what news report producers do to the text to implicitly include various ideologies in them, but the question that remains to be answered is why do these producers do such strategies? Is there a specific set of rules for news text producers in specific institutions that they need to follow? To be able to answer such questions, the analysis should therefore include a wider framework and not just rely on the description stage and analysis of textual features, which is what

Fairclough’s framework here does efficiently. Combining this framework with other discourse analytical frameworks, such as SFG, could yield better understanding and might give further answers to these questions. This is what the current study will attempt to do.

267 • Reuters news reports:

a. Reaction to the Pope’s speech:

1 Indians set fire to an effigy of the Pope as a wave of protests ripples through the Muslim world. Words written more than 600 years ago still cause offence when taken out of context. 5 The Pontiff’s care to point out that he was quoting someone else doesn’t seem to have prevented an angry reaction in some quarters. “The statements are ugly and unfortunate. The Pope needs to take a step back, and should apologise to the Islamic world.” Further north police had to restrain protestors in Jammu and Kashmir. 10 Churches in the West Bank and in the Iraqi city of Basra were attacked, although the damage was minor. The church in Basra is Christian Orthodox and not aligned with the views of the Pope. (Reuters, 16 September 2006)

b. The Pope’s apology:

1 Extra security outside the Pope’s summer residence on a very unsummery day. The Pontiff made a further apology, this time in person, to try to quell the anger in the Muslim world over his quote of a medieval philosopher. “I am deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages of my 5 address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims.” Pilgrims outside the Castel Gandolfo residence seemed to think the Islamic reaction was overblown. “The Islamic world sometimes goes beyond the reasonable, also with violence. 10 Problems can be solved by using words, not with violence.” However, in Egypt the reaction from the Muslim Brotherhood was one of guarded forgiveness. “The remarks that came from the Pope today are a retreat from what he said in his lecture on Tuesday in Germany. And this is a good step towards an apology. 15 Despite that it was not a clear apology towards Islam and the Muslim people.” It remains unclear what sort of apology will suffice for some parts of the Muslim community. (Reuters, 17 September 2006)

• Associated Press news reports:

a. Reaction to the Pope’s speech:

1 ISTANBUL (AP) — Leaders across the Muslim world demanded Pope Benedict XVI apologise for his remarks on Islam and jihad, unmoved by the Vatican's assurances that he meant only to emphasise the incompatibility between faith and war. 5 The torrent of rage unleashed by Benedict's comments in a speech in Germany stirred fears of violent anti-Western protests like those that followed the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Two churches in the West Bank were hit by firebombs Saturday, and a group claiming responsibility said it was protesting Benedict's words. Scattered protests 10 elsewhere, however, have been peaceful.

268 Benedict cited an obscure Medieval text that characterises some of the teachings of Islam's founder as "evil and inhuman" — comments some experts took as a signal that the Vatican was staking a more demanding stance for its dealings with the Muslim world. 15 Vatican officials insisted the pope did not intend to be offensive and expressed regret over any hurt caused to Muslims. But Muslim leaders said outreach efforts by papal emissaries were not enough. Turkey's ruling party likened the pope to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades. Malaysia's prime minister said Benedict 20 should apologise, echoing demands by the Pakistani parliament, Lebanon's top Shiite cleric and even Turkey's staunchly pro-secular opposition party. "The pope must not take lightly the spread of outrage that has been created," Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was quoted as saying Saturday by the state-run Bernama news agency. 25 Abdullah, who is chairman of the 56-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, warned Benedict's comments would hinder the fostering of good relations between Islam and Christianity. "It is unfortunate that such an eminent figure like the pope has not shown leadership in promoting good relations between religions," Abdullah was quoted 30 as saying at the summit of the Non-aligned Movement in Havana. The last outpouring of Islamic anger at the West came in February over the prophet cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper. The drawings sparked protests — some of them deadly — in almost every Muslim nation in the world.' In the West Bank, firebombs left black scorch marks on the walls and windows of 35 a Greek Orthodox and an Anglican church in the city of Nablus. In a phone call to The Associated Press, a group calling itself the "Lions of Monotheism" claimed responsibility. Clergy played down the attacks as isolated incidents, but said they'd worry if more Christian sites are targeted. "It is easy to worry," said Father Yousef Saada, 40 a Roman Catholic priest in Nablus. "The atmosphere is charged already, and the wise should not accept such acts." A day earlier, about 2,000 Palestinians angrily protested in Gaza City. Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of the Islamic militant group Hamas, said the pope had offended Muslims everywhere. 45 Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Saturday the pope made "a big mistake" and "contradicted his own leadership of a divine religion." On Friday, Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning Benedict for making what it called "derogatory" comments about Islam, and seeking an 50 apology. Hours later, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry summoned the Vatican's ambassador to express regret over the pope's remarks Tuesday. Notably, the strongest denunciations came from Turkey — a moderate democracy seeking European Union membership where Benedict is scheduled to visit in November as his first trip as pope to a Muslim country. 55 Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party, said Benedict's remarks were either "the result of pitiful ignorance" about Islam and its prophet or, worse, a deliberate distortion. "He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages," Kapusuz told Turkish state media. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality 60 of the Crusades." "He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini," he added. Turkey's pro-secular opposition party demanded the pope apologise before his visit, and another party led a demonstration outside Ankara's largest mosque. A

269 65 group of about 50 people placed a black wreath outside the Vatican's diplomatic mission. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the pope should explain and "tell us what exactly did he mean ... It can't just be left like that." Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi has tried to defuse anger, saying the pope 70 did not intend to offend Muslim sensibilities and insisting Benedict respects Islam. In Pakistan, the Vatican envoy voiced regret at "the hurt caused to Muslims." Muslim leaders were unappeased. "We do not accept the apology through Vatican channels ... and ask him 75 (Benedict) to offer a personal apology — not through his officials," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's most senior Shiite cleric, told worshippers in Beirut. Diaa Rashwan, an analyst in Cairo who studies Islamic militancy, feared the official condemnations could be followed by widespread popular protests without 80 a rectification from the Vatican. "What we have right now are public reactions to the pope's comments from political and religious figures, but I'm not optimistic concerning the reaction from the general public, especially since we have no correction from the Vatican," Rashwan said. 85 Even Iraq's often divided Shiite and Sunni Arabs found unity in their anger over the remarks, with clerics from both communities criticising Benedict. "The pope and Vatican proved to be Zionists and that they are far from Christianity, which does not differ from Islam. Both religions call for forgiveness, love and brotherhood," Shiite cleric Sheik Abdul-Kareem al-Ghazi said during a 90 sermon in Iraq's second-largest city, Basra. The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam. "The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," Benedict said. 95 "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'" The pope did not explicitly agree with nor repudiate the comment. The Rev. Robert Taft, a specialist in Islamic affairs at Rome's Pontifical Oriental 100 Institute, said it was unlikely Benedict miscalculated how some Muslims would receive his speech. "The message he is sending is very, very clear," Taft said. "Violence in the name of faith is never acceptable in any religion and that (the pope) considers it his duty to challenge Islam and anyone else on this." 105 German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the German-born pope, saying his message had been misunderstood. "It is an invitation to dialogue between religions and the pope has explicitly urged this dialogue, which I also endorse and see as urgently necessary," she said Friday. (AP, 16 September 2006)

b. The Pope’s apology:

1 Vatican City — Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he is "deeply sorry" his remarks on Islam and violence offended Muslims, but the unusual expression of papal regret drew a mixed reaction from Islamic leaders as the Vatican worried about a backlash of violence. 5 Some Muslim leaders accepted the statement. Others said it wasn't enough, but urged Muslims to avoid violence after attacks on churches in Palestinian areas and the slaying of a nun in Somalia.

270 Benedict said he regretted causing offense with his speech last week in Germany, particularly his quoting of a medieval text that characterised some of the 10 teachings of Islam's founder as "evil and inhuman" and referred to spreading Islam "by the sword." He said those words did not reflect his own opinions. "I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere 15 dialogue, with great mutual respect," the pope said during his weekly Sunday appearance before pilgrims. It was an unusual step for a leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, issued a number of apologies during his papacy, but they dealt with abuses and other missteps by the church in the past rather than 20 errors on his own part. Vatican officials had earlier sought to placate spreading Muslim anger by saying Benedict held Islam in high esteem and stressed that the central thrust of his speech was to condemn the use of any religious motivation for violence, whatever the religion. 25 While Benedict expressed regret his speech caused hurt, he did not retract what he said or say he was sorry he uttered what proved to be explosive words. Backlash against Christians Anger was still intense in Muslim lands. Two churches were set on fire in the West Bank, raising to at least seven the 30 number of church attacks in Palestinian areas over the weekend blamed on outrage sparked by the speech. There was also concern that the furor was behind the shooting death of an Italian missionary nun at the hospital where she worked for years in the Horn of Africa nation of Somalia. The killing came just hours after a Somali cleric condemned 35 the pope's speech. "Let's hope that it will be an isolated fact," the Rev. Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA. He said the Vatican was "following with concern the consequences of this wave of hate, hoping that it does not lead to grave consequences for the church in the 40 world." Police across Italy were ordered to step up security out of concern that the anger could cause Roman Catholic sites to become terrorist targets. Police outside the pope's summer palace confiscated metal-tipped umbrellas and bottles of liquids from faithful. 45 Mixed reaction Benedict's expression of sorrow for the offense he caused satisfied some Islamic leaders. The head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a banned group but still the largest Islamic movement in that country, said the outrage was justified but predicted it 50 would subside quickly. "Our relations with Christians should remain good, civilised and cooperative," Mohammed Mahdi Akef told The Associated Press in Cairo. Germany's Central Council of Muslims welcomed the pope's comments Sunday as "the most important step to calm the protest" and urged the Vatican to seek 55 discussion with Muslim representatives to avoid lasting damage. But others were still demanding an apology for the words, including in Turkey, where questions have been raised about whether Benedict should go ahead with a visit scheduled for November as the first trip of his papacy to a Muslim nation. "It is very saddening. The Islamic world is expecting an explanation from the 60 pope himself," Turkish State Minister Mehmet Aydin told reporters in Istanbul. "You either have to say this 'I'm sorry' in a proper way or not say it at all. Are

271 you sorry for saying such a thing or because of its consequences?" (AP, 18 September 2006)

• Agence France Presse news reports:

a. Reaction to the Pope’s speech:

1 Muslim scholars and religious leaders have criticised Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks about Islam and urged him to play a positive role in bringing Islam and Christianity closer. Ali Bardakoglu, head of the state-run religious affairs directorate in Turkey, said 5 on Thursday that Pope Benedict XVI was "full of enmity and grudge" against Islam. He opposed the pontiff's planned visit to Turkey in November. Bardakoglu also demanded that the pope should immediately retract and issue an apology for his remarks about Islam and his criticism of the concept of jihad (holy war). 10 The pontiff's remarks "reflect the hatred in his heart. It is a statement full of enmity and grudge", Bardakoglu told the NTV news channel on Thursday. "It is a prejudiced and biased approach." Islam criticised During a six-day visit to his native Germany this week, the pope criticised Islam 15 and its concept of jihad, citing a 14th-century Christian emperor who said that Prophet Muhammad had brought the world "evil and inhuman" things. "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," he said on Tuesday in an address at Regensburg University. The Vatican press office said in a statement the pope had not intended to carry out 20 an in-depth study of jihad and Muslim thinking about it, "even less to offend the sensitivity of the Muslim faithful". Federico Lombardi, the Vatican chief spokesman, said: "It is clear that the Holy Father's intention is to cultivate a position of respect and dialogue towards other religions and cultures, and that clearly includes Islam." 25 He said a careful reading of the Pope's lecture would show that "what reallymatters to the Holy Father is a clear and radical rejection of religious motives for violence". Bardakoglu, however, described them as unacceptable. "[The pope's] approach is a spoilt and cocksure point of view that looks down on 30 the other. At times, we also criticise the Christian world for its wrongs, but we never defame either Christ or the Bible or the holiness of Christianity." In comments to the Anatolia news agency, Bardakoglu said the pope carried the same mindset as that "of the Crusades" which arose from the Church's view that Islam is the enemy. 35 Apology call In Kuwait, two high-ranking Islamist officials also called on Pope Benedict XVI to apologise for his remarks. Hakim al-Mutairi, secretary-general of the emirate's Umma (Islamic Nation) party, urged the pope to to apologise immediately "to the Muslim world for his 40 calumnies against the Prophet Muhammad and Islam". Al-Mutairi denounced the pope's "unaccustomed and unprecedented" remarks, and linked the Catholic Church leader's comments to "new Western wars currently under way in the Muslim world in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon". 45 The pope's statements amounted to "the pursuit of Crusades", he said. "I call on all Arab and Islamic states to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican and expel those from the Vatican until the pope says he is sorry for the wrong

272 done to the Prophet and to Islam, which preaches peace, tolerance, justice and equality," al-Mutairi said. 50 Sayid Baqir al-Muhri, head of the assembly of Shia ulemas (Shia theologians) in Kuwait, labelled the pope's comments "unrealistic and unjustified", and also called on him to apologise. "His unjustified attack on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad clearly contradicts his call for dialogue between civilisations," al-Muhri said. "It opens the way to 55 animosity between religions. "We demand that the pope make a public apology" to help bring an end to animosity. 'Positive role' The pope was also criticised by Muslim scholars and religious leaders in Pakistan 60 who urged him to play a positive role in bringing Islam and Christianity closer. Khurshid Ahmed, head of the Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad, said: "It is very unfortunate that a religious leader of his stature is issuing statements which can fan religious disharmony. "The Pope's attitude is very different from his predecessor. Instead of bringing 65 Islam and Christianity closer, he is straining relations between the two religions," Ahmed said. "In the present political atmosphere such views can be exploited by those who are trying to malign Muslims and Islam. "We expect the Pope to play a positive role in promoting relations between 70 religions and civilisations. "The Pope's views about the role of Sharia [Islamic law] and jihad are at variance with Muslim beliefs." Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a leader of the Jammiat Ulema-e-Islam party and an MP, urged the Pope not to take inspiration from George Bush, the US president. 75 He said: "The Pope is a respected personality not only for Christians but for Muslims also. He should not lower his stature by giving Bush-like statements." Shahid Shamsi, spokesman for the Jamaat-i-Islami party, said:"The Pope's statement was an attempt to jeopardise a remarkable unity displayed by Christians and Muslims against recent Israeli aggression in Lebanon." (AFP, 15 September 2006)

b. The Pope’s apology:

1 Pope Benedict XVI sought to mollify Muslim anger, saying he was "deeply sorry" for the outrage sparked by his recent remarks on Islam and stressing they did not reflect his personal opinion. Hundreds of angry Iraqis demonstrated in the southern port city of Basra against 5 Pope Benedict XVI, burning an effigy of the pontiff and calling for an apology. The protestors, followers of Ayatollah Mahmud al-Hassani, a mystic Shiite cleric who says he's in direct contact with Shiite religious figures, also burned German and American flags. The crowd condemned remarks made by the pope deemed to be insulting to Islam 10 and call for him to be tried in an international court. Followers of Hassani previously attacked the Iranian consulate in Basra when a program on Iranian television appeared to make disparaging remarks about their leader. A wave of protest erupted among Muslims across the globe after the pope last 15 week implicitly linked Islam to violence and quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were "evil and inhuman". The pope's expression of regret was welcomed by several prominent Muslim groups which said they hoped his words would calm tensions that have flared

273 20 throughout the Muslim world. But other Muslim organisations seemed to reject the Pope's statement as falling short of the full, personal apology they had demanded, with some Islamist groups issuing fresh threats of attacks against Christians. Malaysia's Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said he is not satisfied with Pope 25 Benedict XVI's apology to his remarks linking Islam with violence and will continue to insist on a full apology. "Muslims have all this while felt oppressed and the statement by the pope saying he is sorry about the angry reaction is inadequate to calm the anger, more so because he is the highest leader of the Vatican," Syed Hamid was quoted as 30 saying by state news agency Bernama. The pope must retract his statement as he only stated he was "deeply sorry" about the negative reaction, Syed Hamid said from Cuba, where he was attending a Non-Aligned Movement summit. Benedict had come under mounting pressure from Muslim leaders worldwide to 35 retract his remarks made in Germany Tuesday in which he quoted an obscure medieval text that criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as "evil and inhuman". "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address ... which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," the 40 pope said during the traditional Angelus blessing from the balcony of his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome. He stressed that the passages he quoted during a speech at Regensburg University "do not in any way express my personal thought". "I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my 45 address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect," he added. The pope's comments in Germany had triggered widespread condemnation across the Muslim world, amid violent protests reminiscent of those that erupted after a Danish newspaper printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. 50 One of the most vocal critics, Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood, said the pope's expression of sorrow represented "a good step" towards an apology. "We consider today's statement by the pope a retraction of what he said last week," Mohammed Habib, a senior member of the group, told AFP. The Central Council of Muslims in Germany reacted in similar vein, welcoming 55 what it described as "an important step towards calming the unrest of the past days in many parts of the world". Indian Muslims also welcomed what Maulana Khalid Rashid, a member of the powerful All India Muslim Personal Law Board in Lucknow, called "the apology tendered by the Pope Benedict". 60 The Angelus blessing marked the pope's first public appearance since the furore broke over his university lecture, in which he also implicitly linked Islam with violence. His words were greeted with warm applause by the Roman Catholic faithful who had braved pouring rain to receive the pope's blessing. 65 The Italian interior ministry told police chiefs to raise the level of national security on Sunday, amid violent threats by Islamist groups overseas. A hardline cleric linked to Somalia's powerful Islamist movement had called for Muslims to "hunt down" and kill the pope, while an armed Iraqi group threatened to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican. 70 Gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun Sunday at a children's hospital in the Islamist-controlled Somali capital of Mogadishu, in what Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi denounced as a "horrible act".

274 Two armed Iraqi groups posted statements Sunday on the Internet urging Muslims toward reprisal, though it was not clear if the threats took the Pope's most recent 75 public expression of regret into account. "Know that the soldiers of Mohammed will come sooner or later to shake your throne and the foundations of your state," said the group Asaeb al-Iraq al- Jihadiya (League of Jihadists in Iraq), which has in the past posted online video footage of attacks on American targets. 80 Jaish al-Mujahedeen (the Mujahedeen's Army) -- which on Saturday threatened to strike at Rome and the Vatican -- posted another statement saying that the group's reply "will come with deeds, not words". And a third day of attacks on Christian places of worship in the Palestinian territories saw unknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails and a burning tire at 85 two Catholic churches in the northern West Bank. The head of the Hamas-led government, Ismail Haniya, denounced the attacks and called on Palestinians to exercise restraint. And in the West Bank, the radical Islamic Jihad took steps Sunday to guard one church in Jenin against reprisals, witnesses and the group said. 90 In his Angelus address, the pope said the "true meaning" of what he said in Germany had been clarified by the Vatican's Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone on Saturday. Bertone said the pope's words had been misinterpreted and were meant as a rejection of the religious motivation for violence, "from whatever side it may 95 come". That explanation had been angrily dismissed by many Muslim groups who insisted on a "clear" papal apology. Religious seminaries across Iran shut on Sunday to stage protests over the pope's "outrageous" remarks, while Morocco on Saturday said it was recalling its 100 ambassador to the Holy See. The scale and intensity of the Muslim reaction had cast doubts on the pope's next scheduled foreign trip in November to Turkey. However, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said the visit would go ahead as planned. 105 "A change is out of the question for us right now," Gul said, while describing the pope's comments in Germany as "really unfortunate" and a setback for efforts to promote better understanding between religions and cultures. In Lebanon, the spiritual leader of the country's largest Christian community, the Maronites, defended the Pope Sunday against what he termed a political 110 campaign exploiting a misunderstanding. "The criticism of the pope is political," Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir told AFP from the patriarchate in Bkerke, north of the Lebanese capital. Pope Benedict XVI had "not spoken directly about Islam" in his speech which has aroused widespread anger across the Muslim world, said Sfeir, whose rite forms 115 part of the Catholic Church. (AFP, 16 September 2006)

• Gulf Today news reports

a. Reaction to the Pope’s speech:

1 VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday voiced deep regret at outraged Muslim reaction to a speech he gave in Germany, but stopped short of retracting his remarks, arguing they had been misinterpreted.

275 Angry protests in the Muslim world turned violent in the West Bank and Gaza where 5 churches were attacked while Morocco recalled its ambassador to the Vatican because of the pope's "offensive" remarks. "The Holy Father sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful," Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in a statement. 10 "In reiterating his respect and esteem for those who profess Islam, he hopes they will be helped to understand the correct meaning of his words ... quickly surmounting this present uneasy moment," the statement said. In a lecture delivered on Tuesday at Regensburg University, Pope Benedict spoke of a link between Islam and jihad, and quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said 15 innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) were "evil and inhuman." Muslim leaders around the world united in condemning his comments, amid huge protests. Palestinian security officials said Molotov cocktails were thrown at four churches in the West Bank town of Nablus on Saturday, and shots were fired by unidentified gunmen at the oldest Christian church in Gaza City. 20 Sunni Islam's top authority and the head of Cairo's Al Azhar university, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, said the pope had betrayed "a clear ignorance of Islam." A hardline cleric linked to Somalia's powerful Islamist movement called for Muslims to "hunt down" and kill the pope, while an armed Iraqi group threatened to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican. 25 Afghanistan's Taliban militia said the pope's comments showed the Christian West was waging war against Muslims. Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood said Pope's "regret" fell well short of the required apology. The pope is sorry because his statements had been badly interpreted, but there is no 30 bad interpretation," Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh, a senior official with the group, said. "The pope made a mistake, he must recognise his mistake and apologise," he said. (Agencies) (GulfToday, 2006)

b. The Pope’s apology

1 CAIRO: Muslim leaders in the Middle East gave mixed reactions on Sunday after Pope Benedict XVI said he was "deeply sorry" about the angry response sparked by his speech about Islam and holy war. Many thought a "clear apology" was still wanting. 5 An Italian nun was shot dead in Mogadishu amid outrage over Pope's comments. The nun and her Somali bodyguard were killed at a children's hospital by two gunmen, one of whom was arrested later. The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood took a softer stance, saying the Islamic political group's relations with Christians should remain "good, civilised and co- 10 operative." "While anger over the pope's remarks was necessary, it shouldn't last for long because while he is the head of the Catholic church in the world, many Europeans are not following it. So what he said won't influence them," Mohammed Mahdi Akef said. But Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy of Cairo's Al Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's 15 most powerful institution, said the pope's comments were not enough. "He should apologise because he insulted the beliefs of Islam. He must apologise in a frank way and say he made a mistake," Ashour told Al Arabiya TV after the pope's speech that. 'Nothing personal' 20 Benedict on Sunday explained further that the text he quoted did not reflect his

276 personal opinion. "These (words) were in fact a quotation from a Medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought," Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace outside Rome. 25 Earlier on Sunday in the West Bank, two churches were set afire as anger over the pope's comments grew throughout the Palestinian areas. In the town of Tulkarem, a 170-year-old stone church built 170 years ago was torched before dawn and its interior was destroyed, local Christian officials said. In the village of Tubas, a small church was attacked with firebombs and partially burned, Christians 30 said. (Agencies) (GulfToday, 2006)

• Gulf News news reports

a. Reaction to the Pope’s speech

1 Ankara/Kuwait City: Turkey and Kuwait's religious official yesterday called on Pope Benedict to apologise for comments he made about Islam. In a lecture in Germany on Tuesday, the Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who wrote that the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) had brought things 5 "only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". Benedict made the comment during an appeal to Muslims to join a dialogue of cultures that agrees the concept of Islamic "holy war" is unreasonable and against God's nature. 10 "[The Pope's words are] extremely regrettable and worrying... both for the Christian world and for the common peace of humanity," the state Anatolian news agency quoted Ali Bardakoglu as saying. Bardakoglu heads Ankara's Directorate General for Religious Affairs, which controls all imams in Turkey and sends prayer leaders to Turkish communities 15 abroad. Benedict is due to visit mainly Muslim but secular Turkey in November at the invitation of President Ahmet Necdet Sezer. He is also expected to meet Patriarch Bartholomew, Istanbul-based spiritual head of the world's Orthodox Christians. 20 NTV television quoted Bardakoglu as suggesting the Pontiff should not visit if he holds such critical views about Islam. "I do not see any use in somebody visiting the Islamic world who thinks in this way about the holy prophet of Islam. He should first rid himself of feelings of hate," NTV's website quoted Bardakoglu as saying. 25 Bardakoglu recalled atrocities committed by Roman Catholic Crusaders during the Middle Ages in the name of their faith against Orthodox Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. In Kuwait, Haken Al Mutairi, secretary-general of the nation's Ummah (Islamic Nation) party, urged the pope to apologise immediately "to the Muslim world 30 for his calumnies against the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and Islam". Al Mutairi hit out at the pope's "unaccustomed and unprecedented" remarks, and linked the Catholic Church leader's comments to "new Western wars currently under way in the Muslim world in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon". 35 The pope's statements amounted to "the pursuit of crusades", he added. "I call on all Arab and Islamic states to recall their ambassadors from the

277 Vatican and expel those from the Vatican until the pope says he is sorry for the wrong done to the Prophet and to Islam, which preaches peace, tolerance, justice and equality," Al Mutairi told AFP. Agencies - Published: 00:00 September 15, 2006 (GulfToday, 2006) b. The Pope’s apology

1 Rome: Pope Benedict tried on Sunday to calm Muslim anger at his remarks on Islam, saying he was "deeply sorry" about the reaction and that the medieval quotes he used on holy war did not reflect his personal views. The head of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics stopped short of a full 5 apology emanded by some Muslims for a speech they say portrayed Islam as tainted by violence. It was unclear whether the Pontiff's words would end the backlash. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said it was "a sufficient apology", but in Somalia an Italian nun was killed on Sunday in an attack one Islamist source said may be 10 linked to the Pope crisis. "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," he told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence. 15 "These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought," the Pope said at his weekly Angelus prayer. "I hope this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with mutual respect." 20 The German-born Pope was interrupted by applause from the pilgrims at Castelgandolfo, in the hills outside Rome, and he smiled and joked with them about the torrential rain. Benedict looked relaxed as he greeted the pilgrims standing in pouring rain. But he faces the worst crisis since, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was elected 25 Pope in April last year. His comments followed a Vatican statement on Saturday attempting to clarify the meaning of the academic speech made in Germany on Tuesday. The heads of Muslim countries have expressed dismay at what they see as offensive comments, religious leaders have called it the start of a new Christian 30 crusade against Islam and seven churches were attacked in the West Bank. Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and politicians in Italy rushed to Benedict's defence, saying he had been misunderstood and had really being making an appeal for dialogue. But angry Muslim leaders flung what they saw as allegations of violence back at 35 the West, referring to the medieval crusades against Islam and to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have fanned the flames of Muslim resentment. In Iran at least 500 theological school students protested in the holy city of Qom on Sunday and influential cleric Ahmad Khatami warned that if the Pope did not 40 apologise, "Muslims' outcry will continue until he fully regrets his remarks". "The Pope should fall on his knees in front of a senior Muslim cleric and try to understand Islam," said Khatami. In a sign that some Muslims have been mollified, the head of Turkey's religious affairs directorate welcomed the statement from the Vatican on Saturday. 45 Ali Bardakoglu, who had previously called the Pope's comments "extremely regrettable", told a German paper it was "good that the Pope has now apologised". The uproar had raised questions about whether a papal visit to Turkey in

278 November could go ahead, but the Turkish government, while calling his 50 remarks "ugly", said there were no plans to call it off. The church has officially encouraged dialogue with Islam and other non- Christian faiths since the Second Vatican Council that ended in 1965. Benedict has sought dialogue with Islam - but he also stresses Europe's Christian roots and, before elected, said he opposed mainly-Muslim Turkey joining the 55 European Union. He may have come closer than any modern-day pope to saying sorry in public for something he has said. His predecessor John Paul II made public apologies for the church's historic errors, such as the Inquisition and its failings in the Second World War. 60 The anger and violence - including attacks on seven churches in the West Bank and Gaza - is one of the biggest international crisis involving the Vatican in decades, and the Vatican appeared determined to move quickly to try to defuse anger. On Saturday, a Vatican statement said the pope "sincerely regrets" that Muslims 65 were offended by his remarks. After the statement on Saturday, senior Indian Muslim clerics asked their supporters to call off planned protests. But Muslims in Jordan said that was not enough and called on the pope to personally apologise for his remarks, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang 70 Yudhoyono called the pope's remarks in Germany "unwise and inappropriate," the Kompas daily reported. And in an unusual step, the Vatican's press office released translations in English and French of the pope personally saying Sunday he was sorry about the remarks. 75 The pope's Sunday remarks, delivered in Italian, typically are not translated by the Vatican. Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier urged world religious leaders to show "responsibility and restraint" to avoid what he called "extremes" in relations between faiths. 80 "We understand perfectly how sensitive this sphere is. I think it would be right if we call for responsibility and restraint from the leaders of all world faiths," he said during a meeting with parliamentary leaders from Group of Eight nations in the Russian resort city of Sochi. Police headquarters across Italy were ordered to tighten security at potential 85 Catholic targets, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. In Castel Gandolfo, visitors were scanned with metal-detecting wands, heightened Vatican security measures employed since the September 11 terror attacks of 2001. But in a sign of even more security following the furore over the remarks, some pilgrims were patted down by Italian police, and some metal- 90 tipped umbrellas and bottles of liquid were confiscated from faithful waiting to enter the courtyard. Police sharpshooters kept watch from a city hall balcony on the square and other officers, dressed like tourists, filmed the crowd with video cameras. However, at the Vatican, no additional security measures could be seen as 95 tourists strolled across St. Peter's Square. Italy's interior minister, Giuliano Amato, told Italian state radio that tensions over Benedict's remarks wouldn't result in any significant security worries. He noted that suspected terrorist cells, under surveillance in Italy, were considered to have their potential terrorist interest aimed "outside of Italy." Agencies - Published: 00:00 September 17, 2006 (GulfNews, 2006)

279

Appendix 2: News reports on the flotilla event

The Associated Press (AP) news report:

280 Bloody Israeli raid on flotilla sparks crisis Security Council meets after raid in international waters kills 9 activists 1 JERUSALEM — Israeli commandos rappelled down to an aid flotilla sailing to 2 thwart a Gaza blockade on Monday, clashing with pro-Palestinian activists on the lead 3 ship in a botched raid that left at least nine passengers dead. 4 Bloodied passengers sprawled on the deck and troops dived into the sea to save 5 themselves amid hand-to-hand fighting that injured dozens of activists and six 6 soldiers. Hundreds of activists were towed from the international waters to Israeli 7 detention centers and hospitals. 8 International condemnation was swift and harsh as Israel scrambled to explain how 9 what was meant to be a simple takeover of a civilian vessel went so badly awry. 10 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly canceled a planned meeting with 11 President Barack Obama in Washington to rush home. The global reaction appeared 12 likely to increase pressure to end the embargo that has plunged Gaza's 1.5 million 13 residents deeper into poverty. 14 Most of the information about what happened on the single ship where violence broke 15 out came from Israel, which cut off all communication to and from the activists and 16 provided testimony and video evidence that its soldiers came under attack by activists 17 armed with metal rods, knives, slingshots and two pistols snatched from the troops. 18 'Armed with knives, scissors, pepper spray' Passengers reached at an Israeli 19 hospital and journalists aboard the ship accused the soldiers of using excessive force. 20 One passenger, who identified himself as American, spoke briefly with reporters. 21 "I'm not violent. What I can tell you is that there are bruises all over my body. They 22 won't let me show them to you," he said before he was pushed away by a security 23 escort. 24 A soldier identified only as a sergeant told reporters at a military briefing that the 25 activists on board "were armed with knives, scissors, pepper spray and guns." He said 26 he was armed only with a paintball rifle. "It was a civilian paintball gun that any 12- 27 year-old can play with," he said. "I saw my friends on the deck spitting blood." 28 The high-seas confrontation was a nightmare scenario for Israel, which insisted its 29 soldiers were simply unprepared for what awaited them on the Mavi Marmara, the 30 ship carrying 600 of the 700 activists headed for Gaza. Instead of carrying their 31 regular automatic rifles, the Israelis said they went in with non-lethal paintball guns 32 and pistols they never expected to use.

281 33 Israel intercepted the six ships carrying some 10,000 tons of aid for the isolated 34 seaside territory, which has been blockaded by Israel for three years, with Egypt's 35 cooperation. The Israeli government had urged the flotilla not to try to breach the 36 blockade before the ships set sail from waters off Cyprus on Sunday and offered to 37 take some aid in for them. 38 Israel has allowed ships through five times, but has blocked them from entering Gaza 39 waters since a three-week military offensive against Gaza's Hamas rulers in January 40 2009. 41 Key regional ally Turkey withdrew its ambassador on Monday, the U.N. Security 42 Council held an emergency session, the British foreign secretary demanded an end to 43 the blockade of Gaza, and Jordan called Israel's raid a "heinous crime." 44 An al-Jazeera journalist delivering a report before Israel cut communications said 45 Israel fired at the vessel before boarding it. In one web posting, a Turkish television 46 reporter on the boat cried out, "These savages are killing people here, please help" — 47 a broadcast that ended with a voice shouting in Hebrew, "Everybody shut up!" 48 'They would have been killed' The military said naval commandos descending from 49 a helicopter onto the deck of a Turkish-flagged ship were assaulted by armed 50 activists. Military footage showed activists swarming around the commandos as they 51 rappelled from a helicopter one by one, hitting them with sticks until they fell to the 52 deck, throwing one off the ship and hurling what the military said was a firebomb. 53 Speaking alongside the Canadian prime minister, Netanyahu expressed "regret" for 54 the loss of life but said the soldiers "had to defend themselves, defend their lives, or 55 they would have been killed." 56 Activists said Israeli naval commandos stormed the ships after ordering them to stop 57 in international waters, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) from Gaza's coast. 58 A spokeswoman for the Free Gaza movement, which organised the flotilla, said the 59 group's goal — beyond just bringing supplies to the impoverished territory — was to 60 shatter the blockade. 61 "What we're trying to do is open a sea lane between Gaza and the rest of the world," 62 Greta Berlin said in Cyprus. "We're not trying to be a humanitarian mission. We're 63 trying to say to the world, 'You have no right to imprison a million and a half 64 Palestinians.'" 65 Israel's international image had already taken a beating from allegations that it 66 committed war crimes during its 2008-2009 winter war in Gaza, and from widespread

282 67 global opposition to the blockade. Hamas was also accused of rights violations in that 68 conflict. 69 'Murder conducted by a state' Relations with Turkey, a key supporter of the aid 70 flotilla but also until recently Israel's staunchest ally in the Muslim world, were badly 71 damaged by Monday's events, possibly irreparably. Ankara announced it would recall 72 its ambassador and call off all military exercises with Israel. Around 10,000 Turks 73 marched in protest. 74 At the U.N., Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called the raid "murder 75 conducted by a state" and demanded an immediate Israeli apology, international legal 76 action and an end to the blockade. 77 The bloody showdown came at a sensitive time for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. 78 Netanyahu had hoped to receive a high-profile expression of support from Obama 79 after months of strained relations over Israeli settlement construction. 80 Obama voiced "deep regret," over the raids, and the White House said he and 81 Netanyahu agreed by phone to reschedule White House talks. The U.S. recently began 82 mediating indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians following a 17- 83 month breakdown in contacts. 84 Israel's immediate concern on Monday was what to do about the boats and their 85 passengers. It ferried the wounded to hospitals by helicopter and towed the six ships 86 to port, giving each of the activists a choice of deportation or imprisonment. 87 By late Monday, about 150 of the activists — most from Turkey — had been taken 88 off the boats, Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said, adding the 89 process would continue into Tuesday. She said about 30 had agreed to be deported, 90 and the rest would be imprisoned. 91 A commando who spoke to reporters on a naval vessel off the coast, identified only as 92 "A," said he and his comrades were taken off guard by a group of Arabic-speaking 93 men when they rappelled onto the deck. He said some of the soldiers were stripped of 94 their helmets and their pistols and some had jumped overboard to escape the violence. 95 A high-ranking naval official displayed a box confiscated from the boat containing 96 switchblades, slingshots, metal balls and metal bats. 97 Turkey's NTV network showed activists beating one commando with sticks as he 98 landed on deck. Dr. Arnon Afek, deputy director of Chaim Sheba Medical Centre 99 outside Tel Aviv, said two commandos were brought in with gunshot wounds. 100 Another had serious head wounds, Afek added.

283 101 At Barzilai hospital in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, a few activists trickled in 102 under military escort, claiming they had been beaten during the assault. 103 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the Israeli "massacre" and 104 declared three days of mourning across the West Bank. 105 Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the rival Hamas government in Gaza, condemned the 106 "brutal" Israeli attack and called on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to 107 intervene. 108 After nightfall, Hamas-linked militants fired a rocket that exploded in Israel, the 109 militants and the Israeli military said. Nobody was hurt. The militants said the rocket 110 attack was in response to Israel's raid on the flotilla. (AP, 31 May 2010)

Reuters news report:

284 Nine dead as Israel storms aid ship By Jeffrey Heller and Alastair Macdonald JERUSALEM | Mon May 31, 2010 7:38pm EDT 1 (Reuters) - Israeli marines stormed a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on Monday

2 and at least nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, triggering a diplomatic crisis

3 and an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.

4 European nations, as well as the United Nations and Turkey, voiced shock and

5 outrage at the bloody end to the international campaigners' bid to break Israel's

6 blockade of the Gaza Strip.

7 Boarding from dinghies and rappelling from helicopters, naval commandos stopped

8 six ships, 700 people and 10,000 tonnes of supplies from reaching the Islamist-run

9 Palestinian enclave -- but bloody miscalculation left Israel isolated and condemned.

10 Once-close Muslim ally Turkey accused it of "terrorism" in international waters.

11 The U.N. Security Council met in emergency session. The European Union, a key

12 aid donor to Palestinians, demanded an independent inquiry and an end to the

13 Gaza embargo.

14 Israel's most powerful friend, the United States, was more cautious, disappointing

15 Turkey. But President Barack Obama said he wanted the full facts soon and

16 regretted the loss of life.

17 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also voiced regret as he cut short a visit to

18 Canada and rang Obama to call off a White House meeting that had been planned

19 for Tuesday.

20 He said his forces had been attacked: "They were mobbed, they were clubbed,

21 they were beaten, stabbed, there was even a report of gunfire. And our soldiers

22 had to defend themselves."

23 For all his regret, he vowed to maintain a three-year-old embargo to stop Iranian-

24 backed Hamas from bringing arms to Gaza.

25 Back home, questions were asked about how an operation that aimed to avoid

285 26 bloodshed had gone so badly and publicly wrong.

27 The White House meeting had seemed intended to soothe ties with Obama, which

28 have been strained by differences over Jewish settlement expansion that had

29 delayed the recent revival of peace talks with the Palestinians. But Obama must

30 also balance support for Israel, which is popular with American voters, with

31 understanding for an angry Turkey and other Muslim U.S. allies.

32 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said: "What Israel has committed on board

33 the Freedom Flotilla was a massacre."

34 PAINTBALL ATTACK

35 Even after the vessels were escorted into Israel's Ashdod port, accounts of the pre-

36 dawn operation some 120 km (75 miles) out in the Mediterranean were sketchy

37 and limited to those from the Israeli side. Activists were held incommunicado,

38 though Israeli officials said most would be free to go in due course.

39 Military night-vision video showed commandos being winched down, only to be

40 surrounded. Some Israeli commentators asked why commanders put troops into a

41 position where they were cornered.

42 An Israeli minister admitted plans to maintain the blockade on Hamas while

43 avoiding an international incident had backfired in spectacular fashion. "It's going

44 to be a big scandal, no doubt about it," Trade Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said.

45 One marine told reporters his squad went in with anti-riot paintball guns but,

46 fearing for their lives, resorted to using normal pistols or leapt overboard. Navy

47 video showed a commando fire a paintball at a man who seemed to be clubbing an

48 Israeli.

49 Other footage showed a commando fire a pistol, two-handed.

50 "We were prepared to face human rights activists and we found people who came

51 for war," the marine told reporters.

286 52 Israeli military officials said nine activists died on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish

53 cruise ship carrying nearly 600 people. Most of the dead were Turks, one senior

54 Israeli officer said.

55 Military officials said some activists had snatched pistols from the boarding party,

56 which responded to gunfire. Seven troops and 20 protesters were injured, the

57 military said. Some officials had earlier put the death toll at 10 or even higher.

58 A Turkish Islamic charity chartered the Mavi Marmara. Other vessels carried

59 Americans and Europeans, including politicians, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and

60 Swedish author Henning Mankell.

61 TURKISH ANGER

62 The bloodshed sparked street protests and government ire in Turkey, long Israel's

63 lone Muslim ally in the region.

64 Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist views and outreach to Iran and

65 other Israeli enemies are blamed by many in Israel for souring relations, headed

66 home from Chile.

67 He said: "This action, totally contrary to the principles of international law, is

68 inhumane state terrorism."

69 Some said Turkey's political and economic ties with Israel were too deep and

70 complex to suffer long-term damage, but Ankara canceled joint military exercises

71 and recalled its ambassador.

72 Israel told tourists in Turkey to stay indoors and dismissed any accusations that it

73 had broken international law by boarding foreign ships far beyond its own

74 territorial waters.

75 Israeli forces were on high alert but aside from scattered scuffles, there was little

76 trouble with Palestinian protesters.

77 Demonstrations in European cities included Paris, Stockholm, Rome and Athens,

78 where police used teargas against protesters who threw stones and bottles near

287 79 Israel's embassy to Greece.

80 The U.N. Security Council heard calls from most members for an inquiry.

81 Diplomats then tried to agree on a common statement.

82 The Arab League condemned what it called a "terrorist act." Iranian President

83 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called it "inhuman."

84 More worryingly for Israel, its friends showed little sympathy. The outrage

85 sounded at times more uniformly hostile to the Jewish state than during its

86 offensive in Gaza, which killed 1,400 Palestinians in December 2008 and January

87 2009.

88 Israel said it launched that war to curb Hamas rocket fire on its towns. But it has

89 found it harder to win understanding for an embargo limiting supplies to 1.5

90 million people in Gaza, including cement the U.N. says it needs to repair bomb

91 damage.

(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis and Rami Amichai in Ashdod, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Mohammed Assadi and Ali Sawafta in Ramallah, Michele Kambas in Nicosia, Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara, Matt Spetalnick in Washington, Patrick Worsnip at the United Nations, David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Dan Williams, Tom Perry, Ari Rabinovitch and Joseph Nasr in Jerusalem, writing by Alastair Macdonald, editing by Michael Roddy) (Reuters, 31 May 2010)

Agence France Presse (AFP) news report: World in shock at deadly Gaza ship raid (AFP) – May 31, 2010

288 1 ANKARA — Shock and outrage swept the globe Monday after Israeli commandos 2 stormed a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip, as the Jewish state's foes and 3 allies closed ranks in condemning the deadly raid. 4 The UN's rights chief Navi Pillay said she was "shocked" at the violence of the raid, 5 which left at least 10 dead, many of them reportedly Turks, while the European Union 6 demanded a full inquiry from Tel-Aviv. 7 As the Islamist Hamas which rules in Gaza urged world Muslims to "rise up" in 8 protest, police struggled to hold back an angry crowd of hundreds outside the Israeli 9 consulate in Turkey's biggest city Istanbul. 10 Furious protesters shouted "Damn Israel" outside the residence of Israel's ambassador 11 to Ankara, who was summoned for immediate talks as Turkey warned of "irreparable 12 consequences" to bilateral ties. 13 "This deplorable incident, which took place in open seas and constitutes a fragrant 14 breach of international law, may lead to irreparable consequences in our bilateral 15 relations," a written statement said. 16 "By targeting civilians, Israel has once again shown its disregard for human life and 17 peaceful initiatives," Ankara said. 18 Israel claimed its naval forces were attacked by activists and that both sides used live 19 fire, after they stormed six ships bound for besieged Gaza with thousands of tonnes of 20 aid and hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists aboard. 21 But Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the raid as "inhuman Zionist 22 regime action." 23 Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas declared three days of mourning over the 24 "massacre," while the Arab League chief Amr Mussa called it a "crime" and said the 25 22-country body was consulting on its next step. 26 Kuwait's parliament speaker condemned the storming of the flotilla, which was 27 carrying 16 Kuwaitis including an MP, as a "heinous Israeli crime." 28 In Europe, condemnation was equally swift. 29 The European Union demanded Israel mount a "full inquiry," with foreign affairs 30 chief Catherine Ashton demanding "an immediate, sustained and unconditional 31 opening" of crossings to Gaza. 32 Spain -- the current European Union president -- Sweden and Greece summoned the 33 Israeli ambassadors to their capitals to demand explanations, with Madrid slamming 34 the operation as "unacceptable".

289 35 Greece, which had some 30 nationals on board the flotilla, also withdrew from joint 36 military exercises with Israel in protest at the raid. 37 French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he was "deeply shocked" by the 38 Israeli raid and insisted "nothing can justify" such violence. 39 Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle also said he was "deeply concerned" 40 about the deaths. 41 The bloody ending to the high-profile mission to deliver supplies to Gaza came on the 42 eve of a meeting in Washington between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime 43 Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 44 Maen Bashur, a Lebanese activist and coordinator for a group called End the 45 Blockade on Gaza, said they had expected the convoy to be "attacked" by the Israelis 46 and considered those seized on board the ship as "war prisoners". 47 "For that reason we asked Hezbollah's leadership to act accordingly," Bashur said. 48 When asked whether he was encouraging the Shiite militant group to launch a cross- 49 border raid and seize Israeli hostages, Bashur responded: "Hezbollah's leadership is 50 wise and knows how to behave." 51 A Cyprus MEP Kyriacos Triantafyllides, who was prevented at the last minute from 52 joining the aid mission, told the Cypriot news agency CNA that activists had 53 "expected a strong reaction from Israel." 54 "But nobody believed it would come to this point where they would face something 55 akin to an invading army," he said. Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved. (AFP, 31 May 2010)

Gulf Daily News (GDN) news reports: INHUMAN!

290 Posted on » Tuesday, June 01, 2010 1 MANAMA: Bahrain yesterday called for an immediate international investigation 2 into Israel's deadly raid on the Freedom Flotilla, in which four Bahrainis were seized. 3 The Foreign Ministry was also ordered to investigate the fate of Shaikh Jalal Al 4 Sharqi, Khalid Bucheeri, Hassan Murad and Yousif Mahmood. 5 They were reportedly aboard the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, on which a reported 6 nine people were killed and dozens wounded as Israeli forces stormed the vessel. 7 It was part of a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza, with around 700 peace protesters from 8 around the world on board. 9 But Bahrain's Ambassador to Turkey Dr Ebrahim Yousif Abdulla said in a statement 10 that the Bahrainis were not among the dead or wounded. 11 Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside United Nations House in Manama 12 yesterday, demanding action against Israel. 13 The killing and wounding of activists aboard the flotilla was strongly condemned by 14 His Royal Highness Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa and His 15 Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince and Deputy 16 Supreme Commander, as they met yesterday. 17 "The Israeli attack on the flotilla is a barbaric and heinous act flouting basic civilised 18 human principles," they said. 19 They rapped the Jewish state for targeting peace activists and civilians in international 20 waters. 21 They addressed an urgent plea to the international community and world 22 organisations to assume their responsibilities and hold Israel accountable. 23 Meanwhile, Israel faced a wave of global outrage over the incident, as key ally 24 Turkey froze military ties, Muslim leaders demanded UN action and protests erupted 25 in many countries. 26 UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he was "shocked" by the naval assault while capitals 27 summoned Israel's ambassadors. 28 He called on Israel to "urgently" explain itself over the raid as the UN Security 29 Council went into an emergency session. 30 Turkey, the Jewish state's chief regional partner, scrapped joint war games with Israel 31 and recalled its ambassador. 32 Nato called emergency talks for today while ambassadors from the 27 EU countries 33 condemned Israel's use of violence, demanding "an immediate, full and impartial 34 enquiry". 35 Muslim leaders condemned what Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called a 36 "massacre" and Arab League chief Amr Mussa said was a "crime".

291 37 Greece, which had dozens of nationals in the convoy, also pulled out of joint military 38 exercises with Israel. 39 UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Richard Falk called 40 for a worldwide boycott and sanctions against Israel for its "murderous behaviour". (GDN, 1 June 2010)

292

Appendix 3: News reports on the Obama’s speech in Cairo

293 The Associated Press (AP) news report: Obama seeks ‘new beginning’ in Muslim world President tells Egypt audience ‘America and Islam are not exclusive’

1 CAIRO — Invoking the Quran and his rarely used middle name, Barack Hussein

2 Obama declared Thursday that America has a common cause with Islam and never

3 will be at war with the faith — an overture intently watched by the Muslim world and

4 welcomed in unlikely quarters. An Iranian cleric called the president's speech "an

5 initial step for removing misconceptions."

6 Obama spoke at a seat of Islamic learning, his 55-minute address suffused with

7 respect for touchstones of the religion. He said the time had come to "speak the truth"

8 and "seek a new beginning."

9 "America and Islam are not exclusive," he said, "and need not be in competition.

10 Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance

11 and the dignity of all human beings."

12 Obama made no specific references to his predecessor in the White House during his

13 Cairo University speech, but others quickly did.

14 "There is a change between the language of President Obama and previous speeches

15 made by George Bush," said Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas. But he added

16 that Obama did not specifically note the suffering in Gaza following the three-week

17 Israeli incursion earlier this year.

18 "So all we can say is that there is a difference in the statements, and the statements of

19 today did not include a mechanism that can translate his wishes and views into

20 actions," said Barhoum, whose group the U.S. considers a terrorist organisation.

21 Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in advance of the speech that any

22 statements by Obama were just "words, speech and slogan" that would leave in place

23 sanctions designed to persuade the nation to stop its nuclear weapons program.

24 But Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric who was vice president under reformist President

25 Mohammad Khatami, called the speech "compensation" for a hostile environment

294 26 created by Bush.

27 "This can be an initial step for removing misconceptions between world of Islam and

28 the West," he said.

29 Finding common ground

30 Obama's remarks were designed to reset relations after the terrorist attacks of Sept.

31 11, 2001, and the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Yet he also called sternly for Israelis and

32 Palestinians to live up to their obligations in seeking peace, demanded Iran bow to

33 international demands to halt its nuclear weapons program and bid Muslim countries

34 help in eradicating the threat of fundamentalist' violence across the globe.

35 In doing so, the Christian son of a Kenyan Muslim father and a Kansas mother sought

36 common cause in part by addressing his own roots — and using a middle name that

37 opponents used against him at inflammatory moments in the presidential campaign.

38 "Much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack

39 Hussein Obama could be elected president," he said. "But my personal story is not so

40 unique." He went on to say the dream of America exists for all who go there —

41 including nearly 7 million Muslims.

42 The Israeli government issued a statement saying it, too, hoped for a new era. But it

43 skirted any reference to Obama's calls for a settlement freeze in the West Bank and

44 the creation of an independent Palestinian state — demands that Israel's hawkish

45 prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to reject.

46 Obama addressed the Israeli-Palestinian dispute pointedly in his address, knowing it

47 goes to the heart of Muslim anger toward the West.

48 "It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true," he said. "Too many tears

49 have flowed. Too much blood has been shed."

50 'Huge' pyramids

51 Obama's boisterous audience included several members of the nonviolent

52 fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most powerful opposition movement.

295 53 Though banned by President Hosni Mubarak's government, it holds 20 seats in

54 parliament.

55 Obama seemed upbeat after he spoke, touring the Great Pyramids at Giza. "This is

56 huge!" he yelled at the base of the biggest, his voice echoing off the stone. Around the

57 corner he joked about getting on a camel — and then several of his closest aides

58 promptly did.

59 The president's brief stay in Cairo also included a visit to the Sultan Hassan mosque,

60 a 600-year-old centre of Islamic worship and study.

61 He flew to Europe later in the day, with stops planned in Germany and France before

62 returning to the United States on Sunday.

63 'Negative stereotypes'

64 Obama's remarks were televised on all radio and television stations in Israel; and with

65 Arabic voice-over translations by Arab satellite stations. The Iranian government

66 jammed signals to block satellite owners from watching.

67 From its opening phrases, the speech was laden with respectful gestures to Muslims.

68 Obama said it was part of his responsibilities as president "to fight against negative

69 stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."

70 He quoted the Quran: "be conscious of God and always speak the truth" to underscore

71 his call for a new relationship based on mutual interest and respect. He referred to

72 Iran by its full name, the Islamic Republic of Iran, said Islamic countries had been

73 victimised by colonialism as well as the Cold War era struggle between the United

74 States and the former Soviet Union.

75 "As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the

76 break of dawn and the fall of dusk," he said. "As a young man, I worked in Chicago

77 communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith."

78 The battle against terrorists will continue, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere,

79 Obama said, despite the animosity the operations have helped created toward the U.S.

296 80 among Muslims. "America's commitment will not weaken."

81 Yet he remarked, as he did in a speech to another important Muslim audience, in

82 Turkey, that "America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam."

83 War against extremists

84 Obama called Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, "a war of choice," and explained his plan to

85 withdraw American combat troops next year and his reversal of Bush-era policies in

86 the pursuit of terrorists that have enraged Muslims the world over. Obama said flatly

87 that he has banned torture and will close the detested Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba

88 next year.

89 He asked Muslims to join the fight. "The sooner the extremists are isolated and

90 unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer," Obama said.

91 Not all with hostile views of the U.S. were mollified.

92 "Obama's speech is an attempt to mislead people and create more illusions to improve

93 America's aggressive image in the Arab and Islamic world," said a joint statement by

94 eight Damascus, Syria-based radical Palestinian factions, including Hamas.

95 Still, many Muslim listeners praised the shift in U.S. attitude.

96 "It is the first time I have ever heard such affectionate words from an American for

97 Muslims," said Zahid Husain Gardezi, a landowner in the Pakistani city of Multan.

98 "Apparently we can expect America to try to befriend the Muslim world in deeds as

99 well. But let's see how long it will take to see this on the ground."

(AP, 4 June 2009)

Reuters news report:

297 Obama seeks new beginning in ties with Muslims

By Ross Colvin and David Alexander CAIRO | Thu Jun 4, 2009 8:56am EDT 1 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama called for a "new beginning" in relations 2 between the United States and the Muslim world Thursday, addressing grievances 3 over the Arab-Israeli conflict, two U.S.-led wars and tensions over Iran. 4 Speaking to the world's more than 1 billion Muslims from Cairo, Obama pledged to 5 pursue Palestinian statehood, said U.S. troops did not want to stay in Iraq or 6 Afghanistan forever and offered mutual respect in dealings with long-time foe, 7 Tehran. 8 His keynote speech, occasionally interrupted by shouts of "we love you," was 9 welcomed by some for its fresh tone after George W. Bush's departure even as others 10 expressed frustration that he did not outline specific steps to change U.S. policy. 11 "We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the 12 world -- tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate," 13 Obama said in the address that included quoting Islam's holy book, the Koran. 14 "I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims 15 around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect," he said. 16 "America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition." 17 "This cycle of suspicion and discord must end," he added. 18 Highlighting hostility the U.S. leader faces from some quarters, al Qaeda leader 19 Osama bin Laden, in a message on a website, warned Muslims against alliance with 20 Christians and Jews, saying it would annul their faith. 21 It was the second communication from the al Qaeda leader in as many days aimed at 22 upstaging Obama's speech. 23 The supreme leader of Washington's regional arch foe, Iran's Ayatollah Ali 24 Khamenei, said in an speech before Obama spoke that America was "deeply hated" 25 and only action, not "slogans," could change that. 26 The choice of Cairo for the speech underscored Obama's focus on the Middle East, 27 where he faces big foreign policy challenges, from trying to restart Israeli-Palestinian 28 peace talks to curbing Iran's nuclear plans that Washington says is to build atomic 29 bombs. Tehran denies any such aims. 30 PATIENCE 31 Although the administration tried to lower expectations in recent days about what

298 32 would be accomplished by the speech, there were high hopes in the region that he 33 would take a tougher line on Israel and follow up his words with actions. 34 He also offered little specific on democracy, the rule of law and human rights in the 35 Arab world, issues that many in the region had hoped to hear him address. 36 Obama, who wants to build a coalition of Muslim governments to back his diplomatic 37 moves, affirmed his commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian 38 conflict. 39 "That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's 40 interest," he said. "That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the 41 patience that the task requires." 42 He said Palestinians had to abandon violence and urged them to acknowledge Israel's 43 right to exist. He also said Israel should stop building settlements in the West Bank. 44 "President Obama's speech is a good start and an important step toward a new 45 American policy," Palestinian official Nabil Abu Rdainah said. 46 Obama said Iran should have access to peaceful atomic power, but it must adhere to 47 nuclear non-proliferation. 48 "This is not simply about America's interests. It is about preventing a nuclear arms 49 race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely 50 dangerous path." 51 Obama said the United States had no interest in keeping military bases in Afghanistan 52 and said Washington had a responsibility to "leave Iraq to Iraqis" and build a better 53 future for them. 54 "This speech was very inspiring and I think many people will welcome it, because he 55 tried to be neutral and honest and objective," said Khalil al-Anani, political analyst at 56 Egypt's al-Ahram Foundation. 57 But other reaction was mixed. "The Islamic world does not need moral or political 58 sermons. It needs a fundamental change in American policy," said Hassan Fadlallah, 59 a lawmaker for Lebanon's Hezbollah. 60 Mohamed Habib, deputy leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, said: "It's a public 61 relations address more than anything else."

(Additional by Reuters bureaus; Writing by David Alexander and Edmund Blair; Editing by Samia Nakhoul) (Reuters, 4 June 2009)

Agence France Presse (AFP) news report:

299 Obama speech widely hailed but foes still sceptical DATE: 2009-06-06 1 PARIS - International leaders hailed President Barack Obama's speech on

2 ties with the Muslim world as opening a "new page" but arch foes called for

3 Washington to deliver action rather than words.

4 Washington's closest allies in the Middle East greeted Obama's speech in

5 Cairo with hope while its most bitter rivals expressed scepticism at his call

6 for a "new beginning" to end a cycle of "suspicion and discord".

7 The US leader laid out a new US blueprint for the Middle East, including a

8 new Palestinian state and efforts to defuse a nuclear showdown with Iran.

9 UN chief Ban Ki-moon expressed hope that the speech would have a

10 "positive impact" on the moribund Middle East peace process and "herald

11 the opening of a new chapter in relations between the United States and

12 the Islamic world."

13 EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana hailed it as a "remarkable speech"

14 that "without any doubt is going to open a new page in the relation with the

15 Arab-Muslim world and I hope in the problems we have in so many

16 theatres in the region."

17 Israel, the top US ally in the region, said it hoped Obama's "important

18 speech" would spark a "new kind of reconciliation" between Arabs and

19 Israelis, but warned that its security was key in any peace drive.

20 "We share President Obama's hope that the American effort will herald in a

21 new age that will bring an end to the conflict and pan-Arab recognition of

22 Israel as the state of the Jewish people living in peace and security in the

23 Middle East," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office.

24 The Gaza Strip's Hamas rulers cautiously welcomed Obama's speech, in

25 which he also urged the militant group to recognise Israel's right to exist,

26 but it called for his words to be followed by action.

300 27 "This address must be judged not on its form, but by the policies that

28 Obama will apply on the ground to respect the freedom of people and their

29 democratic choices and the right of the Palestinian people to its land," said

30 Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum.

31 "It had many contradictions, all the while reflecting tangible change,"

32 Barhum told AFP .

33 But another Islamist movement on a US list of terror organisations, the

34 Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, said Obama offered "no real change"

35 to US policy in the Middle East.

36 "The Islamic and Arab world does not need lectures, but real acts starting

37 with a radical change toward the Palestinian cause," Hassan Fadlallah, a

38 Hezbollah lawmaker, told AFP.

39 "The problem of Arabs and Muslims lies with Washington's support for

40 Israeli aggression in the region, especially on the people of Lebanon and

41 Palestine."

42 Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not mention Obama's

43 address, but in his own speech said the United States was detested across

44 the Middle East.

45 "The new US government seeks to transform this image. I say firmly, that

46 this will not be achieved by talking, speech and slogans," Khamenei said

47 addressing thousands of Iranians on the 20th anniversary of the death of

48 the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.

49 Obama said the showdown with Iran over its nuclear programme had

50 reached a decisive point but that Tehran had the right to peaceful nuclear

51 power if it abided by international treaties.

52 Iraq welcomed the "positive direction" showcased in Obama's speech,

53 saying it would help fight extremist ideology in the Middle East.

301 54 Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the speech opened the door

55 for a cultural dialogue between Western and Islamic societies.

56 But Iraq's radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said he would trust Obama

57 "only after their (US) withdrawal from our beloved Iraq and Muslim

58 Afghanistan and their withdrawal of support for the Israeli enemy, and I

59 hope for this from him."

60 Obama's speech was greeted with optimism in other parts of the Islamic

61 world.

62 "The relationship between the West and Islam -- the years of tension and

63 confrontation should come to an end now," Arab League chief Amr Moussa

64 told the BBC.

65 Afghan President Hamid Karzai's office said the speech would be received

66 positively in Afghanistan since it "asks for restarting relations with the

67 Islamic world based on mutual trust and mutual interest". – AFP

(AFP, 6 June 2009)

302 Gulf Daily News (GDN) news reports: 1. GDN 1: JUST WORDS? Posted on » Friday, June 05, 2009 1 CAIRO: Muslims around the world said President Barack Obama's outreach in a

2 speech yesterday was a positive shift in US attitude but fell short of a breakthrough

3 because it lacked concrete proposals to turn the words into action.

4 Arabs and Muslims of all political stripes said they want him to turn his words into

5 action - particularly in standing up to Israel.

6 Obama impressed Muslims with his humility and respect and they were thrilled by his

7 citing of Quranic verses. Aiming to repair ties with the Muslim world, he opened with

8 the Arabic greeting 'Assalamu Aleikum,' which drew enthusiastic applause from his

9 audience at Cairo University.

10 His address touched on many themes Muslims wanted to hear in the highly

11 anticipated speech, broadcast live across much of the Middle East and elsewhere in

12 the Muslim world.

13 He insisted Palestinians must have a state and said continued Israeli settlement in the

14 West Bank is not legitimate. He assured them the US would pull all it troops out of

15 Iraq by 2012 and promised no permanent US presence in Afghanistan.

(GDN, 5 June 2009)

303 2. GDN 2: 'New beginning' call by Obama

1 CAIRO: President Barack Obama sought a "new beginning" between the US and

2 Muslims around the world in a major speech yesterday but offered no new initiative to

3 end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

4 "We meet at a time of tension between the US and Muslims around the world, tension

5 rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate," he said in a

6 speech at Cairo University.

7 "I have come here to seek a new beginning between the US and Muslims around the

8 world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect," he said. "America and

9 Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition."

10 The choice of Cairo for the speech underscored Obama's focus on the Middle East,

11 where he faces huge foreign policy challenges, from trying to restart the Israeli-

12 Palestinian peace process to curbing Iran's nuclear programme.

13 Although the administration tried to lower expectations in recent days about what

14 would be accomplished by the speech, there were high expectations in the region that

15 he would take a tougher line on Israel and follow up his words with actions.

16 Obama, who is hoping to build a coalition of Muslim governments to back his

17 diplomatic moves, affirmed his commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-

18 Palestinian conflict.

19 He said the US bond with Israel, the source of much Arab distrust of the US, was

20 unbreakable, and rejected "ignorant" rants by those who deny the Nazi Holocaust.

21 But, breaking from policies of his predecessor George W Bush, Obama also rebuked

22 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to halt West Bank settlement expansion

23 and reiterated his backing for a two-state solution.

24 Quoting the region's three holy books, the Quran, the Torah and the Bible, he evoked

25 a future of "mutual interest and mutual respect, examining all sources of tension

304 26 between America and the Muslim world.

27 "There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past,

28 we will never move forward."

29 Specifically targeting young Muslims, Obama said "I know there are many, Muslim

30 and non Muslim, who question whether we can forge this new beginning.

31 "Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to stand in the way of

32 progress.Some suggest that it isn't worth the effort, that we are fated to disagree, and

33 civilisations are doomed to clash.

34 "There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past,

35 we will never move forward."

36 The Gaza Strip's Hamas rulers gave a conciliatory response to the speech "It had

37 many contradictions, all the while reflecting tangible change," Hamas spokesman

38 Fawzi Barhum said.

39 Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not mention Obama's event, but in

40 his own speech said the US is detested across the Middle East.

41 Obama said the showdown with Iran over its nuclear programme had reached a

42 decisive point but that Tehran had the right to peaceful nuclear power if it abided by

43 international treaties.

44 A spokesperson for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the speech would be

45 received positively in Afghanistan. "The issue of respecting human life, where he

46 quotes the Quran that killing one innocent person is like killing the whole of

47 humanity, resonates well with Afghans," he said.

(GDN, 5 June 2009)

305

Appendix 4: News reports on the Bush shoe event in Iraq

306 The Associated Press (AP) news report: Reporter detained after shoe-tossing incident President Bush ducked man's shoes during a press conference in Baghdad

updated 12/15/2008 5:25:45 AM ET 1 BAGHDAD — An Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush

2 was being held for questioning by the Iraqi prime minister's guards, an official said

3 Monday, as Arabs across the Middle East hailed the incident as a proper send-off to

4 the unpopular U.S. president.

5 Muntadar al-Zeidi was being interrogated over whether anybody paid him to throw

6 his shoes at Bush during a press conference Sunday in Baghdad and was being

7 tested for alcohol and drugs, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity

8 because he was not authorised to talk to the media.

9 Al-Zeidi's colleagues said the journalist was kidnapped last year by Shiite militias

10 and released after his TV station, Al-Baghdadia, intervened.

11 The Shiite journalist, who is in his late 20s, was being held at the headquarters of

12 Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said the official. His shoes were being held

13 as evidence, he added.

14 Al-Baghdadia repeatedly aired pleas to release al-Zeidi on Monday, while

15 showing footage of explosions and playing background music that denounced the

16 U.S. in Iraq.

17 "We have all been mobilised to work on releasing him, and all the organisations

18 around the world are with us," said Abdel-Hameed al-Sayeh, the manager of Al-

19 Baghdadia in Cairo, where the station is based. "This whole thing is putting the

20 Iraqis and the Americans to a test. Are they going to release him or try him?"

21 Called a 'hero' Al-Jazeera television interviewed Saddam Hussein's chief lawyer

22 Khalil al-Dulaimi, who offered to defend al-Zeidi, calling him a "hero."

23 Al-Jazeera and many other Arab satellite TV stations repeatedly aired the incident

307 24 Monday. Al-Zeidi leapt from his chair as Bush and al-Maliki were about to shake

25 hands Sunday and hurled his shoes at the president, who was about 20 feet away.

26 "This is a farewell kiss, you dog," he yelled in Arabic. "This is from the widows,

27 the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

28 Al-Zeidi was immediately wrestled to the ground by Iraqi security guards.

29 Many other Arab journalists and commentators, fed up with U.S. policy in the

30 Middle East and Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam, echoed

31 al-Zeidi's sentiments Monday.

32 Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the influential London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-

33 Arabi, wrote on the newspaper's Web site that the incident was "a proper goodbye

34 for a war criminal."

35 Beyond extreme disrespect Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the

36 Arab world is a sign of extreme disrespect, and striking someone with them is

37 even worse.

38 "This great Arab shoe sums up the history of the criminal Bush, who is

39 responsible for the loss of lives of hundreds of thousands of Islamic sons and who

40 remained arrogant, spiteful and mean-spirited until the last moment of his term,"

41 wrote Abdel-Sattar Qassem, a political science professor at An Najah University

42 in the West Bank town of Nablus, on a Palestinian Web site.

43 Thousands took to the streets Monday in Baghdad's Shiite slum of Sadr City,

44 where supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr burned American flags

45 to protest against Bush and called for the release of al-Zeidi.

46 "Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head," the protesters chanted.

47 Ghufran al-Saidi, a Shiite lawmaker from al-Sadr's bloc, told AP that she was

48 demanding the immediate release of al-Zeidi.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. (AP, 15 December 2008)

308 Reuters news report: Bush on farewell visit to Iraq dodges flying shoes By Matt Spetalnick BAGHDAD | Sun Dec 14, 2008 4:26pm EST 1 (Reuters) - An Iraqi reporter called President George W. Bush a "dog" and threw his 2 shoes at him on Sunday, sullying a farewell visit to Baghdad meant to mark greater 3 security in Iraq after years of bloodshed. 4 Just weeks before he bequeaths the unpopular Iraq war to President-elect Barack 5 Obama, Bush sought to underline improved security by landing in daylight and 6 venturing out beyond the city's heavily fortified international Green Zone. 7 He declared the war "not over" despite recent gains. 8 In a sign of lingering anger over the war that will define the Republican president's 9 foreign policy legacy, an Iraqi journalist shouted in Arabic "this is a goodbye kiss 10 from the Iraqi people, dog," and hurled his shoes at Bush during a news conference 11 with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. 12 Throwing shoes at somebody is a supreme insult in the Middle East. One of the 13 shoes sailed over the president's head and slammed into the wall behind him and he 14 had to duck to miss the other one. Maliki tried to block the second shoe with his arm. 15 "It's like going to a political rally and have people yell at you. It's a way for people to 16 draw attention," Bush said. "I don't know what the guy's cause was. I didn't feel the 17 least bit threatened by it." 18 The journalist was leapt on by Iraqi security officials and U.S. secret service agents 19 and dragged from the room screaming and struggling. 20 Bush's fleeting visit to Baghdad was aimed at marking the recent passage of a U.S.- 21 Iraq security pact that paves the way for U.S. troops to pull out of Iraqi cities by July 22 next year and withdraw completely by the end of 2011. 23 It was also meant to hail a recent sharp fall in the sectarian violence and insurgency 24 that raged after the 2003 U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and to show 25 support for Iraqi police and soldiers as they take on increasing responsibility. 26 Asked whether he had come to Iraq on a victory lap, Bush said: "No, I consider it an

309 27 important step on the road toward an Iraq that can sustain itself, govern itself and 28 defend itself." 29 "There's still more work to be done. The war is not over." 30 PRAISE FOR BUSH 31 Bush thanked U.S. forces for their service in Iraq at a rally of about 1,500 cheering 32 troops inside Saddam's old al-Faw palace at the sprawling U.S. military base of 33 Camp Victory. 34 "The surge is one of the greatest successes in the history of the U.S. military," Bush 35 said, referring to the decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq last year. 36 Bush held talks with President Jalal Talabani and Maliki during the visit. Talabani 37 called Bush a great friend of the Iraqi people "who helped us to liberate our country." 38 Maliki, who had a strained look on his face after the shoe-throwing, praised Bush: 39 "You have stood by Iraq and the Iraqi people for a very long time, starting with 40 getting rid of the dictatorship." 41 The U.S.-Iraq security pact, which replaces a U.N. mandate governing the presence 42 of foreign troops, has its critics in Iraq, some of whom doubt the United States will 43 live up to its promise to withdraw. 44 "We reject this visit, as it occurs at a time when Iraq is still under the U.S. occupation 45 and the U.S. army has the upper hand in controlling the security situation," said 46 Ahmed al-Massoudi, a spokesman for the parliamentary bloc loyal to anti-American 47 Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. 48 "This visit is a show of force."

49 Though Iraq has slipped down the list of Americans' concerns as the recession-hit 50 U.S. economy has taken centre stage, polls show most people think the war was a 51 mistake. 52 It will now be left to Obama, a Democrat and early opponent of U.S. military 53 involvement in Iraq, to sort out an exit strategy after he takes office on January 20. 54 About 140,000 U.S. troops will still be in Iraq nearly six years into a war that has 55 killed more than 4,200 American military personnel and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

310 56 DAYLIGHT LANDING 57 Bush was greeted on the heavily guarded tarmac in Baghdad by the top U.S. 58 commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. 59 The decision to land in broad daylight reflected confidence that Baghdad was more 60 secure this time than in Bush's last visit to the capital in 2006 when sectarian 61 violence was raging. 62 Until Air Force One touched down, Bush's trip was conducted in strictest secrecy. 63 The presidential jet was rolled out of its giant hangar only after everyone was on 64 board. Journalists' electronic devices, from cellphones to iPods, were confiscated. 65 Bush, dressed casually and wearing a black baseball cap after his night-time getaway 66 from the White House, made a rare appearance in the press cabin just before takeoff. 67 "Nobody knew who I was," he joked when an aide complimented him on his 68 disguise. (Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Waleed Ibrahim; Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Keith Weir) (Reuters, 14 December 2008)

311 Agence France Presse (AFP) news report: Iraqi journalist hurls shoes at 'dog' Bush Dec 14 01:36 PM US/Eastern 1 An Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes and an insult at George W. Bush, without

2 hitting him, as the US president was shaking hands with the Iraqi premier at his

3 Baghdad office on Sunday.

4 As the two leaders met in Nuri al-Maliki's private office, a journalist sitting in the

5 third row jumped up, shouting: "It is the farewell kiss, you dog," and threw his

6 shoes one after the other towards Bush.

7 Maliki made a protective gesture towards the US president, who ducked and was

8 not hit.

9 The journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi from Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts

10 from Cairo, was frogmarched from the room by security staff, an AFP journalist

11 said.

12 Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam

13 Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the

14 statue's face with their soles.

15 Some Iraqi journalists stood up to apologise.

16 The White House said Bush ducked to avoid the first shoe, while the second

17 narrowly missed the president.

18 Bush said: "Thanks for apologising on behalf of the Iraqi people. It doesn't bother

19 me. If you want the facts, it was a size 10 shoe that he threw".

20 Playing down the incident, the president later added: "I don't know what the guy's

21 cause is... I didn't feel the least bit threatened by it."

Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium (AFP, 14 December 2008)

312 Gulf Daily News (GDN) news report: War in Iraq not over says Bush 1 BAGHDAD: US President George W Bush said during a surprise farewell visit to

2 Baghdad yesterday that the war in Iraq was "not over" but on its way to be won. He

3 said America's involvement in Iraq had been difficult but necessary. "The work

4 hasn't been easy but it's been necessary for American security, Iraqi hope and world

5 peace," Bush said on his fourth visit to Iraq since he ordered the March 2003

6 invasion.

7 On a trip shrouded in secrecy, Bush got a size-10 reminder of his unpopularity

8 when a man, said to be a journalist, hurled two shoes at him during a news

9 conference. Bush ducked both shoes as they whizzed past his head and landed with

10 a thud against the wall behind him. "It was a size 10," he joked later.

11 Bush held talks with President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki.

12 He made a show of the improved security in Baghdad by landing in daylight and

13 venturing out beyond the heavily fortified international Green Zone.

14 "We are leaving the next (US) president with a stable foundation," Bush said.

15 "There is still more work to be done," Bush said as he and Maliki signed a

16 security pact setting out new guidelines for US troops in Iraq.

17 Bush's visit was intended to thank US troops for their efforts and "pat the Iraqis on

18 the back for all they've accomplished this last year", said an official.

19 Bush's trip follows approval of the security pact that paves the way for US forces

20 to withdraw by the end of 2011.

21 But the pact has its critics in Iraq. A spokesman for the parliamentary bloc loyal to

22 Moqtada Al Sadr cited General Raymond Odierno's remarks on Saturday as proof

23 of Washington's intention to cheat on the security deal.

24 The spokesman said Odierno's comments showed that Washington had no

25 intention of sticking by any of the deadlines set in the pact. (GDN, 15 December 2008)

313

Appendix 5: Interviews with news editors and reporters

314 • Interview with the Editor-in-Chief of GDN from Bahrain:

1. Why aren’t news reports from news agencies not used “as is” in your newspaper? Some are, but others including sensitive political issues, are sometimes slanted by the agencies themselves – or interpreted through western eyes. This particularly applies at the moment to agency reports about Bahrain’s unrest. The country’s Interior Minister put it succinctly last week at a GCC security meeting in Riyadh. He said “Our countries are presently exposed to a colonial onslaught that uses the pretext of human rights, freedom or democracy to impose concepts of civilisations and cultures that are different from what we believe and want to protect”. Foreign agencies are also guilty of farming out stories for editing. For instance, AFP reports of what’s happening on the ground in say Bahrain, Saudi, Iraq, Syria, etc., are sent to Paris to be edited, often by someone with little knowledge of the Middle East. The result is sometimes a sense of sensationalised sound bites that in no way reflect reality. TV is particularly guilty of this. A 100,000 - strong recent pro-government protest was ignored in favour of a Molotov cocktail attack by street thugs. The dramatic always makes good TV or agency fodder. A case of “never let the facts destroy a good story”. In any case, the bulk of our news is locally sourced either from Gulf agencies, stringers or our own reporters. I used to work in Fleet Street and it is worth pointing out that wire copy is never used – only to augment the newspaper’s own stories, or to beef up background.

2. Which news agencies reports are usually preferred by your newspaper and why? Reuters is still “King”. They never put out an item unless it has been authenticated. In fact their editors prefer to delay a report in order to corroborate it. We like AFP for its extensive sports coverage, but it’s news items are often vague, and transmitted before being properly checked. We also access our own Bahrain News Agency, WAM from Abu Dhabi, and KUNA from Kuwait.

3. Is there a set of rules of what is to be included in the localised versions and what is to be removed? If yes, who sets these rules and what is the nature of these rules? If not, how do you set the standards for this at your newspaper? To be honest, the bulk of our published agency news is entertainment, business or sport. Areas where politics’ are not an issue. But when editing international wire copy, local sensitivities apply. For instance, any report on the Kashmir problem needs to be well balanced, reflecting both sides, given the huge Indian and Pakistani populations here. Wire reports are nearly always biased towards India. However, the worst howlers are committed

315 by agency photographers, who are brilliant at taking photographs, but disastrous when it comes to writing captions!

4. Which type of quotations are preferred more in your localised versions of news reports and why? For example, do you prefer to use more direct quotations in the news reports than indirect ones? It is safer to use direct quotations than indirect ones, as even agency journalists are guilty of “dressing up” a story with indirect statements to make it sound more interesting.

5. How do you deal with vocabulary that has negative connotations for the Middle East or Muslims? For example, when the news agencies version refers to Hezbollah as a “terrorist Muslim group”, how would this appear in your newspaper? Do you delete it or are other words used to describe the group? It depends on changing circumstances. For instance, much of the street violence, bombings etc. in Bahrain at present is seen as being influenced by Iran / Hezbollah. So they are terrorist acts. However, Palestinian commandos would be referred to as freedom fighters, given Israel’s brutal oppression.

6. Does the location of the news report within the newspaper affect the way in which it is edited? For example, does a news report that appears on the first page of the newspaper have different rules applied than ones that appear on other pages? We try to offer a broad, balanced spectrum of views at any given story or situation. A story in its harsh, agency form may be unacceptable on Page One, but re-written more sensitively, with a straightforward headline can be perfectly acceptable on Page Three or Page Four. There is an old saying here that Arabs only read Page One headlines! In any case, western news agencies have a far less subtle way of presenting news.

7. News reports are known to have an inverted pyramid structure, so how and who decides the order of information in the localised news report? Any news report is written to a basic formula. A 25-30 word intro will convey what has happened with maximum impact and simplicity. Then paragraphs of additional information are added in inverted pyramid style according to their importance. This all stems from the days of hot- metal type when everything had to be cut from the bottom just before press deadline time to fit a page. It is also important to remember that we are in the business of direct communication with ordinary people. It is pointless making them reach for their dictionaries after every sentence. Sometimes the agencies forget this.

316 8. What is the role of quotations in a news report and what are the different types that can be used? Quotations add depth and confirmation to hard news reports, and give them credibility. This is also where many agencies fall down, preferring indirect speech, and their own interpretations and analysis. Reuters is particularly guilty of this, and will often include comments in news stories, which should never happen. The story should be factual and objective – not subjective.

• Interview with the then Editor-in-Chief of the Bahrain Tribune (the newspaper is now out of print) from Bahrain:

1. Why aren’t news reports from news agencies not used “as is” in your newspaper?

Media reports are produced by journalists who are supposed to be the first witnesses of history as it unfolds, or at least to be the first producers of the history draft. However, that is not always the case and the reports often contain biased views or personal judgments that do not necessarily agree with the newspaper’s editorial line or idea and therefore it does not want to publish them “as is.”

2. Which news agencies’ reports are usually preferred by your newspaper and why?

A report is judged on its merit and significance to the event and to the readers, and not on the agency behind it. Some agencies are better at covering the Middle East, for instance, as they have better ground and background knowledge. Some agencies at times parachute their reporters into the area with knowledge often drawn from Internet websites or social networks and microblogs. I have met journalists whose knowledge about events in a country was based on what he was told by the taxi driver who took him from the airport to the hotel.

3. Is there a set of rules of what is to be included in the localised versions and what is to be removed? If yes, who sets these rules and what is the nature of these rules? If not, how do you set the standards for this at your newspaper?

Rules of what is published and what cannot be printed are part of the policy of every publication. The rules are usually decided by the board of editors who agree on them based on the general policy followed by the newspaper. These can be related to serious political issues or significant social matters. But they can also be linked to seemingly smaller issues, such as whether to use British or US English.

4. Which type of quotations are preferred more in your localised versions of news reports and why? For example, do you prefer to use more direct

317 quotations in the news reports than indirect ones?

Direct quotes establish a rapport between the speaker and the reader, liven the story and make it more credible.

They also allow the reader to know the exact words uttered by the person being quoted, instead of relying on the journalist’s paraphrasing or interpretation and which could colour the quotes and give them a totally different meaning.

5. How do you deal with vocabulary that has negative connotations for the Middle East or Muslims? For example, when the news agencies’ version refers to Hezbollah as a “terrorist Muslim group”, how would this appear in your newspaper? Do you delete it or are other words used to describe the group?

It all depends on the policy adopted by the newspaper, but the rule is not to take all the adjectives in the news agency versions as they reflect a specific point of view that may or may not be in line with the editorial line. We do not usually take sides and we do not for instance pepper an article with “terrorist” whenever we refer to a Palestinian or Israeli group. We absolutely refuse to associate a religion with acts of terrorism, be it Islam, Christianity or Judaism. Suicide attacks are what they are: suicide attacks, not martyrdom attacks.

6. Does the location of the news report within the newspaper affect the way in which it is edited? For example, does a news report that appears on the first page of the newspaper have different rules applied than ones that appear on other pages?

No. A story on the front page of the newspaper is simply “more compact” than the same story inside. Consistency is a major factor in the newspaper’s policy.

7. The news report is known to have an inverted pyramid structure, so how and who decides the order of information in the localised news report?

The section editor or head who oversees the report discusses the order of the information with the journalist who wrote it, if need be. All journalists undergo training when they join in order to ensure their reports are in line with the newspaper’s standards.

8. What is the role of quotations in a news report and what are the different types that can be used?

Quotations are an integral part of the report to make it more news worthy and more attractive as a piece of reliable and credible information. All journalists are required to use quotes to liven their story and help establish a positive report between the readers and the people they are mentioning in their reports.

318 • Interview with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Middle East editor of Gulf News from the United Arab Emirates:

1. Why aren’t news reports from news agencies not used “as is” in your newspaper?

The short answer to this is that we have to filter and change specific words to follow guidelines on terminology as ordained by our editorial policy.

2. Which news agencies’ reports are usually preferred by your newspaper and why?

In general, we prefer AFP to Reuters because Reuters uses more sectarian and religious attribution that is not necessarily what we want to promote in our newspaper.

3. Is there a set of rules of what is to be included in the localised versions and what is to be removed? If yes, who sets these rules and what is the nature of these rules? If not, how do you set the standards for this at your newspaper?

Our Editor-in-Chief in coordination with senior staff and the board of trustees sets the rules which are enshrined in a very clear editorial policy which all employees must follow. For example, we use the term “colonies” instead of “settlements” when talking about Israeli occupation. We say “Arabian Gulf” instead of “Persian Gulf”. We remove excessive references to Sunni, Shiites and other sectarian attribution that we find unnecessary to explain the story.

4. Which type of quotations are preferred more in your localised versions of news reports and why? For example, do you prefer to use more direct quotations in the news reports than indirect ones?

We do not have an issue with this.

5. How do you deal with vocabulary that has negative connotations for the Middle East or Muslims? For example, when the news agencies’ version refers to Hezbollah as a “terrorist Muslim group”, how would this appear in your newspaper? Do you delete it or are other words used to describe the group?

We would refer to Hezbollah as a militant group as a opposed to a “terrorist” group. In general, we use the term fighters or militants to describe armed struggles against Israel. When leaders describe their own

319 uprisings as “terrorists” we always use quotation marks.

6. Does the location of the news report within the newspaper affect the way in which it is edited? For example, does a news report that appears on the first page of the newspaper have different rules applied than ones that appear on other pages?

No, it is standard across the entire paper.

7. The news report is known to have an inverted pyramid structure, so how and who decides the order of information in the localised news report?

The editor in charge of that particular story, if there are questions or concerns, senior editors are asked for their inputs.

8. What is the role of quotations in a news report and what are the different types that can be used?

Quotes should add value and I’m not sure what you mean by “different types of quotes”.

• Interview with the editor of 24x7 News and reporter for the Daily Arab News online newspapers from Bahrain:

1. Why aren’t news reports from news agencies not used “as is” in your newspaper?

There are many aspects of not using the same copy transmitted by the news agencies and other sources to the newspapers and media globally. The first and the foremost thing is to transform the news agency copy what we call it a ‘raw info’ into a correct language, in terms of grammar and expression in addition to rewriting the news according to the style sheet of the newspaper (which every paper has its own). Secondly, there are certain no go areas in reporting for example many things in the West and developed world are acceptable and the same are taboos in many developing or you may call them more conservative societies, so the content has be to acceptable in the society come what may. Last but not the least, the presentation of any story make or break the issue means the person who rewrites the copy should know the subject, people, values, timing, and ramifications by maintaining the integrity in factual presentation.

2. Which news agencies’ reports are usually preferred by your newspaper and why?

320 Well there are no preferences or guarantees for using the same copy of any source or agency etc., yet there are names what we call more reliable source of news. Reason is that you have to go through each word, sentence and totality of the subject by keeping in mind your readership which completes the communication model, right. If you write a story nobody understands or reads it is not a story.

3. Is there a set of rules of what is to be included in the localised versions and what is to be removed? If yes, who sets these rules and what is the nature of these rules? If not how do you set the standards for this at your newspaper?

To answer the first part of the question, yes there are. You know there are smart ways to say certain things, means despite all restrictions still you can convey your message. For example, I worked in Pakistan and covered politics, parliament and superior judiciary the way I used to report in Pakistan, for example, will never work in the Gulf. Setting rules is a bit harsh word but yes you have to work under certain guidelines as sometime you have to create a freedom even while working in dictatorship, that’s what we call smart journalism. See broadly speaking if I may have say in one word it would be ‘professionalism’ as it is not you as a person but you have to be objective in information, entertainment and how you guide the masses. In a crux, in societies which are inherently intolerant to the freedom of press you should be more responsible by working for the opening up and awakening of the whole society, an uphill task but still worth doing it. Suppression and censorships are very much common when media fails to observe self-constraints and lose objectivity due to your surroundings.

4. Which type of quotations are preferred more in your localised versions of news reports and why? For example, do you prefer to use more direct quotations in the news reports than indirect ones?

Direct quotes always give the report more credibility, from the readers’ point of view at least, as human we tend to believe and see more credible what is stated directly instead of indirect quotation. Frankly speaking there certain guidelines being followed by the newspapers according to their style sheets but no hard and fast rules usually come across in this regard.

5. How do you deal with vocabulary that has negative connotations for the Middle East or Muslims? For example, when the news agencies’ version refers to Hezbollah as a “terrorist Muslim group”, how would this appear in your newspaper? Do you delete it or are other words used to describe the group?

321 See this is a very important issue when it comes to reporting as this have different connotations for different societies and it is the part of training of the reporter which compels him/her to make judgement on these sensitivities while reporting the issue. By the way terrorist term has become the most misused terms in the media in the post 9/11 era when the US media in specific and Western media in general started a media trial of the unfortunate incidents which had shaken the very basis of the American society. The irresponsible role of media in post 9/11 events will continue to haunt the historians as it has had totally failed at least on two accounts: First failed to inform masses that why attacks were carried out on the US? And secondly, who were responsible in the US for the biggest security breach of the present times. 6. Does the location of the news report within the newspaper affect the way in which it is edited? For example, does a news report that appears on the first page of the newspaper have different rules applied than ones that appear on other pages?

I would say though rules of editing are the same but yes page one stories are edited and presented in a way that it should speak itself about the importance and the relevance to the readers. Usually the page one and opinion pages articles, reports and editorials are seen and approved the Editor-in-Chief himself, which shows the importance of the pages in a newspaper. For the inner pages stuff, the similar rules of editing are followed but with less strict adherence, for example, to the facts, length of the story, selection of words and overall flow of the story.

7. The news report is known to have an inverted pyramid structure, so how and who decides the order of information in the localised news report?

First and the foremost duty to file a balance report, with extreme caution of health of the subject, facts and figures are of the reporters. But the actual job starts when the story gets onboard on merit and it goes through the sub editing up to the editor’s desk and at each stage something is changed, edited or balanced out in all respects.

8. What is the role of quotations in a news report and what are the different types that can be used?

Quotations play a very vital role in creating a balance report but this phenomenon is more common in reporting the events like press conferences, interviews, vox pops and routine stuff. In investigative reporting the role of quotation gets eclipsed as such report involves research on which the reporter builds the subject hence the role of the quotations becomes secondary.

322 • Interview with a reporter at GDN from Bahrain:

1. Why aren’t news reports from news agencies not used “as is” in your newspaper?

The most important reason why the changes are made is the content. The news agencies have their own style and the local newspaper has its own style for its audience. It is important to edit and localise the content so that the news connects with the local readers. The news agencies reports are written for international audience, while the news report that appears in the newspaper in Bahrain is for local readers and it is important that we make changes, add some details, remove some details, but most importantly the essence of the news is not tampered.

2. Which news agencies’ reports are usually preferred by your newspaper and why?

Using news agencies has finance involved in it as newspaper need to subscribe to these agencies in order to be able to use their reports. So it depends on which one would provide you with a better rate as well as better analysis for your purpose for publishing.

It also depends on the region, for example AFP is a very popular new agency for its Arabic reporting since they have local reporters in the region who report in Arabic and they have these reports translated into English. In the case of Bahrain, we have the Arabic newspaper Akhbar Al Khaleej and its English sister the Gulf Daily News, so you try to get a package at a good rate and AFP is a good example. They produce reports in Arabic which can be used for the Arabic newspaper and their news is also translated into English which can also be used for the English newspaper. So you are benefiting both newspaper and you are getting your content. But it is not necessarily the way it goes all the time, for example the English newspaper would use a different source than the Arabic one.

As far as I know, at the moment we are subscribed to Reuters and AFP.

3. Is there a set of rules of what is to be included in the localised versions and what is to be removed? If yes, who sets these rules and what is the nature of these rules? If not, how do you set the standards for this at your newspaper?

Yes we have rules that we need to follow in making the news. For example, with names. The news agencies would normally refer to Bahrain’s Crown Prince as “the King’s son Shaikh Salman”, but in our newspaper we have rules for royal names and this would appear as “the King’s son His Royal Highness the Crown Prince Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa”. So yes we need to make such changes to the news,

323 but it all comes down to the newspapers style and policy. Each newspaper would have something called a style book that shows how you need to refer to certain designations, who do you refer to certain things and what way the quotes should be written. This gives the reporter an idea how to frame the report. Sometimes as a reporter you also need to come up with new rules when you comes across something that is new.

4. Which type of quotations are preferred more in your localised versions of news reports and why? For example, do you prefer to use more direct quotations in the news reports than indirect ones?

Quotes add meat to the story and these are facts attributed to someone who is in position and who is conveying a message. Direct quotes is always preferred as they are straight to the point and crisp. When it comes to indirect quoting, it is more used when you are analysing and trying to put forward a message or connect dots. You are hinting to something and it leads you to another point. So you can build up your story by using indirect quotes.

But now even the concept of quoting is changing now. For example, I can use your words in the report without quoting you, I just paraphrase your message. This is becoming famous these days in reporting when you aren’t quoting someone directly or indirectly, but the message is used without attributing it to the person who uttered it.

But the rule is that quotes shouldn’t be changed, but in certain cases when the quotes are informal or difficult to understand, then you can paraphrase or make some changes, but not completely changing the whole thing. Quotes are very sensitive and if you mess with something, anyone can get you in trouble for that.

Regarding mixed quoting, this is a style of writing more than it is a rule set by newspapers. You pick up the most interesting or important word or words of the quote that portrays the whole idea to add more weight to the whole story. Mixed quotes is also used to break the quoting style and format, so instead of going with he said and she said all over the report you paraphrase some of the quotes here and there so that the reader won’t be bored while reading the story.

5. How do you deal with vocabulary that has negative connotations for the Middle East or Muslims? For example, when the news agencies’ version refers to Hezbollah as a “terrorist Muslim group”, how would this appear in your newspaper? Do you delete it or are other words used to describe the group?

This is again related to localising the content, so we will make some changes. For example, regarding Hezbollah we refer to them as “outlaw terror group” or “terrorist

324 organisation”. The original reporter of the news agency is writing for international readers and changes must be made when this story is going to be used in an Arab or Muslim country. It automatically demands a change since it is going to be publish for readers who are majority Muslims, but the essence is still maintained. You just remove the religious aspect from it so not to offend the readers. But in general, for readers in this part of the world, you don’t need to explain what Hezbollah for example is or stands for as everyone knows.

6. Does the location of the news report within the newspaper affect the way in which it is edited? For example, does a news report that appears on the first page of the newspaper have different rules applied than ones that appear on other pages?

The front page or the back page are the best pages of the newspaper, so the report should be condensed, eye-catching, sharp and to the point. The report on the first page has the main story and it has to have everything summed up so that the reader knows what is is all about. It should not have too many words, around 200-250 words - 300 words is too much. It is also written in a way that forces the reader to flip the page and read the rest of the report.

7. The news report is known to have an inverted pyramid structure, so how and who decides the order of information in the localised news report?

Deciding which information should be in the first paragraph depends on the individual’s years of experience as a reporter or editor. The first paragraph should have something new, fresh, raise eyebrows or attract readers and affects a lot of people. There is no fixed rule to this.

325

Appendix 6: Readers’ response interviews

326 QUESTION 1: The following two extracts are parts of two different news reports on Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009; one produced by the Associated Press (AP) and the other one appeared in the Gulf Daily News newspaper (GDN). Can you identify each one of them? What are the reasons for your answer?

Extract 1: Muslims around the world said President Barack Obama's outreach in a speech yesterday was a positive shift in US attitude but fell short of a breakthrough because it lacked concrete proposals to turn the words into action. Arabs and Muslims of all political stripes said they want him to turn his words into action - particularly in standing up to Israel.

Extract 2: Invoking the Quran and his rarely used middle name, Barack Hussein Obama declared Thursday that America has a common cause with Islam and never will be at war with the faith — an overture intently watched by the Muslim world and welcomed in unlikely quarters. An Iranian cleric called the president's speech "an initial step for removing misconceptions."

Answers: Naim Ashur: Extract 1 belongs to GDN. Occupation of Palestine since 1948 is a central issue especially for the Arabs and Muslims as well, while Western media is mainly interested in Iran's reaction as being a regional super power when compared to the GCC states and Iraq.

Dr. Muneer Abbad: I think the first extract is the one you can find in GDN because GDN is talking about the feelings that exist in the street in the Arab countries and their hope in Obama as President. In addition it is concentrating on how the new policy will translate the policy to action because what the Arab wants is action not just talking especially that we know the good relationship between Israel and USA.

Mahmoud Khalafawi: Extract (1) is GDN and Extract (2) is AP. As most readers of GDN are Muslims and as it is distributed mostly in the Arab region it made its emphasis on the breakthrough in relations not only assuring Muslims that there will

327 be no war on Islam. On the other hand AP has emphasised on Obama’s background rather the Muslims community’s perceptions.

QUESTION 2: Read the following two extracts from the news report of the GDN on the Obama speech. Each one appeared in a different part of the article and both reported what Obama said in his speech:

• He insisted Palestinians must have a state and said continued Israeli settlement in the West Bank is not legitimate.

• He said the US bond with Israel, the source of much Arab distrust of the US, was unbreakable, and rejected "ignorant" rants by those who deny the Nazi Holocaust.

How do you feel about Obama’s speech after reading these two extracts? What do you think GDN is trying to achieve by including these two paraphrases from Obama’s speech?

Answers: Naim Ashur: GDN is almost the English version of the pro government, conservative, and moderate newspaper (Akhbar Alkhaleej). It is normal that GDN focuses on Israel 's settlement in the West Bank as most of Arab moderate countries believe that settlement is the main obstacle facing the peace process in the Middle East. Obama's speech keeps the whole area in the middle, as USA policy is obliged to protect Israel in the long run. USA policy bargains on time and on negative social changes that may affect the Arab society sooner or later.

Dr. Muneer Abbad: I think this is just a speech from US President in an Arab Country and this is politics, he would like to control all the parts. I think he would say a different thing in Israel. I think GDN focus on these sentences to say Obama is with Arab but I don’t think so. However, he is better than others.

328 Mahmoud Khalafawi: Both extracts are legitimate since they speak of two different strategies. The first speaks of the Israeli illegitimate occupation of Gaza Strip West Bank and East Jerusalem and it has been his policy to emphasis on the un-acceptable Israeli occupation as per the UN resolutions 242 and 338. On the other hand, in the second extract he was emphasising on the Israeli Security and the firm stand that the US is committed to Israel’s security and the unbreakable bond which is clearly was addressed to the mass Jewish community in the US. It has been the US policy for years to explicitly communicate this strategy, A Palestinian State on the 1967 occupied territories, yet firmly stress on the US commitment regarding Israel’s security.

QUESTION 3: Read the following first paragraphs of the news reports about the Bush shoe incident in 2008 that were produced by the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, Agence France Presse (AFP) and the Gulf Daily News (GDN):

• AP: An Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush was being held for questioning by the Iraqi prime minister's guards, an official said Monday, as Arabs across the Middle East hailed the incident as a proper send-off to the unpopular U.S. president. • Reuters: An Iraqi reporter called President George W. Bush a "dog" and threw his shoes at him on Sunday, sullying a farewell visit to Baghdad meant to mark greater security in Iraq after years of bloodshed. • AFP: An Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes and an insult at George W. Bush, without hitting him, as the US president was shaking hands with the Iraqi premier at his Baghdad office on Sunday. • GDN: US President George W Bush said during a surprise farewell visit to Baghdad yesterday that the war in Iraq was "not over" but on its way to be won. He said America's involvement in Iraq had been difficult but necessary. "The work hasn't been easy but it's been necessary for American security, Iraqi hope and world peace," Bush said on his fourth visit to Iraq since he ordered the March 2003 invasion.

329 The three news agencies focused in their opening paragraphs on the Iraqi reporter throwing his shoes at Bush, while the GDN article had a different focus. Why do you think GDN is not highlighting the shoe incident at the beginning of the article?

Answers: Naim Ashur: GDN is a moderate newspaper. And being a pro government tool, it tries to follow the official response to the incident. While the other news agencies are somewhat independent and work within a stream of freedom that obliges them to focus on incident as it happens. GDN sacrifices the truth and the real media vocation just to keep in line with the government policy.

Dr. Muneer Abbad: I think it is related to the freedom culture in the western and because GDN is sponsored by government.

Mahmoud Khalafawi: The difference in press coverage is related to 2 main issues: First, it was important for the first 3 international news agencies to highlight the cultural significance of the meaning of throwing a shoe at someone were the European community is highly unaware of its meaning. As for the GDN and due to its geographical distribution in the Middle East, it assumed that the Arab’s awareness of such an insult and its cultural meaning. I also believe that the 3 news agencies wanted to highlight the level of rejection to US policy in Iraq where most of the Arab world has compiled a kind of hatred towards the US policy in Iraq and its implications on the rest of the Arab nations. While for GDN, it was more focused on the fact of Bush was sending a message to the Arab regimes and Arab countries that the end of occupying Iraq is still far from being ended.

QUESTION 4: The following three extracts were taken from the news reports of the three international news agencies (AP, Reuters and AFP) on the same Bush incident. These extracts inform the readers about the significance of shoe throwing in the Arab culture:

• AP: Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the Arab world is a sign of extreme disrespect, and striking someone with them is even worse.

330 • Reuters: Throwing shoes at somebody is a supreme insult in the Middle East. • AFP: Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the statue’s face with their soles.

Do you think the GDN needs to include such information in its news report and why or why not?

Answers: Naim Ashur: GDN doesn’t need to include such information in its news report as everybody in the Arab and Muslim world knows and understands that throwing someone's shoes to someone else is a very strong sign of extreme disrespect and humiliation.

Dr. Muneer Abbad: No, I don’t think they have to say this because we as Arab people know what it means but at least they have to say the event.

Mahmoud Khalafawi: I think they should not as the Arab readers of GDN or even the English speaking communities that live in the Arab world are aware of this type of insult and its meaning.

QUESTION 5: In 2010, the Israeli commandos raided an aid flotilla that was heading to Gaza. This incident was globally reported. The international news agencies (AP, Reuters and AFP) reported this incident and as part of their articles, many Israeli officials were quoted to give their side of the story. On the other hand, the news report of the GDN didn’t include any quotes from any Israeli official and when Israel is mentioned, it was to describe its “violent” actions. As a Bahraini reader of news, why do you think the GDN didn’t quote any Israelis?

Answers: Naim Ashur: I believe that since there are no official diplomatic relations between Bahrain and Israel, GDN should abide with such a status and in accordance with such fact, GDN does not have any correspondent inside the territories of 1948 which is the

331 historical Palestine. It is just a matter of practice that has nothing to do with belief or ideology.

Dr. Muneer Abbad: I think because they don’t need to say this as it is related it to politics and the government relations with other countries.

Mahmoud Khalafawi: International agencies try to present a balanced story where they try to present all facts which give the story more credibility as both fighting parties spell their point of views. On the other hand for GDN, it is a fact that the Arab world still sees Israel as an occupying force that maintains serious economic blockade and siege over Gaza strip where almost 2 million people live. There is a fact that Arab world still sees Israel as a vicious occupying force especially after the war it waged in Gaza 2008-2009. It would be a provocative for Arab readers to make interviews with Israelis assuming that foreign reporters who will make it since all residence of GCC citizens are not allowed to have direct contacts with Israeli people.

332

Appendix 7: News reports on the 2012 Formula One race in Bahrain

333 AP report:

Bahrain Formula One Protests: Tens Of Thousands Rally Ahead Of Weekend

By REEM KHALIFA 04/20/12 03:11 PM ET

1 MANAMA, Bahrain — Anti-government protesters flooded a main highway in a 2 march stretching for miles and security forces fired tear gas in breakaway clashes 3 Friday as Bahrain's leaders struggled to contain opposition anger while under the 4 world's spotlight as the island nation hosts the Formula One Grand Prix. 5 The government allowed the massive demonstration in an apparent bid to avoid the 6 hit-and-run street battles that are the hallmark of the Gulf nation's 14-month 7 uprising – and an embarrassing spectacle for Bahrain's Western-backed rulers as F1 8 teams prepare for Sunday's race. 9 But violence flared as small groups in the march peeled away from the route to 10 challenge riot police, who answered with volleys of tear gas and stun grenades. 11 Some protesters sought refuge in a mall and nearby shops about 20 kilometers (12 12 miles) north of the Formula One track, where practice runs took place and 13 Bahrain's crown prince vowed the country's premier international event would go 14 ahead. 15 Last year, a wave of anti-government protests by the island's Shiite majority and a 16 crackdown by the Sunni rulers forced organisers to cancel the 2011 Bahrain GP. 17 At least 50 people have been killed since the start of Bahrain's uprising – the 18 longest-running in the Arab Spring – which seeks a greater political voice for 19 Shiites and to weaken the near monopoly of the Sunni dynasty that has ruled for 20 more than 200 years. 21 "We demand democracy" and "Down, Down Hamad," chanted some of the tens of 22 thousands of opposition supporters in reference to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, 23 as they massed on the main highway leading out of the capital, Manama. Bahrain's 24 monarchy is the main backer of the F1 race, and the crown prince owns rights to 25 the event. 26 Hours before the march, Bahrain's most senior Shiite cleric, Sheik Isa Qassim, 27 delivered a strongly worded sermon that denounced authorities for making dozens 28 of arrests of suspected dissidents in recent weeks. He called the intensified 29 crackdowns before the F1 event "as if we are entering a war."

334 30 Bahrain's rulers lobbied hard to stage this year's Grand Prix as part of attempts to 31 portray stability in the strategic kingdom, which is home to the U.S. Navy's 5th 32 Fleet. On the opposite side, rights groups and others campaigned to keep the race 33 away, citing the relentless pressures by security forces and the imprisonment of 34 opposition figures – including a Shiite political activist on a more than a two- 35 month-long hunger strike. 36 The U.S.-based group Physicians for Human Rights, also said it was concerned 37 about the near daily use of tear gas in Bahrain, including in crowded urban areas 38 and homes, and its possible long-term health consequences, including increased 39 rates of miscarriages and birth defects. 40 "Despite promises of reform since our investigation into the Kingdom last year, the 41 Government's excessive use of force has only increased," said the group's deputy 42 director, Richard Sollom. 43 The hacking collective Anonymous, meanwhile, claimed responsibility for a 44 denial-of-service attack on the official Formula One website in protest over the 45 running of the Bahrain Grand Prix this weekend. Such web attacks work by 46 overwhelming a site with bogus traffic. 47 Shiites account for about 70 percent of Bahrain's population of just over half a 48 million people, but claim they face widespread discrimination and lack 49 opportunities granted to the Sunni minority. The country's leaders have offered 50 some reforms, but the opposition says they fall short of Shiite demands for a 51 greater voice in the country's affairs and an elected government. 52 The unrest has put Washington into an awkward position. U.S. officials have 53 called for efforts to reopen political dialogue in Bahrain, but are careful not to 54 press too hard against the nation's leadership and possibly jeopardise its important 55 military ties. 56 In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland expressed the 57 Obama administration's concern about "the increase in violence in Bahrain, 58 especially leading up to the Formula 1 race." 59 "These are unproductive, unhelpful acts in building the kind of meaningful trust 60 and reconciliation that is needed in Bahrain," Nuland told reporters. "We're calling 61 for, again, Bahraini government respect for universal human rights and 62 demonstrators' restraint in ensuring that they are peaceful." 63 Bahrian's crown prince, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, visited the track Friday

335 64 and rejected any suggestion that the race should be scrapped. 65 "I think canceling the race just empowers extremists," he said. "For those of us 66 trying to navigate a way out of this political problem, having the race allows us ... 67 to celebrate our nation as an idea that is positive, not one that is divisive." 68 Clashes take place nearly every day with demonstrators hurling firebombs and riot 69 police responding with tear gas and sometimes firing birdshot. The main Shiite 70 political group, Al Wefaq, says at least 50 people have been injured in the past two 71 days when security forces fired pellets to disperse protesters. 72 Additional security forces deployed this week, setting up checkpoints Friday on 73 roads leading to the Bahrain International Circuit and increasing their presence 74 across Manama. 75 The rulers have depicted the race – expected to draw a worldwide TV audience of 76 about 100 million in 187 countries – as an event that will put the divided society 78 on the path of reconciliation. 79 "I genuinely believe this race is a force for good, it unites many people from many 80 different religious backgrounds, sects and ethnicities," said the crown prince. 81 In the past weeks, however, much of the protesters' anger has been directed at the 82 crown prince, who is also the commander of the kingdom's armed forces, which 83 the opposition supporters say have been enforcing the crackdown. 84 Last year, Salman was tasked to lead a national dialogue aimed at reconciliation 85 between Shiite and Sunnis. The talks broke down without any compromise and 86 have not yet resumed. 87 In Iraq, hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, denounced Bahrain for staging the 88 grand prix while "blood is being shed" on the island. Al-Sadr also condemned the 89 F1 teams for racing, saying their presence in Bahrain gives "support for injustices 90 and the killings." 91 As a majority Shiite country, Iraq has backed Bahrain's Shiite-led protests.

Associated Press writers Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Bushra Juhi in Baghdad contributed to this report. (AP, 20 April 2012)

336 Reuters report: Formula One lives in a Bahrain bubble By Alan Baldwin MANAMA | Sat Apr 21, 2012 3:55pm EDT

1 (Reuters) - While demonstrators hurled petrol bombs at the police a half hour's drive 2 away, the only smoke that reached the Bahrain Grand Prix paddock on the eve of 3 Sunday's race was laid on by the organisers at the "relaxed Bahraini-style 4 barbecue". 5 Formula One's Bahrain experience has been a tale of two parallel universes, with 6 the drivers and team bosses staying in luxury hotels and safely sheltered inside their 7 paddock bubble of familiar routine, while running battles are fought on the streets 8 and in villages. 9 Protesters, mainly from the Shi'ite Muslim majority who say they are oppressed by 10 a Sunni ruling family, have been clashing with police nightly, denouncing the 11 Formula One Grand Prix here as a lavish spectacle glorifying a repressive 12 government. 13 On Saturday, the body of a demonstrator was discovered on a rooftop after a battle 14 at which witnesses said police fired birdshot at crowds. His funeral could be held 15 on Sunday, setting the stage for riots on the day of the race itself. 16 Marchers have held up banners depicting Formula One race car drivers as riot 17 police, bashing protesters. 18 But for those within the sport's entourage who have not ventured out to see a 19 different reality, talk of petrol bombs, death and torture might as well be from 20 another planet. 21 "THE STUFF THAT REALLY MATTERS: TYRE TEMPERATURES" 22 Red Bull's world champion Sebastian Vettel said shortly after arrival on Thursday 23 that he thought much of what was being reported was hype. 24 He looked forward to getting in the car and dealing with the "stuff that really 25 matters - tyre temperatures, cars." 26 Added the German, who will start the race on pole position: "I think generally 27 being in the paddock it seems to be no problem." 28 At Saturday evening's barbecue, rows of palm trees down the middle of the 29 paddock were lit up with red and white lights in the colors of the Bahraini flag.

337 30 Groups of Formula One people chilled out under the stars with a glass of wine. 31 There was traditional music for anyone in the mood, with work over for the day 32 and the cars locked up until Sunday morning. 33 After the race on Sunday night, teams will pack up and head directly for the airport 34 for flights in the early hours back to their European bases or holiday locations. 35 Not all of the Formula One family were spared glimpses of the violence. A few 36 employees of the Sauber and Force India teams were caught up in petrol bomb 37 incidents earlier in the week as they headed back to their Manama hotels. 38 Members of the media were able to get out to cover the unrest, although the 39 government denied visas to journalists who normally cover Mid-East politics 40 rather than motor sports. 41 Scores of police cars line the broad highway on the morning 30km drive from the 42 skyscrapers of central Manama to the track in the dusty south. But it has been 43 perfectly possible for most to travel to and from the circuit without seeing more 44 than one or two armored vehicles and encountering no demonstrations. 45 With the demonstrations mainly confined to Shi'ite areas outside the city centre, 46 much of Manama is experiencing business as usual, with people going to shopping 47 malls and tourists sunning themselves by hotel pools. 48 Inside the race circuit, behind the fences and past the electronic turnstiles that keep 49 out anyone without a pass, Formula One is on familiar territory - apart from the 50 heat, palm trees and a reduced presence in the media centre. 51 Teams have gone about their regular activities with drivers holding media 52 briefings and discussing tyres, tactics and technical issues. 53 Attempts to get them to discuss the political situation have largely failed, although 54 team principals did say they felt "comfortable" with security measures when asked 55 by an official questioner at a news conference organised by the governing 56 International Automobile Federation (FIA). 57 FIA President Jean Todt broke a 10-day media silence on Saturday to say that he 58 was sorry "about what has been reported" rather than expressing any doubts about 59 giving the green light to the race at a time when the Gulf kingdom was still 60 undergoing so much turmoil. 61 "I am not sure that all that has been reported corresponds to the reality of what is 62 happening in this country," added the Frenchman. 63 There was also some resentment within the paddock at the intervention of

338 64 politicians, including British lawmakers who called for a boycott by teams and 65 sponsors at the 11th hour. 66 "We were committed to this race and after the race we will make a proper 67 judgment of what happened and come to a conclusion," Mercedes team boss Ross 68 Brawn told reporters. 69 "I find it very frustrating that politicians in the UK were saying that we should 70 withdraw once we got here. Why didn't they say anything beforehand?" 71 Martin Whitmarsh, whose McLaren team is half owned by Bahrain's sovereign 72 wealth fund Mumtalakat and who has Britain's 2008 and 2009 world champions 73 Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button as his drivers, agreed. 74 "I don't think it's helpful to wake up this morning and hear we shouldn't be here 75 when we are already here, so I endorse what Ross says," he said on Saturday.

(Reporting by Alan Baldwin; Editing by Peter Graff) (Reuters, 21 April 2012)

339 AFP report: Violence mars Bahrain GP leadup By AFP, 20 Apr 2012

1 Violence marred Bahrain’s controversial Grand Prix race as a firebomb exploded 2 near Force India team members and protesters clashed with police in the lead-up to 3 the Formula One practice runs set to begin on Friday. 4 Security has been beefed up ahead of Sunday’s race, but the incident prompted F1 5 officials to reassure participants that, despite the violence, Bahrain was safe. 6 Speaking to reporters at the Sakhir circuit, chairman of the Formula One Grand Prix 7 Drivers Association, Pedro de la Rosa, said safety is “not a concern” despite 8 political tensions in the kingdom. 9 Four members of the Force India team were stuck in traffic when a fire bomb 10 exploded as they returned from the Sakhir circuit to their hotel late on Wednesday. 11 The four mechanics apparently got caught up in a clash between protesters and 12 police on the main motor way from the capital Manama to Sakhir. 13 Nobody was injured. 14 A spokesman for the Force India team said one team member, not involved in the 15 incident, and a contractor hired by the team, had chosen to return home as a result 16 of the blast. 17 Force India driver German Nico Hulkenberg said it was “not right” that members 18 of his team had been close to an exploding fire bomb, but added that he still felt 19 safe. 20 Mohammad Mascati, head of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, told 21 AFP that security forces fired tear gas and sound bombs to disperse dozens who 22 protested in Manama on Thursday, adding that police set up checkpoints at the 23 entrances to the capital. 24 Bahrain’s main opposition group, Al-Wefaq, has called for a week of daily protests 25 to coincide with the Grand Prix, using the sports event to focus media attention on 26 their long-standing demands for greater equality and representation in the Sunni- 27 ruled kingdom. 28 “There is a desire to take advantage of the presence of (international) press, 29 normally barred from entering the country,” said Bahraini rights activist Nabil 30 Rajab. 31 The violent clashes followed calls by the February 14 Youth Movement on social

340 32 networking sites for “three days of rage” to coincide with the event. 33 The Bahrain Grand Prix was cancelled last year in the wake of a Shi’ite-led 34 uprising against the Sunni monarchy and the brutal government crackdown that 35 followed in which a government commission said 35 people were killed. 36 Meanwhile, two Associated Press journalists are being prevented from covering 37 the race because they have not received visas to enter the Gulf kingdom. 38 The two writers, based in Dubai, have been granted accreditation to cover the race 39 by the sport’s governing body, the Paris-based International Automobile 40 Federation, but have been told by Bahrain’s Information Affairs Authority that 41 their visa applications to enter the kingdom are still “pending.” 42 Other Gulf-based journalists working for international news organisations had also 43 not received visas in time to cover Thursday’s press conferences.

(AFP, 20 April 2012)

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