News and Nationalism in Afghanistan, America and Pakistan During Wartime, 2010-2012
Patterns in the Chaos: News and Nationalism in Afghanistan, America and Pakistan During Wartime, 2010-2012 Katherine Ann Brown Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Katherine Ann Brown All rights reserved ABSTRACT Patterns in the Chaos: News and Nationalism in Afghanistan, America and Pakistan During Wartime, 2010-2012 Katherine Ann Brown This dissertation examines the United States’s elite news media’s hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests? This study draws from two bodies of scholarship that are analogous, yet rarely linked together. The first is on hegemony and the U.S. news media’s relationship with American society and the government. This includes scholarship on indexing and cascading; agenda building and agenda setting; framing; and reporting during conflict. The second is on the American news media’s relationship with the world, and nationalism as a fixed phenomenon in international news. This includes examining the different kinds of press systems that exist globally, and how they interact with each other. Afghanistan and Pakistan’s media systems have expanded dramatically since being freed in 2002 and they struggle daily with making sense of the volatility that comes with the U.S.-led Afghanistan war.
[Show full text]