My research focuses on the impact of the media for four main reasons. Firstly, the media is critical for the success of any political discourse, because in modern societies it is the main transmission belt or conduit between politics and society. Political elites need media since the latter play a key role in the ‘social construction of reality’139. As mentioned above, any social
137 Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, p. 74.
138 See Yoram Meital, ‘Who is Egypt’s “Hero of War and Peace”? The Context Over Representation, History & Memory’, 1, 15
(Spring/summer 2003), pp. 150-183.
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action is not simply “a direct duality of human agency and social structures, but has a triadic structure in which “social structures are enacted through human agency with continuous reference to a medium, resulting in the ‘social construction of reality’140. However, the media helps reality to become social in different terms. In terms of culture, the media acts as a “primary source of definitions and images” of the social reality, and as “the most ubiquitous expression of shared identity”141. In terms of politics, the mass media is a means of exercising power by virtue of the relatively privileged access that politicians and agents of government can generally claim form the media as a legitimate right142. Thanks to the gentleness and indirectness of media as a tool of power, ruling or dominant groups find media indispensable in order to rule through this Gramscian process of ‘negation, mediation and compromise’143.
Secondly, in today’s mass societies, people are almost entirely dependent on the media for information about public affairs and they rely heavily on media sources for cues on how to understand and interpret that information.144 In a developing country like Egypt, where literacy rates are low, this influence of media for adolescents can be greater. Focusing on audience and receptiveness leads to traditional theories that analyse the process in terms of a circulation circuit, i.e. concentrating at the level of message exchange (sender/message/receiver)145. Nevertheless, and away from this linearity, the mass media should be conceptualised on the same postmodernist theoretical framework adopted in the whole of this study, i.e. as a web of interconnected and complex relations and interests.
140Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture, ed. by Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby (London: SAGE, 1997), p. 41. See Klaus Bruhn
Jensen, The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication (London: SAGE, 1995)
141 Denis McQuail, McQuail's Mass Communication Theory (London: SAGE, 2000), p. 4. 142 Ibid, p.4
143 Eoin Devereux , Understanding the Media (London: SAGE, 2003), p.54
144 Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, p. 165. For example, Doris Graber found that American high school students say they rely on the
mass media more than on families, friends, or teachers in developing attitudes about current events, in Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and
American Politics (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, in David Croteau and William Hoynes, Media/society: Industries, Images, and Audiences (London : Pine Forge Press, c1997), pp.211-212
145 Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, ed. by Stuart Hall and others (London : Routledge in
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Thirdly, media is all about frames. Frames in the news are defined as “patterns … of representation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion”.146 Furthermore, “media frames, largely unspoken and unacknowledged, organize the world both for journalists who report it and, to some important degree, for us who rely on their reports.”147 Gaye Tuchman was the first to apply the framing process to newsgathering. Tuchman concluded that news offers an ideological frame through which perception of public events is filtered and contained in place of projecting an objective picture of reality.148 Robert Entman explicates that the concept of framing by associating it inclusion and exclusion. The “analysis of frames,” Entman thus explains, “illuminates the precise war in which influence over a human consciousness is exerted by the transfer (or communication) of information”. 149 Furthermore, these frames can “bundle key concepts, stock phrases, and iconic images to reinforce certain common ways of interpreting developments.”150 As far as the media is concerned, this framing also gives the media an agenda-setting role (determining the most important issues), a priming role (signalling and preparing the public to receive messages about these issues), and evaluative role (offering or implying solutions)151.
Fourthly, the role of the media is never more important than during times of national crisis. There are two main reasons for this. First, the media looks primarily to political leaders for cues on how to interpret and explain national events, and it offers officials almost unlimited access to communicate with the public.152 The frames employed by the media to transmit messages from the politicians are therefore critical. Second, in times of crisis such as the 1973 War, the public relies heavily on the media for information and explanation, and the
146 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (London: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 10.
147 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980), p. 7.
148 Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 17.
149 Robert Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication, 4, 43 (Summer 1993), 51-58. 150 Pippa Norris, Montague Kern and Marion Just ‘Framing terrorism’, in Framing Terrorism: the News Media, the Government, and the Public, ed. by Pippa Norris and Montague Kern (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 10-11.
151 Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, p. 165. 152 Ibid.
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way in which the media frames such events will therefore have a powerful effect on the public’s subsequent understanding, perception, and knowledge.153 It is because the media plays such a crucial role that it is always in danger of being manipulated by political actors who will use it to try to ‘manufacture consent’ for particular policies.154 This role of the media in shaping discourse in a national crisis becomes obvious in war, as the power to shape the public’s outlook rests almost solely with governments because it is to government officials that reporters tend to defer to explain events. As Livingston put it “Those who have routine access to the mass media, those to whom reporters turn when the dust settles and the shooting stops, have the ability to shape coverage and perceptions.”155 In this sense, senior politicians are ‘opinion leaders’ in times of crisis; they shape the terms of the debate, and set the parameters of discussion.156 The 1973 War is not an exception to this understanding.
As a necessary note of methodological clarity, it is important also to explain the logic behind the choice of Ahram as the main case study. According to Mohamed El-Bendary’s book on the Egyptian press “since national publications are government-owned, they reflect a major extent the view of Government and tend to support its policies …”157 Indeed, Ahram is taken an example of this state rhetoric rather than as a newspaper of its own, as “national newspapers are similar in the manner they select, cover and frame stories”.158 Furthermore, this state discourse is usually unmediated and uncriticised, since journalists at these national newspapers “have less influence on what makes the news”. 159 Indeed, every speech of the president under the era of Sadat or Mubarak was transmitted verbatim in both the front pages and a special page dedicated to the whole text of the speech. In the Ahram this ‘unmediated’ discourse, also including army communiqués or
153 Ibid.
154 See Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.
155 Steven Livingston, The Terrorism Spectacle (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 178. 156 Jackson, Writing The War on Terrorism, p. 166.
157 Mohamed El-Bendary, The Egyptian Press and Coverage of Local and International Events (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011), p. 12. 158 Ibid.
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official statements, exists side by side with ‘mediated’ discourses. The latter are mostly interpreted, absorbed, reconstituted, and reproduced in a new form to other listeners. 160 Along the way, meanings are often altered or lost, and the discourse assumes new forms and takes on novel ways.161 As I explain in the following chapters, this mediation is standardised and patterned as the state controls newspapers, and regulates their content. As a final remark, Ahram is also notably the oldest newspaper in the Arab world. It began publishing in 1876 as a weekly newspaper produced by brothers Beshara and Saleem Takla, who migrated to Egypt from the Lebanon/Syria in 1875. It became a daily newspaper in 1881, publishing throughout the week except on Saturdays. It is published today by the giant Al-Ahram Group, is the largest newspaper in Egypt, and is printed seven days a week. To sum up, Ahram is the mouthpiece of government.162 As a result, scholars depend on the newspaper to understand the official discourse such as El-Bendary did for his thesis. Furthermore, I worked for Ahram for six years (2000-2006). This advantage, as I mention in next section, has facilitated my access to elements of the text, discourse practice, and social practice as well.