Former International studies student Nina Møllerstuen Bjørge and I participated on Media, War and Conflict Journal's excellent 10th Anniversary Conference "War of Spaces" in Florence, late May 2018. We presented the paper Cultures of Anarchy: Images of Russia. You can read the abstract and browse through the representation below the picture.
The abstract
This paper investigates how national mainstream news media act as a gatekeepers and potential agenda-setters during international crises. The “arrested war”-hypothesis (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2015) claims that the trend towards media flux has reversed in recent years and that mainstream news has “re-asserted its centrality”. However, re-presenting violent conflict is still complex. “Hybrid warfare” and the stream of unverified information persist. Furthermore, ethical norms of journalistic professionalism include expectations of independence and presenting a diversity of views to the public.
We examined the role of the news media through a case study of the representation of the 2014 Ukraine crisis in the three major Norwegian newspapers. Representing the crisis as it unfolded was a challenge for the news media. The crisis was highly unpredictable and complex, besides containing a “war” of incompatible information conducted by actors affiliated with parties in the conflict.Our focus is on the framing of Russia during the dramatic month of March 2014. We applied Wendt’s three cultures of anarchy (Wendt, 1999) to classify the individual news items. The dominant media narrative resembled a Hobbesian “Cold War”-template”, framing Russia as a potentially existential threat to Norway and the West. The image that was presented, despite the flux of information potentially providing for alternative narratives, may confirm the “re-assertation” aspect of the “arrested war”-hypothesis. However, it also raises the question whether the norms of presenting diversity contained in the Code of Ethics of the Norwegian Press – were not part of the re-assertation in this case.
