'War on Terror' in der New York Times?

Tobias Artacker
2019 unpublished
Being confronted with dubious press agencies and 'fake news', it is of uttermost importance that audiences of modern media ask critically, if the very content they are consuming is based upon facts or rather biased in some ways. In this regard, the immanent structure of so-called 'Weltmedienereignisse' ('global media events') plays a vital role in testing media objectivity. If the coverage of an international newspaper, writing about such a 'global media event', turns out to be distorted, their
more » ... initial bias may be frequently observed within other articles too, which in turn refers to what the 'Koorientierungshypothese' predicts. Since politicians are able to frame situations and raise their popularity by using a certain kind of rhetoric, the examination of follow-up communication is of high scientific value and pertinence. Hence, also this study deals with a related question, to wit: To what extend did the American newspaper 'New York Times' reproduce its former president's (George W. Bush's) war talk after September 11th, 2001? In order to provide a comprehensive treatise on this issue, quantitative figures, distinctive rhetoric features, as well as evidence of critical reflection have been incorporated. Furthermore, two main aspects of the study design give us new insights into the aftermath of 9/11, which are: 1.) distinguishing between editorials and 'news'- articles; 2.) focusing on the three most significant 'speeches ('Address to the nation') of president Bush. Due to an extensive inductive and deductive approach that was applied to the basic form of Philipp Mayring's content analysis, eighteen out of over one hundred articles have been thoroughly surveyed. As one of the main findings it was discovered that the New York Times took up a strongly ambivalent position through identifying and criticising Washington's omnipresent pro-war rhetoric on the one hand, while one the other hand adopting Bush's diction without using any punctuation marks. Moreover, by falling for the orchestrated war clouds of the gover [...]
doi:10.25365/thesis.59258 fatcat:okmtltv5f5fkhadfb2vzj5ogc4