Despite âexistingâ in some form or another since the late 1980s, the events of September 11th 2001 served to project the al-Qaeda phenomenon into the global consciousness. On that fateful day, citizens around the world were introduced to the looming figure of Osama bin Laden and his amorphous terrorist âorganisationâ, while at the same time witnessing a level of terror and destruction never before seen in the West. In the words of Christina Hellmich and Andreas Behnke, this event can be regarded as the âopening of a blank pageâ upon which al-Qaedaâs narrative was to be written. 1 In particular, this process of knowledge production was most evident within the news media, where in the days and weeks that followed, accounts of bin Ladenâs immense wealth and influence, along with stories about al-Qaedaâs sheer size and scale, dominated the news agenda. In the United States, for example, Brigitte L. Nacos has shown how bin Laden appeared on U.S. television more often than President Bush following the September 11th 2001 attacks , dominating news reports, documentaries, and current affairs programming. 2 Within such coverage, the strangeness and unfamiliarity evoked by the word âal-Qaedaâ ensured that journalists and producers had to employ a series of culturally available frameworks of knowledge in order to make both âal-Qaedaâ and âbin Ladenâ mean something for their audiences.
For trusted institutions like the BBC, the growing sense of fear and anxiety that followed these events meant that its news staff had to quickly make sense of the uncertainty surrounding who, and what, was behind the attacks in order to provide its citizens not only with a clear idea of why someone would carry out such an act, but also a broader sense of security, stability and reassurance. As Mark Easton , the BBCâs Home Affairs Editor, recalls,
[a]t the time we were developing our understanding of what âal-Qaedaâ was, and were in a continual dialogue about how best to describe it. This was an ongoing process, and not something that could simply be done in a two-minute bulletin. Our aim was to be as accurate and truthful as possible with the resources we had at the time⊠but it was, and still is, a really difficult area for any journalist to cover. 3
Thus, in the days, weeks and months following the events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, a slow process of signification began to take shape which has, despite the best intentions of institutions such as the BBC, given rise to the elusive and continually shifting enemy that continues to mystify and evade meaning today.
It is this process of meaning-making that the current book seeks to analyse and interrogate. It aims to explore the various ways in which âal-Qaedaâ has been represented and made meaningful for British news audiences, and understand how these portrayals have changed over the course of the âwar on terrorâ. In particular, it seeks to shed light on the way these representations have, in the absence of any stable ontological and epistemological frameworks of knowledge, functioned as a continually shifting site upon which a broad range of fears, identities, discourses and forms of knowledge and power struggle and contend. As will be seen in the pages that follow, despite a significant amount of scholarly attention surrounding al-Qaeda, there has been surprisingly little consideration of the way the media have sought to represent this entity for citizens. Moreover, within this nascent academic field there has been no attention given to the way âal-Qaedaâ has been visually and verbally constructed within the news media, or the way news language and imagery work together in order to secure, or challenge, dominant understandings of the terror threat. It is this focus that distinguishes this book from other works focusing on al-Qaeda and the âwar on terrorâ, and, as such, provides direct insight into the production and politics of âal-Qaedaâ as an object of representation, discourse, knowledge and power.
Focusing on the medium of television news, âthe main source of news and information for populations across the Western worldâ, 4 and in particular the BBCâs flagship âNews at Tenâ programme, Britainâs most watched and trusted bulletin, 5 the book sheds light upon the representational practices underpinning some of the most significant al-Qaeda-related events of the past decade. Beginning with the September 11th 2001 attacks , the book analyses over 30 hours of BBC news coverage from across the âwar on terrorâ period, encompassing the January 5th 2003 Wood Green ricin plot, the July 7th 2005 transport bombings, and the May 2nd 2011 death of Osama bin Laden. Despite being taken from a broad range of national and international contexts, these case studies provide insight into the many ways âal-Qaedaâ has been presented to British news audiences over a 10-year period. Perhaps more importantly, however, each case study shows how the meaning of âal-Qaedaâ changes in relation to the various contexts in which the BBC reports and the emergence of new discourses and frameworks of knowledge surrounding the terror threat more broadly.
The overall argument is as follows: Rather than simply view al-Qaeda in a material sense, as a phenomenon made up of real people in real locations around the world, the book suggests that this threat can be better understood as a discursive entity that derives much of its form, strength and structural coherence from the representations offered by the news media. This is not to say that al-Qaeda is not ârealâ, or that its acts violence do not cause physical harm, but more simply that, for most people in the United Kingdom, our understanding of who and what âal-Qaedaâ is has been shaped by a limited series of words, images , and sounds; in short, through what the French philosopher Michel Foucault refers to as âdiscourseâ. 6 According to Foucault, discourses can be understood to be a highly regulated âsystem of representationâ that help us to stabilise and make sense of ârealâ-world phenomena such as terrorism . 7 But rather than simply represent reality, discourses systematically form the objects and subjects of which they speak. 8 Understood in this way, instead of being conceived as something that exists prior to, or separate from, the BBCâs reporting during the âwar on terrorâ , al-Qaeda can be viewed as an entity that emerges from within such coverage. These representations are by no means neutral reflections of reality, but instead are a dynamic site upon which a whole range of conflicting ways of seeing, speaking and thinking are enacted, with the meaning of al-Qaeda shifting in relation to the various cultural materials and frameworks of knowledge that emerge during a given event and the different contexts the BBCâs reports within. Thus, in the same manner that Edward W. Said describes how âa scarecrow is assembled from bric-a-brac and then made to stand for manâ, 9 this book sets out to detail the process through which al-Qaeda has been pieced together from a range of discursive components and then made to stand for a more complex and convoluted reality. More so than this, however, rather than show how these depictions simply serve as a repository for the most reductive discourses circulating within society, the book provides insight into the complexity of the BBCâs representations ; showing how, in the absence of any lasting cultural frameworks for knowing and understanding âal-Qaedaâ, they simultaneously draw upon and challenge the kinds of portrayals that are traditionally understood to inform Western coverage of âIslamicâ terrorism . And, in so doing, it reveals how the dominant mode of representation to emerge within the Corporationâs coverage over the course of the âwar on terrorâ period is one that increasingly resembles Britainâs own, diverse and multicultural âSelfâ.
Following on from this, the analysis has two primary aims. First, it seeks to explore the nature of the BBCâs representations of the al-Qaeda phenomenon: posing a series of interconnected questions that focus on the manifest and latent content of the BBCâs coverage, such as âhow is âal-Qaedaâ visually and verbally represented within the BBCâs coverage?â and âhow have these representations changed over the course of the âwar on terrorâ?â Despite their apparent simplicity, few scholars have sought to consider these questions in regard to news media representations of this entity. More to the point, because of the centrality of news in formulating public understandings of social and political phenomena it is vitally important that we investigate the nature of its representations of terrorism, because it is from these portrayals that all else follows. As Jonas Hagmann explains, representations of terrorism are important because they provide âknowledge bases for political actionâ. 10 Here, in addition to Foucaultâs development of the concept of discourse, the book draws upon the methodological tradition of multimodal discourse analysis to help account for the way âverbal, visual and aural aspects ...