Ph.d.afhandling Hanne Jørndrup - Syddansk Universitet

SummaryWartime Journalism- An analysis of the relation between journalistic practise and the national context asreflected in the Danish newspapers’ coverage of the breakout of the Iraq war inMarch 2003The general aim of the thesis is to problematise the relation between journalistic practise and thenational context in which journalism operates. The approach used is a detailed empirical analysis ofthe Danish newspaper coverage of the first ten days of the Iraq war. The general problematic thuslocates in the more specific relation between Danish journalistic practise and the Danish nationalstate.The thesis is subsequently structured in terms of three more specific questions:1. Methodologically the thesis asks how the study of journalism should be carried outwhen the aim is to investigate the relation between journalistic practise and the nationalcontext?2. Empirically the thesis asks what are the concrete examples of journalism formulatingits content in and in relation to the national context, implicitly as well as explicitly?3. Analytically the thesis asks what can possibly be concluded about the relation betweenjournalistic practise and the national state on the basis of the empirical analysis. Moreprecisely, the question is whether or not it is possible to characterise journalism as a practiseworking independently of the interests of the national state and the dominant definitions ofnational community values?The three sub-questions are answered in an analysis of 1250 newspaper articles from six Danishnewspapers written in a time-span of 10 days, starting few days before the breakout of the Iraq war.The Iraq war was chosen as case-study because it is the first war of aggression in 150 years involvingthe Danish state and the expectation was therefore that the coverage of the war would providevaluable and substantial material reflecting the relation between journalistic practise and the nationalcontext.Apart from elaborating on precisely those content-relative questions raised by a specific empiricalcase, the thesis also contributes to the development of analytical methods and perspectives in Danishjournalistic research. It in fact develops an analytical method by way of which journalistic textscan be studied. Methodologically inspiration is found in Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis,something which is reflected in the way normal journalistic categories, such as conceptions of journalisticgenre and general news criteria are used as suturing points for the analysis and in the at-307