The Times and the Northern Ireland Conflict

Abstract

In societies in conflict the role of the media is supposed to be neutral and to report conflicts fairly and with balanced analyses. By their public debates on conflicts they are also supposed to take part in pacifying societies and in helping to bring peace. Cottle (1997), for instance, explained that even though some findings related to the British media and its reporting of the Northern Ireland conflict were relevant, he argued that they needed revision. Consequently, he proposed new paradigms of media studies. Elliott (1977) and Curtis (1996) showed that the British media concentrated on violence in general and on republican violence in particular. Moreover, they argued that the British media neglected social and political contexts in their reporting of the conflict. The aim of this paper is then to examine some aspects of how the British media cover the Northern Ireland conflict. We studied the coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict by The (London) Times (1990-1995). We used a discourse analysis method to study the paper's discourse structure in its representation of the Northern Ireland conflict.