Media Coverage of 2003 Peace Movement

To understand media coverage of the protest, or antiwar movement that coalesced in early 2003 against the Iraqi War, requires an understanding of the growing interconnectedness between the mass media and protest or peace movements. Peace movements rely on the media to spread their message. Media coverage, however, depends not only upon the news value of an event, but on other factors such as the size of the crowed and social and political issues.

An examination of media coverage of the peace movement during

the 2003 Iraq War indicates that traditional media outlets in the United States played down the historical and political significance of the movement, only adjusting their coverage as protestors directly confronted them. Media professor Barbara Epstein, who teaches in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz and has research extensively in the field of cultural politics and social movements points out, the peace movement against the 2003 war in Iraq was the largest ever global movement against a single war. In spite of this, the peace movement did not always receive the media attention demanded by its numbers. Barbara Epstein teaches in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz and has researched extensively in the field of cultural politics and social movements. This paper analyzes several articles on peac

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verage. Specifically, Kim located 61 stories about the Kwangju movement in the Lexis-Nexis database and the New York Times Index as opposed to 302 stories for the Tiananmen movement in the same sources. Moreover, Kim argued that the Kwangju coverage "was not reported with the outrage that marked the reporting of the Tiananmen movement" (Kim, 2000, p. 22). Kim explains the difference in coverage of the two similar pro-democracy events by reference to the different relationships each country's government had with the United States. The U.S. media is not alone in its domestic bias, however. Glenn Frankel and Emily Wax, writing for the Washington Post, noted that Iraq war coverage during 2003 in the national media of various nations was often colored by national interests. For example, they noted that newspapers in countries who governments opposed the war also tended to editorialize against the war and were more willing to cover negative aspects of the war (Frankel & Wax, A1). For example, they noted that Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite network that attracted a large Arab following, broadcast images of casualties it claimed were caused by the attack on Basra and offered interviews with the first Iraqi casualties at a Ba
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Some common words found in the essay are:
A1 Casualty, Santa Cruz, Post Newsweek, Post's Ombudsman, Washington Post, Communication Studies, Kim Rachlin's, South Korea, York Israel, Nonetheless Giles, media coverage, peace movement, social movements, york times, washington post, iraq war, giuffo 2001 14, giuffo 2001, 2001 14, 2000 22, kim 2000, kim 2000 22, peace movement 2003, 2003 iraq war, los angeles times,
Approximate Word count = 2556
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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