Travel Journalism: Europe imagining the Middle East

Like international news, travel journalism draws upon and perpetuates the “home” nation’s collective imagination of different parts of the world (Fursich and Kavoori, 2001). In keeping with the hierarchical nature of news genres and the academic attention they garner, travel journalism has tended to be overlooked in favour of the “hard” news of political reporting. Nonetheless, given its long history of representing “other” peoples and “other” places, travel journalism is an equally important site for the study of transcultural encounters.

This paper focuses on the ways in which travel journalism represents the Middle East in three British Sunday broadsheets; The Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, and The Sunday Telegraph as well as Amman to Wadi Rum, a programme broadcast by the pan-European network, the Travel Channel. The rich cultural and political heritage of Europe’s relations with the Middle East provides an ideal context to examine how travel journalism frames “others”. Specifically, three primary considerations will be addressed: how does this journalism construct cultural frames for the peoples and places of the Middle East?; to what extent do these cultural frames draw upon Europe’s colonial past?; and is this representational trope constitutive of a European imagining of the Middle East?