Framing the Iraq war : a critical analysis of the mainstream western news media's explanations of violence during the occupation of Iraq

This dissertation provides a contribution to the criminology of war from the perspective of cultural criminology. The research conducted a critical analysis of the mainstream Western news media's explanations of violence during the US-led occupation of Iraq. The sample covered the period from 19th March 2003 - 1st January 2009. This period spanned the beginning of military operations, the height of the counter insurgency war up to the systematic reduction in Coalition forces, after the transfer of security control of the Green Zone in Baghdad to Iraqis. The study utilised a discourse analytic approach to critically assess the explanations of violence found in articles from print news sources in both the US and UK. These explanations were contrasted with alternative arguments found in marginal, left-leaning news sources, to test the hypothesis that the mainstream media wilfully neglected to present a comprehensive analysis of state criminality in occupied Iraq. The research utilised data from the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs and human rights reports in order to provide evidence of the consistent resort to state-sanctioned violence by the occupying Coalition and associated proxy forces. It was found that the mainstream media were complicit in hiding evidence of state criminality during the occupation. Instead, the media sources sampled characterised the violence inherent to the occupation of Iraq as the product of entrenched ethnic divisions, the influence of foreign jihadists migrating into Iraq, or the result of mistakes made in the administration of the occupation by the Coalition. Congruence was found between these explanations and those adopted by political leaders. Each of these explanations were found to have some merit but served to marginalize state criminality from popular public discourse. In short: the thesis argued that the mainstream media constructed a hegemonic discourse in line with official government and military accounts of the conflict.