WHAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DESERVE FROM AMERICAN JOURNALISM DURINGWARTIME: A FIRST AMENDMENT VIEW ABETTED BY SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

Journalism Studies, 9, 38-56

Arnold S. Wolfe, Ph.D., Jeromy Swanson, and Stacy Wrona

AbstractFrom a First Amendment theoretical perspective, the freedoms constitutionally guaranteed the U. S. media are bound to expectations that they will “wide[ly] disseminat[e to Americans] information from diverse and antagonistic sources” (A. P. v. U. S. 1945, p. 20). Analyses of two 2005 reports on the Iraq War posted on the Internet by two prominent U. S. news organizations,however, show that they are presenting Americans with pro-Bush administration, anti-“insurgent,” pro-war readings of the events reported. In light of these analyses, the “performance” of the U.S. texts in meeting First Amendment obligations is discussed.

Key words: First Amendment, Internet, Iraq, journalism criticism,semiotics, war reporting

“The concept of press freedom . . . comprises not only the free flow of ideas . . . but also a defense against [even] attempts

at influence by . . . the state” (Baerns 2003, p. 101).

What expectations ought the American people have of the journalism that claims to serve them in times of war? For the authors of one of the most canonical texts in communication law, such “reporting . . . has always presented the most difficult challenge for a free press in a democratic society” (Pember & Calvert 2005, p. 88). To explain how this study will approach thequestion it poses, we will first interpret from a First Amendmenttheory perspective the quote used as a preface. Our reading is guided by the U. S. Supreme Court ruling in the landmark case, Associated Press v. United States (1945). In it, the Court held that the “First Amendment assum[es] that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” (p. 20). Hence, freedom is constitutionally granted the news media in order that they serve what the Federal Communications Act of 1934

calls “the public interest.”Baerns (2003) specifies no fewer than two ways the media do

this. One is by expressing ideas free from governmental prior restraint (see also Kelly 2003). A U. S. Senator, however, reminds us that under the Constitution, the media merit such freedom because the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is “crucial for a democracy” (DeWine in U. S. Senate 1999). Media freedom is central to the task of maintaining and sustaining democratic governance in the United States--arguably, in every democracy. Thus, journalism also serves the public interest in another way: by sustaining democracy in resisting “attempts [by] the state [to] influence” reporting, particularly on such governmental affairs as making war (Baerns 2003, p. 101).

For journalist Moyers (2003) “journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is . . . the oxygen . . . of democracy” (p. 4; see also International Federation of Journalists 1954). “The truth,” of course, can either help or harm public officials elected to determine the interests of the state they govern. In wartime, “journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor” serves the public interest in maintaining democratic governance by disseminating diverse and antagonistic information about the war being waged in the public’sname. Again, such journalism best performs its constitutional function when it resists, and even defeats, attempts by the stateto shape its reporting (Baerns 2003). The “guarantee of press freedom,” writes Kirtley (1992, p. 474) “should assure the public of independent information about military activities” (emphasis added.).

Over the past two decades, however, the freedom of U. S. news media to “tell . . . the truth without fear or favor” about U. S.military actions has lessened (Pember & Calvert 2005). So, too, have attempts, especially by the most powerful U. S. media organizations, to resist government efforts to influence or thwart truthful, “fear”less, impartial reporting.2 For Greenberg (1993, p. 120), U. S. journalism during the Gulf War of 1991 was so “partisan [and] propagandistic” in favor of the policies of then-President George H. W. Bush that it “intensif[ied the] crisis of democracy” in the U. S. that the government and media had (putatively) previously co-constructed (see also Hallin 1992). During that conflict, wrote an American foreign policy scholar, the interests of the U. S. military overrode the interests of the U. S. media in functioning as an independent

guardian of the public interest and “pillar of the American democratic system” (Dennis 1993, p. 316; see also Gottschalk 1992; Jacobs 1992; Pember & Calvert 2005).

The changes in news reports that the military “insisted on” during the Gulf War rarely had anything to do with “military security” (Gottschalk 1992, p. 460). Even so, both politicians and military officials repeatedly violated the “prohibition of government abridgement of freedom of the press” (Smith 1999, p. 221; see also Pember & Calvert 2005). In sum, the U. S. news media failed to adequately serve the public interest in covering the Gulf War, because they did not supply Americans with information about it from sufficiently diverse and sufficiently antagonistic sources (Greenberg 1993; Gottschalk 1992; Jacobs 1992; Jensen 1997; Smith 1999). Rather, the U. S. media “emphasi[zed] views [of the war] that conflated patriotism, militarism, and nationalism” (Allen et al. 1994, p. 272).

Undoubtedly, some will call our contention that the media mustserve the public during wartime naïve. But the expectation that they meet or even exceed the obligations the High Court prescribes in A. P. v. U. S. is not this study's or that ruling'salone. Sharkey (2001, p. 24) argues that “the First Amendment wascreated because the founders [of the U. S.] believed the government was not to be ‘trust[ed]’ to supply citizens with whata general called ‘the realities of war’” (Weyand, quoted in Sharkey 2001, p. 24). Americans' trust for accurate accounts of such realities is better placed in the media, which are constitutionally guaranteed freedom in order that they produce such accounts (see New York Times v. U. S. 1971). Whether the U. S. media meet their First Amendment obligations during wartime is debatable. From a First Amendment theoretical perspective, however, Sharkey, Jacobs (1992), and many other scholars concur with the Supreme Court in New York Times v. U. S. (1971). The opinion explains that the media are granted liberty “so that [they] could bare . . . secrets of the government [in order] to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people [in attempts to] send [them] to distant lands to die of foreign fevers[,] shot and shell” (quoted in Gillmor, Barron, & Simon 1998, p. 48).

On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered U. S. forces to invade Iraq, giving American journalism another opportunity to serve the public interest during wartime. The central assumption that drives our analysis of the U. S. journalism we will scrutinize is that a resolution of the

hostilities in Iraq that have cost, and continue to cost, American and Iraqi lives and material assets is in the public interest. Congruent with this assumption, but not only with this assumption, the performance of the U. S. media in covering the Iraq War as servant to the public interest warrants examination.

Content Analysis as Method for Examining the Research Question

The number of published, broadcast, and web-posted news reports on the war since hostilities started, while not infinite,is very large. When a universe of news texts is so sizeable, communication scholars often turn to content analysis to “describe” such universes (Berelson, quoted in Patterson 1984, p.36; for exemplars, see Griffin & Lee 1995; Haigh et al. 2006; King & Lester 2005; Miller 1982; Patterson 1984). But content analysis may not be the optimal method to address the research question asked, namely, “In light of what could be called the First Amendment obligations of the U. S. media, what expectationsought Americans have of the journalism that claims to serve them in wartime?”

Content analysis has been defined as “a research technique that allows for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson, quoted in Patterson 1984, p. 36). By “manifest content” is meant “what is (or was) said or printed, not what is [or was] between the lines” (Patterson 1984, p. 36, citing Blake & Haroldsen). Butcontent analysis has also been characterized as “ad hoc” and frequently providing little else but “simple descriptions of the most easily observable dimensions of news coverage.” Four such dimensions are counting the “amount of airtime [and column inches] given to certain issues” (Patterson 1978, p. 177), the size in square inches of photographs that “covered” two wars (King & Lester 2005, p. 623), and number of pictures that showed “Allied” and Iraqi “troops” (Griffin & Lee 1995, p. 817). “Innocent of any theoretical notions” (Patterson 1978, p. 177), content analysis essentially equates one news “message” that could be taken as pro-war as equal to precisely minus one news “message” that could be taken as anti-war (see Owen 1975).

Media economist Owen (1975, p. 21) emphatically disagrees. “Itis simply not true that one ‘pro-Labor” word [or picture] is equal to another and exactly equal to minus one ‘pro-Management’ word” or picture. He blasts content analysis methods as theoretically “infirm,” rather than simply innocent, because,

despite their frequency of use by researchers, these methods “arenot grounded on any theory of [media] consumer psychology or reception.” Typically, too, content analysts ignore meaningful “extra-linguistic” features of any given news text, such as the size of the font in which a headline is printed or the camera-to-subject distance in any photograph of the “content” it depicts.3

A content analysis of television coverage of the “Iran Crisis”of 1979-80, for example, calculated the amount of airtime networknews programs allotted to reports on that topic, coded them as towhether they were presented from a studio or an exterior locationand also as to whether they included graphics or other visual illustrations. Such elements of these texts as what any such visuals displayed and which linguistic signs accompanied which graphic or other visual signs were not analyzed, due to their allegedly “subjective” nature (Miller 1982, p. 392; see also Rassi 1993). Yet, Hartley (1982, p. 181) insists that the “role” visual signs play “in the construction of meanings” of media texts is “crucial.”

Miller and Rassi are not alone in employing such an ad hoc, simplistic, atheoretical, medium-ignoring method. Patterson (1984) content analyzes Vietnam War coverage in photo-rich U. S. news magazines, implicitly comparing their coverage to television’s.4 He counts the number of stories dealing with Vietnam printed and whether they reported combat or not, and, like Miller, “whether they were with or without pictures” and whether they showed combat or not (pp. 35, 39; emphasis added.). He employs this approach despite acknowledging that the “most vivid images” of that war “are remembered as symbols [that produced] a series of dramatic, striking and memorable impressions”(Patterson 1984, pp. 35, 39; emphasis added). “Impressions” strongly implies meanings, as opposed to “content” units, which are meaningful to content analysts only--and primarily because such units are countable. In effect, Patterson (1984, p. 39) approaches the problem of “impressi[ve]” journalism by giving lipservice to its power to be vivid, dramatic, striking, and memorable. Yet, like Miller (1982), Patterson (1984) employs a research method that privileges the most easily observable dimensions of news coverage and does not and cannot account for the communicative power that makes some reports more dramatic, striking, memorable, and impressive than others.5

King and Lester's (2005) content analysis of Gulf- and Iraq War photographs also isolates several content categories. One is:pictures that show prisoners. But King and Lester's method does

not and cannot account for the power that makes some pictures more dramatic, striking, memorable, and impressive than others. King and Lester would count one of the notorious images of the abused prisoners at Abu Graib (see Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald 2004) as no different from a picture of a detainee held by U. S. Marines after a Fallujah firefight (see Niedringhaus 2004). Both pictures “count” only because and only insofar as both show prisoners. Both mean nothing more than that they both show prisoners. All other meanings each may convey are “between the lines” (Patterson 1984, p. 36), “subjective” (Miller 1982, p. 392), of no scholarly value.

King and Lester (2005) do not and cannot account for the communicative power of what could be called “the news report photograph” in part because their method cleaves each one from the linguistic details that surrounded it when it was first published. Content analysis ignores the interrelations among the pictorial and linguistic details in the news report that construct its meaning(s), taken both as a whole and, as we hope to show, in at least some of its parts (see Hartley 1982). As distinct from content analysis, the method we shall defend rejects the notion that the report is an amassment of analysts’ coding categories—of isolated prisoner “content” in one sentence,isolated soldier “content” in a second, and an isolated image on the same page that shows subjects from a “far” distance (to invoke three of King and Lester's categories). Rather, semioticians insist that any meaning any news consumer makes fromany report does not stem from analysts’ coding categories (Hartley 1982; Fiske 1982).

All pictures of “prisoners” do not mean the same. A “far image” (King & Lester 2005, p. 631) that depicts the charred remains of an American contractor hanging from an Iraqi bridge does not mean the same as a far image of Humvees on patrol. News reports are not “collections” of coding categories. They are “narratives” (Brooks et al. 2007, p. 4; see also Campbell, Martin, & Fabos 2000)--not collections but “connections” that journalist-narrators forge between and among the pictorial and linguistic signs they choose (Toliver 1974, p. 4; Hartley 1982). As one narratologist insists, “Neither ‘the facts’ nor our ‘experience[s]’” in response to them “come to us in discrete and disconnected packets [read: content categories.] Rather, they stand in need of some narrative which can bind the facts . . . together into [an] intelligibl[e] coherenc[e]” (Goldberg 1982, p.242).

The news narrative, or report, is not designed to get its consumers to think about or recall the coding category or categories that content analysts decoct from it. Rather, the report is designed get its consumers to think about what it predicates of the prisoners or soldiers it signifies. Humans, citizens, do not make sense of “their world” by consuming quantities of “far shots” of diverse persons and objects or by consuming quantities of pictures of prisoners. Communication scholars Sillars and Gronbeck (2001, p. 23) insist: Humans make sense of “their world” by consuming narratives. Even more pivotally, given the research question of this study, citizens indemocracies decide to take action to influence their rulers by consuming narratives, rather than quantities of content category units. Hence, this study’s research question--“Do U. S. media reports provide U. S. news consumers with diverse and antagonistic views on wars U. S. governments make?--requires a research method that takes into account those communication processes by which the journalist encodes meaning(s) into her reports and by which the consumer decodes meanings from them (seeHall 1980).6

For the authors of a canonical newswriting text, the news report is designed “to convey understanding” (Brooks et al. 2007,p. 9; see also Hall 1997). Its meanings, or understandings, are made possible only by the relationship between its signs (Hartley1982)—by the relationship between a sign that signifies “soldiers,” for instance, and other signs the report signifies in relation to its linguistic and/or pictorial signification of soldiers. The report “produces” its consumer’s “sense” of the physical and social world of which both the report and its consumer are parts “depend[ing] on the nature of the signs it uses” (p. 15) and their “storied connection” (Toliver 1974, p. 4;Sillars & Gronbeck 2001). Understandings, harvested from “connections” that journalist-narrators fuse between and among the pictorial and linguistic signs they choose, are what move citizens in democracies to take actions that support or oppose the leaders who compel them to risk their lives and property in war.

Recently, content analysis studies have invoked what King and Lester (2005) call framing theory (see also Haigh et al. 2006). While it seems unfalsifiable to say that “media frames” help journalists construct news texts and help audiences comprehend them (Entman 1991), content analysis does not and cannot explain how news words and images considered both separately and in

tandem fashion the frames that frame theorists claim to be so influential. Entman (1991) allows that “news frames are constructed from and embodied in the key words, metaphors, . . . symbols, and visual images emphasized in a news narrative” (p. 7). But analyses that describe precisely how news narratives prefer certain words (as key) while they downplay others or that describe how words, key or otherwise, work with “images” to construct “symbols” are not to be found in either King and Lester’s or Haigh et al.’s discussions of Iraq War news frames.7

Missing, too, from content analysis is any grasp of “what we know about how people perceive and absorb . . . news content” (Findahl & Hoijer 1981, p. 116) or any theory that explains how they do. Findahl and Hoijer (1981), Georgoudi and Rosnow (1985), and Hartley (1982) insist that receiver understanding, or meaning, grasped from media presentations, again depends on relationships--among words and images and between senders and receivers. By isolating words, phrases, and images into discrete coding categories, content analysis severs them from their mutualrelatedness and assumes away concern for both those communicationprocesses that link them to one another and those that link senders to receivers (Findahl & Hoijer 1981; Georgoudi & Rosnow 1985; Hartley 1982; Toliver 1974).

Therefore, in order to determine the extent to which the U. S.news media are fulfilling their constitutional function of maximizing democratic decision-making in wartime--in promoting, as the High Court put it, “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open . .. debate on public issues” relating to war (New York Times v. Sullivan 1964, p. 270)--scholars must consider the meanings war reports present. Such meanings must be problematized, not assumed. Content analysis is simply not designed to do this.

An Alternative Approach to News Meaning-Making: Semiotic Theory

Semiotic theoreticians, however, insist that the meanings members of a culture make of the texts that circulate within it are products of sign relations. “Meaning is made possible by the relationship[s] between sign and sign” (Hall 1997, p. 20; see also Peterson 2001; Tudor 1970). We have noted that each sign in a media text is related to other signs set in it. Yet, each sign is also related to other signs that are not visible but which the message-maker could have chosen instead (Hartley 1982, pp. 13-21; Fiske 1982; Hall 1997). Semiotic theory attempts to explain how words, images, and sounds generate meaning, taken separately and

in combination (Dyer 1982; Fiske 1982; Hall 1997; Hartley 1982).Until now, however, semiotic analyses of news texts have been

relatively rare (Hartley 1982; Wolfe 1992). Given the centrality of meaning to the research question posed, we will proceed by attempting to apply two elemental semiotic concepts to two Internet-posted news texts produced by two major U. S. news organizations. The focal theoretic-methodological contentions of this effort are that semiotic analyses of a small number of textscovering aspects of the Iraq War may suggest answers to the research question that content analysis cannot and that the method that produces these answers promises not only a more comprehensive, medium-conscious understanding of such texts. It also offers an “explicit, consistent, and therefore . . . useful”means (Scholes 1982, p. 56) for harvesting meanings such texts make by taking into account, as content analysis does not, two relationships among the linguistic and pictorial signs that constitute the news report. They are: relationships between and among the constituting signs and between the visible, or selected, signs and others that could have been chosen but were not.

Semiotic theory attempts to explain how readers who hold in common with journalists the same linguistic and pictorial codes are able to “‘translate’” what news reports say into what readers“understand, and vice versa” (Hall 1997, p. 4). Scholars who use semiotic methods aim to describe the meanings texts make by asking such questions as: “What are the observable [or perceptible] signifiers” in the chosen texts? and “What are the signifieds that these signifiers suggest?” (Beasley & Danesi 2002, pp. 71, 28). This research poses these questions to the chosen texts and accounts for the aforementioned relationships that structure them. This research argues that the effort to determine the extent to which the U. S. media are fulfilling their constitutional function of maximizing democratic decision-making in wartime calls for a research method that respects both the culturally-shared processes by which newsworkers encode meanings into their reports and by which consumers make sense of,or decode, the reports they consume.

Measures of frequencies and determining typicalities could follow studies that closely analyze such texts. Those analyses are likely to reveal meanings common to several reports. Such “emergent” meanings can then be utilized in efforts to determine their frequency across multiple texts. An emergent meaning that recurs across multiple texts can be conceptualized as an

ingredient in a new or previously existing narrative genre, or even a frame, that journalists and their audiences share in the culture in which that genre or frame circulates (see Entman 1991;King & Lester 1995; Haigh et al. 2006).

“This is a war of images and perceptions”Gen. George Casey, Commander of U. S. forces in Iraq (2005, October 14).

In the next section, we aim to show how Internet reports posted by two major U. S. news organizations represent U. S. and Iraqi combatants in ways that do little that can be reasonably expected to help resolve the current Iraq War. We contend that this criterion of evaluation accords with the argument detailed above that Iraq War reporting that would advance such a resolution is in the public interest. In semiotic theory, the term “paradigm” refers to the full range of choices available within a particular signifying, or sign-producing, category to message-makers aiming to communicate with actual or potential message consumers living within the same culture (Fiske 1982; Hartley 1982). The “meaning” of any given sign “is a product of socially recognized differences” between and among signs in each category (Hartley 1982, p. 18). The English language, for instance, retains many terms that can signify, or refer to, a warcombatant. Americans fluent in English, both journalists and readers, are familiar with socially recognized distinctions amongthe linguistic signs “insurgent,” “soldier” and “terrorist.” An American source defines “terrorist” as “someone using violence for political purposes” (Encarta). The same source defines an “insurgent” as “a rebel, someone who rebels against authority or leadership” (Encarta). An American definition of a “soldier” is “someone who serves in military service and works with dedicationfor a cause” (Encarta). “For the purposes of news” report composition, Hartley (1982) writes, “the main issue” is the choice of which sign to use in order to “realize, to make sense of, [a] real event” (p. 20). All the linguistic signs in any particular language that can refer to a war combatant may be called the “linguistic paradigm” of the war combatant.

Contrastingly, the semiotic notion of “syntagm” maintains thatthe meaning of any particular element, or sign, in any media presentation “can be affected by its relationship with others” set in the presentation. The “meaning” of that element “is determined partly by its relationship with others in the syntagm” that binds together elements in the presentation (Fiske 1982, p.

63; emphasis added.).We will consider syntagmatic relations in the texts studied.

The study concludes by(a) reflecting on the prowess of the semiotic tools it uses

to describe meanings the chosen news texts present,(b) returning to the question of whether these meanings can

be reasonably expected to help resolve the current struggle in Iraq, and

(c) considering in the light of this study’s analyses what we shall call the performance of these texts in meeting First Amendment obligations to widely disseminate to the American people information from diverse and antagonistic sources about the war their government is waging.

Method of Text Selection

This research began as a project for a media criticism class taught at a large Midwestern university. The course is required of Mass Communication majors. Approximately 50 students are eligible each semester to enroll in one of two 30-seat sections of the course. Only sections taught by Wolfe offer the assignmentthat produced the analyses detailed below. Among the eleven project choices Wolfe authorized during the Spring 2005 semester was one Wolfe developed that called upon students to apply the semiotic construct of syntagm to a web posting by a major U. S. media organization treating any aspect of the Iraq War. The assignment also required students to choose a posting that presented words, in the forms of both a headline and body “copy,”and at least one photograph.

Wolfe designed the assignment to encourage students to take the selected Internet text as other than an assemblage of isolable content categories but, rather, as a syntagm—or syntagmatic coherence—the meaning of which could be seen as arising not only from the posting’s parts--words, such as “soldier” or “content” pictured, such as an armed vehicle. More precisely, Wolfe designed the assignment to draw students’ attention to ways the meaning of any particular element, or sign,in a media presentation can be affected by its relationship with others placed in the presentation (Fiske 1982).

During the term Wolfe’s coauthors selected their research topics among the eleven choices Wolfe authorized, the number of web postings by major U. S. media organizations covering the IraqWar, while not infinite, must have numbered in the tens of

thousands. To summarize, any pair of approximately 25 two-person student teams could have chosen from any one of eleven research topics Wolfe devised for her/his course. Moreover, those studentswho chose to research U. S. news discourse on the Iraq War could have chosen from tens of thousands of texts that met the criteriaof the assignment: The selected text must treat any aspect of theconflict between U. S. and Iraqi citizens since hostilities formally began on March 19, 2003, and must contain “copy,” a headline, and at least one photograph. For the

present study, Wolfe’s student coauthors used a convenience sample Google search to choose a posting to analyze.

A search using the key phrase “Iraq war” led to a link to an MSNBC posting. The posting displayed a photograph of a bombed-outU. S. Humvee. The image was accompanied by copy and the headline,“Can election help turn tide against insurgency?” (Maceda 2005). The photo, headline, and copy of the posting were analyzed both separately and syntagmatically, that is, in combination. The Nordlands, Masland, and Dickey (2005) posting was selected via the same process, and its photo, headline, and copy were analyzedusing the same semiotic tools.

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

MacedaMaceda: Photo and : Photo and CutlineCutline

“A U. S. soldiersoldier looks at a burning Humvee.”

Methodology: Semiotic Perspectives on War Reporting

Semiotically speaking, news writers and photographers choose

linguistic and pictorial signs (copy and images) to create messages that readers use to formulate meanings they make from such messages. “A sign is any[thing that] can produce a meaning” (Hartley 1982, p. 11; see also Fiske 1982; Hall 1997). Both wordsand images may be taken to be signs (Fiske 1982; Hall 1997; Hartley 1982). Semiotics, the study of signs and sign-systems (Bertin 1983; Dyer 1982; Fiske 1982), distinguishes signs from the persons, objects, activities, or notions they refer to—“theirreferents” (Hartley 1982, p. 34). For this reason, Hartley (1982,p. 15) insists that “the event which is reported [never] determines the form, content, meaning, or ‘truth’ of the news, but rather, [it is] the news”--its institutions, persistent practices, and codes--that determines what . . . the event [reported] means.”

Semioticians are hardly alone in claiming news reports rarely show the real totality, or total reality, of any event or situation reported (see Epstein 1973; Gans 1979; Tuchman 1978). Hartley (1982, p. 15) maintains: “Neither news nor language are transparent windows on the world. They are both more like maps ofthe world.” The writers and photographers who create these “maps”seldom produce or reproduce a single “true” or veridical reality.Rather, what news producers and consumers call reality “is realized (in both senses of the word--made real and understood assuch)” by means, and by dint of the communicative power, of signs(p. 13). In contrast, none of the cited content analysis studies offers any theory that explains between how a consumer’s consumption of content categories relates to her sense (Sillars &Gronbeck 2001) or “understanding” (Brooks et al. 2007, p. 9) of reality.

Again, scholars who use semiotic methods aim to describe the meanings texts make by asking such questions as: “What are the observable signifiers” in the chosen texts? and “What are the signifieds that these signifiers suggest?” (Beasley & Danesi 2002, pp. 71, 28). Maceda’s (2005) MSNBC coverage of the war in Iraq uses the linguistic signifier “insurgent”--instead of “soldier,” “terrorist,” “resistor,” or “freedom-fighter”--to brand armed opponents of Bush administration Iraq policy. The choice of using one signifier over another is often determined bythe culture to which a person or organization belongs and may express and reinforce that culture’s “dominant discourses on national identity and citizenship” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2005). According to Hartley (1982, p. 21), “usage and general acceptance

[of such signs] are set up by a language community.” The culture of one language community can favor the use of a sign that another culture does not apply to a particular referent--the person, object, activity, or notion to which the sign is said to refer.

The culture of one language community can favor an interpretation of a sign that differs from the interpretation another culture assigns to it or its referent. A citizen living in a country at war, for example, may interpret the word, “insurgent” or “terrorist” differently than a citizen living in a country at peace. “The meaning of the preferred term ‘terrorist’ derives notfrom [combatants’] actions or identities as such, but from the relations between the sign ‘terrorist’ and others” in the paradigm that also includes “insurgent” (Hartley 1982, p. 20; emphasis added.). A given culture or “language community” may also syntagmatically bind positive or negative feelings to any given sign, depending on its meaning for that culture or community.8 Itseems safe to say that for the majority of U. S. citizens today, the words “terrorist” and “insurgent” as defined above have negative connotations. With this negative association (literally)a common sense among Americans, other negative terms, such as “blew up” or “destroyed” follow in train (p. 21). MSNBC is a joint venture of two major corporations, Microsoft and General Electric, parent company of the NBC broadcast television network.For reasons of the size of its corporate parents and its synergies with a major U. S. broadcast television network, MSNBC for the purposes of this research has been taken to be a mainstream U. S. media outlet.

In her study of U. S. journalism on the Gulf War, Liebes (1992, p. 52) found that U. S. news reports reinforced what she calls the “demonized” status of the word “terrorist” or “insurgent” by displaying only aspects of events reportedly involving such combatants that reinforced the negative meanings, or signifieds, Americans conventionally hitch to these terms. By so doing, major U. S. news outlets construed these combatants as subhuman. Consider, in this light, the image in Maceda (2005, p. 1) showing a bombed-out U. S. armed vehicle. The headline above the picture, “Can election help turn tide against insurgency?” effectively assigns blame to “insurgents” for the destruction visible. The picture thus reinforces the negative value Americansconventionally bind to the linguistic sign, “insurgents.”

“A U. S. army soldier looks at the burning [U. S.] Humvee,” the caption reads (emphasis added). The picture’s over-the-soldier’s-

shoulders view of the Humvee echoes the “soldier’s” perspective of the destruction, effectively sympathizing with that perspective. We acknowledge that the caption may not reinforce the positive value bound to the linguistic sign, “soldier.” But neither the caption nor the image to which it refers do anything to even interrogate, much less deconstruct, the positive value Americans conventionally bind to the linguistic sign, “soldier,” or to the depicted soldier’s somber evaluation of the sight before him or her.

Taken together syntagmatically, the picture, caption, and headline work to promote an emotionally-charged (LaGrandeur 2002), pro-American, pro-war, anti-“insurgent” reading of the events reported. As the late Susan Sontag (2003, p. 24) recently observed, “the ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin--is a . . .feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war.” MSNBC offers such an image, which, when joined to the report’s headline, brands and vilifies those responsible for the destruction and thereby reinforces a pro-American, pro-war, anti-“insurgent” reading of the events reported. This, in effect, is the “moral” of Maceda’s story. “Factual storytelling,” writes historian White(1981, p. 14), “is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality.”

Journalistic moralization, of course, can advance or retard democratic governance in wartime and is, therefore, a facet of journalism of surpassing interest to this study. But, to this focal facet of news texts content analysis as it has been definedabove turns a blind eye. In any case, story moralizations, White implies, do not register either textually, or with audiences, at the level of the coding category. Journalistic moralizations are expressed at the level of the narrative sign system.

Consider, too, if the Humvee of Maceda’s (2005) report had been photographed from a point 180 degrees away from the viewpoint of the shot posted. The Humvee would have burned in that photo’s foreground; at least one deflated U. S. soldier would have been shown looking on. S/he would have taken up less of the frame, and the view of the event would not echo the soldier’s. A different angle, a different paradigmatic choice from all the possible angles from which the sight could have beenshot, surely would not have produced a pictorial meaning, or moralization, identical to the meaning the posted shot presents. Yet, according to communication scholar Hart (1994, p. 66), U. S.journalism typically “asks us to forget that its pictures have

been selected from among an infinite number of alternative images, alternative news frames [agony and ruin vs. a defeat for the infidel foe, and] alternative camera angles.” Content analysis asks us to forget these things, too. Semiotic analysis does not. “Signs,” Hartley (1982, p. 17) writes, “gain their capacity for meaning by the differences which [are] establish[ed] between one another”—between one picture or “frame” or “angle,” and another.

The article discusses the war in Iraq and the elections scheduled to be held later in spring, 2005. The report quotes a U. S. military officer as saying, “‘[Iraqis] are extremely tribal. . . and mostly illiterate. The insurgents try to control them through intimidation. We are trying to win their trust and confidence’” (Maceda 2005, p. 3). Here, Maceda portrays U. S. “soldier[s]” as having positive intentions in preparing Iraq for the election, while he paints “insurgents,” Iraqis who oppose these Americans as “demon[s]” (Liebes 1992, p. 52). Even the article’s headline associates the word “insurgent” with a negative: By posing the question, “Can election help turn tide against insurgency?” (Maceda 2005, p. 1), the headline strongly implies that the outcome of the vote preferred by Maceda and MSNBC would be a defeat for opponents of Bush administration policy.

We have noted how one sign—here, “insurgents”—is conventionally linked to others, such as “destroyed” in the language community we shall call U. S. “news-discourse” (Hartley 1982, pp. 20-21). We have shown how pictorial signs—image elements signifying American soldiers and burning U. S. military vehicles, and camera angles that echo perspectives of the combatants shown—also are coupled to groupings of word signs to reinforce certain beliefs rather than others. Maceda’s (2005) promotion of the Iraq policies of the politically empowered extends a pattern Liebes (1992) found in U. S. media coverage of the Gulf War. Murdock (1974/1998) described this pattern more than three decades ago.

Those groups in society which occupy positions of the greatestpower and privilege will also tend to have the greatest accessto the means of communication, with the result that their particular definitions and explanations of . . . social and political situation[s are] enshrined in the major institution[s] of society, such as the media. (p. 206)

Journalists working for U. S. news organizations have not been encouraged to question the Bush administration’s definitions and explanations of the situation in Iraq. Newsworkers have been detained, had their news-gathering and transmission equipment confiscated, “suffered both verbal and physical abuse” and even ejection by U. S. government agents from the combat units to which they were assigned (Pember & Calvert 2005, pp. 88f).

We cannot deny that others may interpret the report differently than we. But as literary critic Culler (1980a) insists, choices made by message-makers always “presuppose modes of [reception] which are not random or haphazard” (p. 104). Interpretations directed by the convention of what could be called syntagmatic chaining (see Fiske 1982; Hartley 1982; Toliver 1974) “are not in any sense personal and idiosyncratic acts of free association”; on the contrary, they exemplify “very common and acceptable formal strategies” (Culler 1980b, p. 61). That the interpretations of this and the other U. S. media text we will read take each to be emotionally-charged (LaGrandeur 2002), pro-American, pro-war, and anti-“insurgent” also jibes with the pattern Liebes (1992) found in U. S. coverage of the Gulf War, a pattern Gottschalk (1992, p. 449), too, called “jingoistic [and] misleading” (see also Allen et al. 1994).

The Newsweek posting . Nordlands, Masland and Dickey (2005), authors of “Unmasking the Insurgents,” also elected to use certain signs, rather than others, in their Newsweek online report. On its page one, the report refers to armed opponents of Bush Iraq policy as “terrorist[s],” “suicide bomber[s]” and “fierce nationalist[s].” The term, “freedom-fighter,” another in Hartley’s (1982) list of choices within the linguistic paradigm of the war combatant, does not appear.

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Photo in Photo in Nordland Nordland et al. (2005)et al. (2005)

The trio’s word choices here arguably have less to do with theoccurrences reported on than the side in this conflict that the report favors. Hartley reminds us, “The reality you observe depends on how you look at it. . . . Meaning is made possible [not only] by the relationship between sign and sign, [but] by the social circumstances in which signs are uttered” (pp. 12, 20). Among the circumstances that likely influenced the paradigmatic choices evident are: (a) that Nordlands, Masland, and Dickey are employees of Newsweek, a another mainstream U. S. news outlet; (b) the conventionality in U. S. news-discourse of applying such terms to armed opponents of Bush administration Iraq policy (see Maceda 2005); and, (c) the again conventional undesirability of sympathizing with any “side” other than “ours” (see Liebes 1992; Pember & Calvert 2005) in any war report.

But, Hartley (1982, p. 20) maintains, even the sign “terrorist” can be read in several ways, depending on the reader’s “ideological position on . . . the conflict.” A “terrorist” to one reader may be taken to be a “freedom fighter” to another. Yet, Nordland, Masland and Dickey (2005) leave littleroom for doubt as to how they see the opposition. They stud theirreport with other references to these citizens that, in all fairness, can be charitably described only as non-neutral. Some are: “common thugs,” “suicide bomber[s],” “rebellious desert

tribesmen,” and “fanatics from . . . the Muslim world” (pp. 2, 3).

The pictorial part of the report shows five heavily armed persons menacingly displaying their weapons in a nondescript interior location. Looking directly into the camera with the onlyparts of their faces not masked or otherwise concealed--their pitiless eyes--the five are framed to vividly, dramatically, strikingly, and memorably (Patterson 1984) image the very “insurgent” Nordland, Masland and Dickey seek to “unmask.” Like its counterpart in Maceda (2005), the photo under scrutiny produces a particular viewpoint for the reader that functions “tosubstantiate the contentions of [the] journalists (Parry-Giles 2000, p. 211). But let us now consider the “performance” of both these U. S. media texts in meeting First Amendment obligations towidely disseminate to the American people information from diverse and antagonistic sources about the war their government is waging.

Evaluating the Reports: A First Amendment Perspective

Neither U. S. report quotes a single Iraqi source outside of government intelligence officers. No evidence shows that anyone from the opposition was interviewed or even quoted, much less paraphrased, from secondary sources. Absent, too, is any information from those with Middle East historical, sociological,political, cultural, religious, or military expertise.9 Americanswho disagree with Bush policy are nowhere evident. Expert and dissenting American alike do not figure in either report. Contentanalysis counts manifest “items,” but, as more than one literary critic reminds us, textual meaning is no less clearly expressed in what a text excludes than in what it includes (Scholem 1969; see also Jameson 1981).

In an article advocating change in undergraduate journalism curricula, Wilkins (1998, p. 64) calls on the academy to boost students’ “performance as . . . creators of reflective judgments that help [news consumers] understand the social, cultural, economic, and political worlds they inhabit.” Reflective judgment“requires the continual evaluation of beliefs, assumptions, and hypotheses against existing data and against other plausible interpretations of the data’” (quoting King & Kitchener, p. 68). But reflective judgment is not only lacking in students. Reflective judgment that could be advanced through diffusion of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is wholly

lacking in the texts analyzed. Neither offers other interpretations of the events or conditions reported. Neither promotes “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open . . . debate on public issues” relating to the Iraq War (New York Times v. Sullivan 1964, p. 270). Neither proposes, or refers to any proposal for, any resolution to the conflict other than the military one authorized by George W. Bush. MSNBC and Newsweek do post reports, but, in the final analysis, neither one serves the public interest as this study has defined it.10

First Amendment theorist Emerson (1970, p. 6) explains that under-girding what he calls “the system of freedom of expression”is the recognition that “an individual who seeks knowledge and truth must hear all sides of [any] question, consider all alternatives . . . and make full use of different minds.” Neitherthe reports studied nor those published by U. S. “embeds” (Fahmy & Johnson 2005) supply such multiple and alternative, or diverse and antagonistic, perspectives. The limited view of the Iraq War this journalism tenders echoes the quality of journalism U. S. news organizations produced during the Gulf War. “American media framing of [that] War,” wrote Liebes (1992, p. 54), “replicated that of the political leadership” then in power in the U. S. Of that coverage, even a U. S. Defense Department official admitted,“the reporting has been largely a recitation of what [the] administration” chose to disclose (Jensen 1997, p. 248). All sides, all alternatives, different minds (Emerson 1970) were not then and are not in these postings being represented to American news consumers by news media that claim to serve them. Then, as in these postings, the Bush administrations’ particular definitions and explanations of the situation in the region trump, and even silence, all others.

In “The First Amendment is Absolute,” Mieklejohn (1961) calls upon government to “inform and cultivate the mind . . . of a citizen so that [s/]he shall have the . . . dignity of a governingcitizen” (p. 257; emphasis added.). That government continually rebuffs this call ought to surprise no one. But that journalism does ought to alarm us all, even if the cynical among us already “knew” before this research began that mainstream U. S. media cannot be expected to supply the “information from diverse and antagonistic sources” (Associated Press v. United States 1945, p.20) that U. S. citizens need to “secure. . . Life, Liberty,” (United States Congress, 1776) and peace after their leaders authorized war on Iraq. Like the news report,however, relations among the American people, their government,

their news media, and the First Amendment can be grasped as a story, 230 years in its telling—with no end in sight. That story features some dramatic moments when the media dispersed reports that informed citizens that their governors or other leaders weredoing wrong. Mentioned already was the account of the Saigon police chief summarily executing an alleged Viet Cong. To this wecan add the Washington Post’s stories of Nixon administration corruption and Cronkite’s battlefield call to disentangle Americafrom Vietnam.

If the cynics are correct, the story of relations among the American people, their government, the news media, and the First Amendment is over. But we argue that the First Amendment directs media scholars to work in the public interest to redress and not accept a media that acts as a government megaphone. “The concept of press freedom,” Baerns (2003) writes, not only entails the freedom of the media to present ideas. The concept requires the media to be independent of government and to vigorously defend “itself against [even] attempts at influence by” it (p. 101, see also Kirtley 1992). We argue, further, that research methods thatrespect both the narrative nature of the news report and the unfinished narrative chronicling relations among the people, their government, and the media are better able than content analysis to portray and explicate both what the media cover and how they cover it.

Theoretical-Methodological Implications

Legal precedent holds that U. S. news media merit the freedomsthey have been constitutionally guaranteed when they provide U. S. news consumers with meaningful information from diverse and antagonistic sources. We have maintained that there are no conditions when Americans require such information more--nor are more justified in expecting that the media that claim to serve them deliver it--than when Americans risk death defending a givenadministration’s policy. We have argued that meaningful information is neither accurately nor adequately conceptualized by content analysis, that is, as “an isolatable unit [or category] to be studied as an independent variable that produces particular effects on the receiver” (Georgoudi & Rosnow 1985, p. 83; Findahl & Hoijer 1981). The present effort offers journalism scholars an alternate means to analyze news-discourse (Hartley 1982) as meaningful information or utterance, as a narrative designed to enable its consumers to “make sense” of both it and

the persons, objects, activities, or notions to which it refers (Goldberg 1982; Sillars & Gronbeck 2001).

To illustrate this alternative, we have applied to two news texts that report on aspects of the Iraq War two concepts from semiotic theory, a perspective under-utilized in journalism research. Again, semiotic theory attempts to explain how words and images generate meaning, and because, in contrast to content analysis, semiotics maintains that “meaning is made possible by the relationship[s] between sign and sign” (Hartley 1982, p. 20; Tudor 1970), the two semiotic concepts the study employs to address the question it poses are paradigm and syntagm. Applied to the texts studied, paradigmatic analysis directs the researcher not only to consider the individual linguistic or pictorial sign the media text makes visible but to consider as well the sign’s relations to those signs that were not made visiblebut which could have been. Contrastingly, syntagmatic analysis directs the researcher to consider relations between and among the linguistic or pictorial signs that media texts do make visible (Hartley 1982). Among the relations in the texts studied are those between linguistic sign and linguistic sign in the bodyof each report, between linguistic signs in the body of each report and linguistic signs in its headline, and between both types of linguistic signification and the image sign system that is joined to the text’s headline or body or both.

We do not rule out the possibility that the content analysis method of counting the frequencies of use of terms (such as “insurgent” or “freedom fighter”) or of one category of picture (such as those showing members of the U. S. armed forces) or another (such as those showing armed opponents of U. S. policy) can be helpful in communication study. But, to borrow a phrase from a semiotician, the aim of the news report is not simply to “render some object or other,” to present what many would call “content.” Rather, the aim of the news report is to make its renderings—its pictorial, linguistic, and/or audio representations of persons, objects, activities, or notions (Hartley 1982)—“carrier[s] of meaning” (Lotman 1976, p. 14). Semiotic theory attempts to explain how news consumers “translate” what news reports say or represent into what readers “understand, and vice versa” (Hall 1997, p. 4). Accordingly, to paraphrase an analyst of another mass media form, “Whatever political aims one may havefor” journalism, whatever standards for it one seeks to apply, the need to evaluate how news texts “deal with issues of . . . meaning”--how they formulate it and disperse it--will “inevitably

remain one central concern of [inquiry.] A better understanding of the cultural object,” here, the news report grasped as a narrative sign system, “must precede, provide the basis for, [further] analysis” (Born 1993, pp. 274, 285).

Notes

1The most recent edition (2005-2006) is the 14th.2During World War II, the U. S. government developed a “Code of

Wartime Practices” but did not require news organizations to obeyit. Rather, reporters “enjoyed wide access to the [battle]field” (Kirtley 1992, p. 475). Such was the case in Vietnam and Korea aswell (Gottschalk 1992; Jacobs. 1992; Smith 1999;). In contrast, journalists were not admitted into the battle zone during the U. S. invasion of Granada nor during combat that resulted in the capture of Panama president Noriega (Pember & Calvert 2005).

3King and Lester (2005) consider camera-to-subject distance onecontent category but take no account of what the “close” or “far images” depict.

4In fact, “television” is the first word in his study’s title (Patterson 1984, p. 35).

5Similarly, Griffin and Lee (1995, pp. 813-814) maintain that, while the Vietnam War picture of the “Saigon police chief . . . summarily executing a suspected Viet Cong . . . in the street” may be “symboli[c, even] famous,” it is of scant scholarly interest because, they claim, it is not “typical” of U. S. media coverage of that war.

6Thus, semiotic theory offers what content analysis assumes away: a theory of media “consumer psychology or reception” (Owen 1975, p. 21).

7Framing theory maintains that news frames are shared among journalists and audiences (King & Lester 2005). But content analysis studies that employ the theory rarely describe how such frames originated or diffused among either journalists or audiences, much less how the details of the reports analyzed constructed the frames identified.

8Condit (1989, p. 106) calls this particular feature of mass communication “polyvalence,” which “occurs when audience members share understandings of the denotations of a text [or of one or more parts of a text] but disagree about the valuation of those denotations to such a degree that they produce notably different interpretations” of the text or one or more of its constituents.

9Steele (1995, p. 799) observed the same “operational bias” in

U. S. media coverage of the Gulf War.10Embedded correspondents reporting on the early weeks of the

war were no more self-reflective. Nearly 65% of those surveyed claimed to believe that not knowing how to speak Arabic “had limited or no influence on [their] reporting [of] the Iraq War.” Neither Iraqi citizens nor soldiers were accessed in their reports (Fahmy and Johnson 2005, p. 310).

References

ALLEN, BARBARA, O’LAUGHLIN, PAULA, JASPERSON, AMY, and SULLIVAN, JOHN L. (1994) “The Media and the Gulf War: Priming, Framing, and the Spiral of Silence”, Polity, 27, 255-84.

Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945).BAERNS, BARBARA (2003) “Separating Advertising from Program

Content: The Principle and its Relevance in Communications Practice”, Journal of Communication Management, 8, 101-12.

BEASLEY, RON, and DANESI, MARCEL (2002) Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

BERTIN, JACQUES (1983) Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams Networks Maps, (W. J. Berg, trans.) Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

BORN, GEORGINA (1993) “Afterword: Music Policy, Aesthetic and Social Difference”, in Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, and Graeme Turner (eds.) Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, London and New York: Routledge: 266-92.

BROOKS, BRIAN S., KENNEDY, GEORGE, MOEN, DARYL R., and RANLY,DON (The Missouri Group) (2007) Telling the Story (3rd ed.) Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

CAMPBELL, RICHARD, MARTIN, CHRISTOPHER R. and FABOS, BETTINA (2000) Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

CASEY, GEN. GEORGE (2005, October 14) Statement Aired on Morning Edition, National Public Radio.

Communications Act of 1934, 47 U.S.C. §151 et seq.CONDIT, CELESTE (1989) “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy”,

Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6, 103-22.CULLER, JONATHAN (1980a) “Literary Competence” (rep. from

Structuralist Poetics), in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.) Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press: 101-17.

CULLER, JONATHAN (1980b) “Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading”,in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.) The Reader in the Text:

Essays on Audience and Interpretation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP: 46-66.DENNIS, MAK (1993) “The Media on the Front Lines”, Journal of

International Affairs, 47, 316-21.DYER, GILLIAN (1982) Advertising as Communication, London: Methuen &

Co. Ltd. EMERSON, THOMAS I. (1970) The System of Freedom of Expression, New

York: Random House.ENCARTA. (2005) “Insurgent”, [On-line] Available:

<http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/insurgent.html.> (February 16, 2005).

ENCARTA. (2005) “Soldier”, [On-line] Available: <http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/soldier. html.> (February 16,2005).

ENCARTA. (2005) “Terrorist”, [On-line] Available: <http://encarta.msn.com/ dictionary_/terrorist.html.> (February 16, 2005).

ENTMAN, ROBERT (1991) “Framing US Coverage of International News: contrasts in narratives of the KAL and Iran Air incidents”,Journal of Communication, 41(4), 6-27.

ENTMAN, ROBERT (1993) “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm”, Journal of Communication, 43, 51-58.

EPSTEIN, EDWARD J. (1973) News from Nowhere, New York: Random House.

FAHMY, SHAHIRA, and JOHNSON, THOMAS (2005) “How We Performed: Embedded Journalists’ Attitudes and Perceptions towards Covering the Iraq War”, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 82, 301-17.

FINDAHL, OLLE, and HOIJER, BIRGITTA (1981) “Media Content and Human Comprehension”, in Karl E. Rosengren (ed.) Advances in Content Analysis, Sage Annual Reviews of Communication Research, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications: 111-32.

FISKE, JOHN (1982) Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Methuen.

GANS, HERBERT (1979) Deciding What’s News, New York: Pantheon Books.

GEORGOUDI, MARIANTHI, and ROSNOW, RALPH (1985) “The Emergence of Contextualism”, Journal of Communication, 35, 76-88.

GILLMOR, DONALD M., BARRON, JEROME A., and SIMON, TODD F. (1998) Mass Communication Law: Cases and Comment (6th ed), Belmont, CA:Thompson Higher Education.

GOLDBERG, MICHAEL (1982) Theology and Narrative, Nashville, TN: TheParthenon Press.

GOTTSCHALK, MARIE (1992) “Operation Desert Cloud: The Media and the Gulf War”, World Policy Journal, 9, 449-86.

GREENBERG, BRADLEY (1993) Desert Storm and the Mass Media, Cresskill,NJ: Hampton Press.

GRIFFIN, MICHAEL, and LEE, JONGSOO (1995) “Picturing the Gulf War: Constructing an Image of War in Time, Newsweek, and U. S. News &World Report”, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 72, 813-25.

HAIGH, MICHAEL M., PFAU, MICHAEL, DANESI, JAMIE, TALLMON, ROBERT, NYBERG, SHANNON, THOMPSON, BERTHA, BABIN, CHANCE, CARDELLA, SAL, MINK, MICHAEL, and TEMPLE, BRIAN (2006) “A Comparison of Embedded and Nonembedded Print Coverage of the U. S. Invasion and Occupation of Iraq”, Press/Politics, 11, 139-53.

HALLIN, DAN C. (1992) “The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism”, Journal of Communication, 42, 14-25.

HALL, STUART (1980) “Encoding/decoding”, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds.) Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson: 128-38.

HALL, STUART (1997) “Introduction”, in Stuart Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage Publications in association with The Open University: 1-11g.

HART, RODERICK. P. (1994) Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter, New York: Oxford University.

HARTLEY, JOHN (1982) Understanding News, London: Methuen.INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF JOURNALISTS (1954) “IFJ

Declaration of Principles on the Conduct of Journalists” <http://www.ifj.org/default.asp?index=1627&Language=EN> (April 22, 2007).

JACOBS, MATTHEW J. (1992) “Assessing the Constitutionality of Press Restrictions in the Persian Gulf War”, Stanford Law Review, 44,675-726.

JAMESON, FREDRIC (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

JENSEN, CARL (1997) Twenty Years of Censored News, New York: Seven Stories Press.

KING, CYNTHIA and LESTER, PAUL M. (2005) “Photographic Coverage during the Persian Gulf and Iraqi Wars in Three U. S. Newspapers”, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 82, 623-37.

KELLY, CARLOS A. (2003) “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword, or Why the Media Should Exercise Self-restraint in Time of War”, Florida Bar Journal, 77, 22-29.

KIRTLEY, JANE E. (1992) “The Eye of the Sandstorm: The Erosionof First Amendment Principles in Wartime”, Government Information Quarterly, 9, 473-90.

LAGRANDEUR, KEVIN (2002) “Digital Images and Classical Persuasion”, in Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick (eds.) Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 117-36.

LIEBES, TAMAR (1992) “Comparing the Intifadeh and the Gulf Waron U. S. and Israeli Television”, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9, 44-55.

LOTMAN, JURIJ (1976) Semiotics of Cinema, (M. E. Suino, trans.) Michigan State Slavic Contributions, no. 5. Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan.

MACEDA, JIM (2005, February 1) “Can Election Help Turn Tides Against Insurgency?” MSNBC, [On-line] Available: <http:// www.msnbc.msn.com /id/6894745.> (February 16, 2005).

MILLER, CHRISTINE M. (1982) An Analysis of the American Networks' Evening News Coverage of the “Iran Crisis”: Dateline Tehran, November 5, 1979 to January 15, 1980. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University.

MOYERS, BILL (2003, November 12) “Keynote address”, National Conference on Media Reform Madison, WI [On-line] Available: <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1112-10.htm> (November 8, 2006).

MURDOCK, GRAHAM (1974) “Mass Communication and the Construction of Meaning”, reprinted in Roger Dickinson, Ramaswami Harindranath, and Olga Linne (eds.) (1998). Approaches to Audiences: A Reader, New York: Oxford University Press: 205-17.

New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).NIEDRINGHAUS, ANJA (2004, November 12) Photo of U. S. Marine

and Iraqi Prisoner (among Associated Press Photographs Awarded The 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography), [On-line]Available: <http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2005/breaking-news-photography/works/warzone16.html> (November 8, 2006).

NORDLANDS, ROD, MASLAND, TOM, and DICKEY, CHRISTOPHER (2005, February 7) “Unmasking the Insurgents: Shadow War: Elections Won’t Stop the Bomber, but Quality Intel–and Luck–Might Help”, Newsweek, [On-line] Available: <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/ 6885867/ site/ newsweek/?GTI= 6190> (February 7, 2005).

OWEN, BRUCE. M. (1975) Economics and Freedom of Expression: Media Structure and the First Amendment, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.

PARRY-GILES, SHAWN J. (2000) “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton: Television News Practices and Image-making in the Postmodern Age”, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 17, 205-26.

PATTERSON, OSCAR III. (1984) “Television's ‘Living Room War’ in Print: Vietnam in the News Magazines”, Journalism Quarterly, 61(1),

35-39, 136.PATTERSON, THOMAS (1978) “Assessing Television Newscasts:

Future Directions in Content Research”, in William C. Adams and Fay C. Schreibman (eds.) Television Network News: Issues in Content Research,Television and Politics Study Program, School of Public and International Affairs, George Washington University. Washington, DC: School of Public and International Affairs, George WashingtonUniversity: 177-87.

PEMBER, DON R., and CALVERT, CLAY (2005) Mass Media Law 2005-2006,New York: McGraw-Hill.

PETERSON, VALERIE V. (2001) “The Rhetorical Criticism of Visual Elements: An Alternative to Foss’s Schema”, Southern Communication Journal, 67, 19-32.

RASSI, KATHLEEN J. CARR. (1993) A Content Analysis of Message Strategies Found within In-house Organizational Newsletters, Unpublished master’s thesis, Illinois State University. Normal, IL.

SCHOLEM, GERSHOM C. (1969) Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York:Schocken Books.

SCHOLES, ROBERT (1982) Semiotics and Interpretation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

SHARKEY, JACQUELINE E. (2001, Summer) “War, Censorship and theFirst Amendment”, Media Studies Journal, 15, 20-4.

SILLARS, MALCOM O. and GRONBECK, BRUCE (2001) Communication Criticism: Rhetoric, Social Codes, Cultural Studies, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

SMITH, JEFFERY A. (1999) War and Press Freedom, New York: Oxford University Press.

SONTAG, SUSAN (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador.STEELE, JANET E. (1995) “Experts and the Operational Bias of

Television News: The Case of the Persian Gulf War”, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 72, 799-812.

Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald. (2004, April 18) “Photos ShowJail Abuse by US [sic] Troops”, [On-line] Available: <http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/29/1083224523783.html> (November 8, 2006).

TOLIVER, HAROLD (1974) Animate Illusions: Explorations of Narrative Structure, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

TUCHMAN, GAYE (1978) Making News: A Study in the Social Construction of Reality, New York: Free Press.

TUDOR, ANDREW (1970) “Film, Communication and Content”, in Jeremy Tunstall (ed.) Media Sociology: A Reader, London: University of Illinois Press: 92-103.

U. S. Senate (1999) Subcommittee on Antitrust, Business

Rights, and Competition. Committee on the Judiciary. “The Viacom/CBS Merger: Media Competition and Consolidation in the NewMillennium”, October 28, 1999. <http://www.frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cg…senate_hearings&docid=f:71576.wais> (April 17, 2003).

WAHL-JORGENSEN, KARIN (2005, March 4) “Call for Papers: SocialSemiotics--Special Issue: Mediated Citizenship(s)”, CommunicationResearch and Theory Network, a Service of the National Communication Association, Number 8577. (Listserv).

WHITE, HAYDEN (1981) “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1-23.

WILKINS, DENNIS M. (1998, Spring) “Recommendations for Curricula that Stress Reflective Thinking”, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, 53, 64-73.

WOLFE, ARNOLD S. (1992) “Who's Gotta Have It? The Ownership ofMeaning and Mass Media Texts”, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9, 261-76.

Author contacts: Arnold S. Wolfe, Ph.D., Jeromy Swanson, andStacy Wrona

School of Communication4480 Illinois State University

Normal, IL 61790-4480Telephones (Wolfe): (office) 630-915-0623

Email: aswolfe@ilstu.edu

Arnold S. Wolfe is professor emeritus of communication at Illinois State University. He has published articles on television and film semiotics in Critical Studies in Mass Communication and on theories of mass media audiences in Popular Music and Society. His political economy and first amendment study of the U. S. v. Microsoft antitrust case was published in Popular Music (published by Cambridge University) and his analysis of the Matsushita buyout of MCA-Universal appeared in the Journal of Media Economics.

Stacy Wrona received an M. S. in Communication at Illinois State and Jeromy Swanson received a B. A. in Mass Communication from the same institution in 2006.