Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7: translating terror but inciting violence?

ANDREW HOSKINS AND BEN OLOUGHLIN Since the London bombings of 7 July 2005, political discourses amplified by what we shall call security journalism have raised the spectre of the internet as a medium through which Muslims in Britain are radicalized. Might it be, on the contrary, that it is the very messengers of the security threatprincipally the mainstream media in the UKthat function, however inadvertently, as the chief radicalizers? To put the question more simply: does BBC news radicalize? It is commonplace to register the role of news in delivering or communicating terror because of its intrinsic gravitation towards that which is extreme and dangerous. Terrorists, newsmakers and audiences are all aware of this; it is a taken-for-granted feature and indeed dilemma of mainstream security news environments. But although news coverage of terrorist shocks disrupts, security coverage of terrorism in general is for the most part benign. The pattern of news reporting of terrorism-related events modulates between short and intensive bursts and the ongoing containing of the shock of attacks through familiar news packaging and analysis, rendering them intelligible.1 However defining events like 9/11 and 7/7 are as tangible moments or ruptures in news and political discourses, it is actually the ongoing, and less tangible, medial everyday communication that structures what we are calling here the mainstream.2 We use the term medial to refer to the way in which media texts are interwoven into our lives: the continuity and familiarity of news production and consumption practices. In this article we argue that much more attention needs to be given to what we shall call the medial underlayer that mainstream news security discourses help to constitute, if we are to more effectively understand the orientation of and responses to radicalizing discourses. In particular, we focus on British Muslim and other racialized minority ethnic groups in relation both to extremist messages that invoke their (collective) name and to the translations of these messages by western news media, especially in the UK and the US. We aim to show that it is via a pervasive and continuously present medial underlayer relating the suffering of persecuted groups (for example, Palestinians), and the weakness of western administrations responses to that suffering, that the mainstream is viewed and understood by those seen as
1 2

Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, Television and terror: conflicting times and the crisis of news discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also, R. Grusin, Prediation: affect and mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin potentially vulnerable to violent extremist messages. In this way, the mainstream is constituted to an extent that its parameters are fixed in terms of how it operates and who is presumed (by newsmakers, audiences and policy-makers) to inhabit it and be subject to its influences. Our approach to the mainstream also includes consideration of the remit and the functions of security journalism. This is a relatively underexamined genre of news (especially compared to war journalism, for example), which should be more explicitly addressed and opened to change, and we hope that this article will stimulate debate to this end. We will present data from interviews with Muslims in Britain that demonstrate that the mainstream is a legitimate and timely subject in security studies. For instance, coverage by mainstream media organizations such as ITV, Sky and the BBCfamiliar, trustworthy Auntieof events in the Middle East, South Asia and indeed Europe and Britain perpetuates longstanding understandings of Muslim suffering. The websites that combine to form a jihadist media system offer reporting on the same events, with a different slant of course. But in the new media ecology,3 in which news consumers are alert to the partiality of any news reporting, whether from the BBC or Al-Qaeda, all news of these eventswhat we call the medial underlayer of the mainstreamfunctions to remind Muslim audiences of underlying narratives of grievance and frustration. This is part of a wider process, then, beyond the weaponization of the media: it is not simply that media provide an oxygen of publicity to terrorist groups, but that there is an enduring and underlying medial or structured dimension in the iterations of potentially radicalizing news content. Our argument stems from a series of interviews with individual Muslims in Britain in 2009 in which the interviewees were asked to compare jihadist media productions in Arabic with English-language translations.4 Research participants also reflected upon mainstream news reporting in Britain. We drew three findings from our study. The first is that participants treat jihadist and mainstream texts alike, seeking to identify the biases, institutional agendas and styles of reporting that might manipulate audiences. Second, participants were able to reject jihadist texts while affirming the perceived historical injustices and struggles to which those texts refer and which they represent. Any media representation of Muslims suffering could activate emotional responses and potentially trigger an urge to take action. In addition, the task of comparing different versions of jihadist texts enabled them to articulate critiques of such materials and the uses to which they are put. This led to our third finding: that participants assumed othersordinary peoplecould be affected and manipulated by jihadist texts but believed that they, as not-your-typical-viewer, were immune. Our participants had a keen
3

The new media ecology is our current media-saturated environment of perpetual connectivity, in which we are intensely aware of distant conflicts or close-to-home threats yet in which insecurities are also contained rendered intelligiblethrough mainstream news discourses. 4 Developing our understanding of the language of extremism and its potential for predicting risk, funded by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI). The research team included the authors and Paul Taylor, Paul Rayson, Sheryl Prentice, Carole Boudeau and Mark Carrigan.

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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 sense of the vulnerable group jihadists are targeting but did not recognize themselves as members of that group, even if they sympathized with the same issues and struggles. Such individuals could easily be conceived of as extremist, then, despite occupying a position across the mainstream and margins and actually explicitly rejecting violence. These findings support those of the only comparable study conducted in Britain, by Baines and colleagues in 2005.5 This involved a series of focus groups in which British Muslims were shown radical material: the results suggested that the research participants could understand the events depicted, and sympathize with the motives of some jihadist actors, without actually supporting the violent action itself. The key finding was that such materials activate and reinforce pre-existing narratives of Muslim grievance. By implication, these activation and reinforcement functions could be performed by any media, not just radical or Arabic-language media. This further implies that we must think beyond existing categories and assumptions about the relationship between media and terrorism, and about mainstreams and margins or extremes, in the broader condition we describe below as diffused war, a condition marked by increasing connectivity and communication across cultures, languages and security situations. News reporting, in the form of security journalism, has performed some predictable functions in British society and culture since the London bombings of 7 July 2005. It has delivered regular representations of terrorist threats to a presumed national audience, showing us the threat we face, by offering coverage of Al-Qaeda leaders speeches, bomb attempts, criminal trials and radical protesters in Britain. Security journalisms delivery of Al-Qaeda speeches is particularly significant. By repackaging and remediating jihadist media productions from one context and language into another, reporters offer to British audiences messages presumed to be radicalizing to would-be jihadist recruits. Such reporting serves a second function: it constitutes a version of British society made up of, on the one hand, a small set of vulnerable or threatening individuals to whom Al-Qaeda productions must be appealing and, on the other, a majority or mainstream who must be aware, concerned, vigilant and, if called upon, resilient in the face of such projected threats. Elsewhere we have shown that British security journalism systematically reduces complex jihadist texts such as productions by bin Laden and Al-Zawahari to short clips of angry, gesticulating men.6 This blocks understanding of the apparent threat, because aspects of jihadist texts that might be persuasive to some Muslim audiences, such as religious quotations, political analysis, conciliatory offers and various songs, poems and other modes of attunement to the mood of the text, are entirely omitted from western media reporting. In this way, it will appear improbable to some that the remediated residue alone could be persuasive.
5

Paul Baines, Nicholas J. OShaughnessy, Kevin Moloney, Barry Richards, Sara Butler and Mark Gill, Muslim voices: the British Muslim response to Islamist video-polemic: an exploratory study, research paper 3/06, Cranfield University, 2006. 6 Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, Remediating jihad for western news: the renewal of gatekeeping?, forthcoming in Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 12: 1, 2011.

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin It is clear, then, that both security journalism itself, and the notion of mainstream media more broadly, face challenges. Security journalism reports on terrorism in a way that retards public understanding of Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. Meanwhile the news media more broadly, whether mainstream or jihadist, English-language or Arabic, can activate frustration in some Muslim audiences. Does this mean the BBC should stop reporting on relations between Israel and the Palestinians, or on the conflict in Afghanistan? Does this mean ITN must acknowledge its inevitable institutional biases and simply be transparent about what it is not covering and why? Does this mean that Sky News should offer excerpts from Al-Jazeera and even from jihadist media itself, to allow all viewers to become critical comparativists across the global media menu? While much attention is focused on the role of the media around shocking terrorist attacks, security journalisms presumptions about to whom, and for whom, it is reporting raise fundamental questions about the effects of a much broader range of routine news reporting. Research framework: diffused war and media translation The context for examining security journalism is a condition we call diffused war, a new paradigm of war.7 There are three axes to diffused war. First, like all aspects of social life, the relationships and institutions of war are increasingly constituted by digital media connections and networks and take on a medial formwhat some media scholars have called a mediatized condition.8 Second, as war is increasingly mediatized, we witness more diffuse causal relations between action and effect: the properties of networked communication enable emergent dynamics in which outcomes cannot be predicted or reduced to the capacity of actors or existing structures. Rather, unforeseeable and amorphous publics can be harnessed through digital technologies and softwares and an increasingly global information infrastructure to carry out actions or disrupt the operations of conventional military or security agents.9 Just as Devjis analysis shows how Al-Qaeda demonstrates a terrorism defined by effects without causes,10 so citizen-led cyberconflict, public
Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, War and media: the emergence of diffused war (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). Simon Cottle, Mediatized conflict: developments in media and conflict studies (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006); N. Couldry, Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling, New Media and Society 10: 3, 2008, pp. 37391; S. Hjarvard, From bricks to bytes: the mediatization of a global toy industry, in I. Bondebjerg and P. Golding, eds, European culture and the media (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2004); S. Hjarvard, The mediatization of religion: a theory of the media as agents of religious change, Northern Lights 6: 1, 2008, pp. 926; Hoskins and OLoughlin, War and media; K. Lundby, ed., Mediatization: concept, changes, consequences (New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); W. Schulz, Reconstructing mediatization as an analytical concept, European Journal of Communication 19: 1, 2004, pp. 87101; S. Livingstone, On the mediation of everything: ICA presidential address 2008, Journal of Communication 59: 1, 2009, pp. 118. 9 The phrase information infrastructure is Sir David Omands, cited in M. Dillon, Governing terror: the state of emergency in biopolitical emergence, International Political Sociology, 1, 2007, pp. 728. Cf. G. C. Bowker and S. L. Star, Sorting things out: classification and its consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Paul Edwards, Infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems, in Philip Brey, Andrew Feenberg and Thomas Misa, eds, Modernity and technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 185225. 10 F. Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: militancy, morality and modernity (London: Hurst, 2005), p. 1.
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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 diplomacy, information leakage and other aspects of war become more difficult to control. Third, the consequence of mediatized, diffused relationships is greater uncertainty for policy-makers in the conduct of war. These three axesmediatization, causality and decision-makingcan shape and reinforce one another in ways that make diffused war a coherent and intelligible paradigm. We use the term axes because each is a matter of degree rather than being simply present or absent. Not all war is mediatized; not all actions have unforeseen effects; and uncertainty rarely paralyses policy-makers absolutely. Rather, there is a modulation of each; policy-makers certainty oscillates over time, for instance. These three axes capture the dynamics of an emerging paradigm of war within which the battle of ideas between governments and Al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists has unfolded in recent years.11 The latter take full advantage of a mediatized world, operating a mix of hierarchical official propaganda production and distribution sites alongside a diffused network of supporter sites which both push official material out through online networks and pull in ideas, user-generated content and new sympathizers, as well as monitoring mainstream media to identify new events salient to jihadist politics and to evaluate how mainstream Arabic and western media are covering jihadists themselves. Hence the condition of diffused war creates unprecedented real-time multidirectional relationships between mainstream and extremist media (of which mainstream media professionals may not even be aware) and between societies and cultures, conducted through several languages and in several styles. Translation is an important process in diffused war. As information from different linguistic groups party to security events circulates in increased quantities, more accessibly and at higher speed, we would expect security actors to seek to understand and influence those working in other languages. Manuel Castells has recently written that the network society diffuses selectively throughout the planet,12 and translation is one mechanism through which selection occurs. This process operates through news institutions: a recent study of the BBC World Service indicates how a single story such as that of Obamas victory in the US presidential election gets trans-edited by journalists for the World Services various language websites, mixing translation of original story text with additional contextu alizing material to render an American electoral contest intelligible in a range of societies.13 Trans-editing also occurs through individuals own media practices: for example, in migrant families in which those born in the host country translate personally for friends and family from the country of origin, or in individuals use of social media to send stories to friends and family around the world with translations, links and so on. Examining the BBC World Services decision to open up Arabic-language services during the war on terror period, Podkalicka argues that translation policies reflect power asymmetries and
11 12 13

HM Government, Countering international terrorism: the United Kingdoms strategy (London: TSO, 2006), p. 13. Manuel Castells, Communication power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 25. Tom Cheeseman and Arnd-Michael Nohl, Many voices, one BBC World Service? Gatekeeping and transediting the Obama elections 2008, forthcoming in Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 11: 1, 2011.

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin political priorities in contemporary geopolitics.14 Which institutions and viewerscum-users in which countries are translating for whom and why? The question of translation allows us to step back and consider the role of the mainstream in radicalization. In terror and security discourses, jihadist terrorism is often disembedded from ordinary society: populations may be sources of legitimacy and consent, but they are rarely actively involved in the battle at hand, other than as passive victims. Yet the terror and security discourses run through the mainstream: jihadist violence, arrests, trials, plots are all regularly present in mainstream news and an underlying if unarticulated concern for publics. The mainstream may also be a source of recruits to such violence. Consequently, how translation shapes the version of jihadism present in mainstream public life becomes important; but this point is being overlooked. Take recent research in the Change Institutes comprehensive series of Studies into violent radicalisation commissioned by the European Commission. This aimed to explore the beliefs, narratives and ideologies that underpin violent radicalism with a view to developing a much deeper understanding of the causes and remedies for violent radicalisation as part of an ideological response to the main terrorist threat facing Europe.15 Yet, despite the resources invested in 145 stakeholder and primary fieldwork interviews in four Member States and an extensive analysis of the content and imagery of terrorist rhetoric and propaganda found on the internet,16 this research excluded consideration of other mass media and the role of its agents (commentators, journalists, experts, etc.) in translating and repackaging the beliefs, narratives and ideologies that it sought to interrogate. Our analysis below shows why this is a significant omission. The distribution and translation of media content also matter because they illuminate a historical transformation under way in the relationship between media, audiences and terrorism. For a long time news media have vacillated between amplifying terror and containing it, delivering alarming and often graphic news while embedding it within familiar formats and narratives so that breaking events are not too shocking to comprehend and so that audiences keep watching. Research has been carried out in Britain since the attacks of 11 September 2001 to evaluate how multilingual, multi-ethnic audiences respond to news about terrorism and security crises.17 This research indicates that mainstream media, particularly the BBC, remain the primary source of news across all demographic groups in times of crisis, but also that viewers able to watch news in several languages attain greater media literacy through their daily practices of consuming and comparing news in both, say, South Asian and British television, or Middle
14

Aneta Podkalicka, A translation factory or translations with soul? Changing practices by international broadcasters, forthcoming in Journalism: Theory Practice, Criticism 10: 6, 2010. 15 The Change Institute, Studies into violent radicalisation, Lot 2: the beliefs, ideologies and narratives (Brussels: European Commission, 2008), p. 4. 16 Change Institute, Studies into violent radicalisation, pp. 4, 8. 17 Marie Gillespie, James Gow and Andrew Hoskins, Shifting securities: television news cultures before and after Iraq 2003, funded by the Economic and Social Research Councils New Security Challenges programme, award no. RES-223-25-0063. Ben OLoughlin and Ivan verhanovski were employed as research associates on the project. The empirical research for the project is located at www.mediatingsecurity.com.

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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 Eastern and British newspapers. Research also indicates that news consumers across demographic groups speak about terrorism and indeed radicalization as if these were topics with which everyone and anyone would be familiar, but they also speak of themselves as someone more cynical or independent-minded than others in the presumed news public they position themselves within; as not-your-typicalviewer.18 The combination of critical comparative competence in media literacy and self-positioning as both within a mainstream audience-cum-public and yet apart from it indicates that audiences for security journalism are possibly more sophisticated than journalists and indeed policy-makers recognize.19 The only existing academic study in which British Muslims have agreed to reflect on jihadist materials was that referred to above, conducted by Paul Baines and colleagues in 2005. They established four focus groups in different UK towns and cities and showed the participants, all Muslim men and women, propaganda from Al-Qaeda and radical Iranian television broadcasters. The researchers found that some participants expressed understanding of the actions and arguments in the footage shown, even if they did not explicitly support them. Baines and his colleagues concluded that, although such material might not radicalize people directly, it can often reinforce wider negative attitudes towards the west, and in some cases demonstrate evidence of contempt for Western and/or British values. Equally, despite for the most part rejection of the intrinsic message of the material, there is almost always perceived to be an element of truth to the content.20 They found that participants understood the Al-Qaeda protagonists as victims, forced into action out of frustration at continued Muslim suffering, and that certain genres and styles elicited different degrees of engagement and sympathy: an animated movie of Palestinian children encountering Israeli soldiers was moving for mothers but not for young men. Our challenge, then, was to build on these insights about diffused war, the increasing significance of translation and the potentially complex audience interpretations of media coverage of terrorism to see how the apparent audience for jihadist materials responds to propaganda aimed at them. In the next section we briefly introduce the methodology of our study and some of the ethical issues such research involved, before we present our analysis and findings.

Ben OLoughlin, Carole Boudeau and Andrew Hoskins, Keeping the extraordinary at a distance: audience understandings of discourses of radicalisation, forthcoming in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 2010. Cf. Paddy Scannell, For-anyone-as-someone structures, Media, Culture and Society 22: 1, 2002, pp. 524. 19 Marie Gillespie, James Gow, Andrew Hoskins, Ben OLoughlin and Ivan verhanovski, Shifting securities: news cultures, multicultural society and legitimacy, Ethnopolitics 9: 2, 2010, pp. 23953; Marie Gillespie, Shifting securities: news cultures before and beyond the Iraq crisis 2003: full research report, ESRC end of award report, RES-223-25-0063 (Swindon: ESRC, 2007). 20 Baines et al., Muslim voices, p. 2.

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin Methodology and ethics21 One of the profound difficulties in making claims about the nature and influences of political and media discourses in the new media ecology is that the very dynamic phenomenon of connectivity identified above, and the diffused and ubiquitous nature of digital technologies, inhibit standard empirical content analysis of media. Conventional content analysis can show systematic patterns across a narrow range of media outlets.22 Yet we know that audiences consume news from a much broader set of primary and secondary sources. Moreover, measures of exposure to media have become so problematic that researchers are largely at sea in their capacity to make claims about the power or role of news media in shaping public opinion.23 Our approach seeks instead to track a set of ( jihadist) texts through communication networks to illuminate how meaning is created through the remediation and translation of a given text as it is passed or diffused through a range of linguistic, cultural and institutional contexts. In this way we are not seeking a sample of some imaginary comprehensive corpus, but, rather, seeking to illuminate the transformations in media texts as dynamic and fluid entities that are remediated in and through a new media ecology. The analytical framework we employ is nexus analysis.24 A nexus analysis maps the semiotic cycles (the circulation of symbols, including media content) generated in the formation of a social network or institution such as a public sphere, sphericule or issue public, or in response to a mediated event such as a major television broadcast, terrorist attack or sporting event. Nexus analysis explores the past, present and future trajectories of meaning implicated in the sum of communications around the phenomenon. Scollon and Scollon later revealed that they had arrived at this methodology after realizing, in a study or racism, that there was no single point at which we could address problems of societal discrimination, institutional structure, and social change with any sense that this point was the fulcrum point around which everything else rotated.25 Elsewhere we have conducted a broader nexus analysis of the culture of jihadist media to which government, journalists and others have attributed a radicalizing effect in the past decade.26 We have studied apparently radicalizing communications
The necessary length constraints on this article restrict us to a summary of our methodology here; for a fuller explanation of our approach, see A. N. Awan et al., Media and radicalization: political violence in the new media ecology (London: Routledge, forthcoming), and Hoskins and OLoughlin, Television and terror. 22 For instance, P. Goddard et al., Patriotism meets plurality: reporting the 2003 Iraq war in the British press, Media, War and Conflict 1: 1, 2008, pp. 930 and W. L. Bennett et al., When the press fails: political power and the news media: from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), demonstrated regularities in coverage of the 2003 Iraq war across a small but significant set of mainstream UK and US newspapers respectively. Bennett et al. also analysed framing in US television news. 23 M. X. D. Carpini, Somethings going on here, but we dont know what it is: measuring citizens exposure to politically relevant information in the new media environment, in G. King et al., eds, The future of political science. 100 perspectives (New York, and London: Routledge, 2009), p. 55. 24 R. Scollon and S. W. Scollon, News analysis discourse and the emerging internet (New York, and London: Routledge, 2004); Awan et al., 2010. 25 R. Scollon and S. W. Scollon, News analysis: refocusing ethnography of action, Journal of sociolinguistics 11: 5, 2007, pp. 60825. 26 Awan et al., Media and radicalization, 2010.
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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 by jihadists as well as communications about jihadist radicalization issuing from governments, journalists and other experts.27 The former involves semiotic cycles featuring religious imagery, historical references, the legitimation of contemporary violence and complex relations between on- and offline behaviour. The latter involves a series of statements about threats, extremists, resilience and vulnerability, a number of security practices, and emerging norms of security journalism. In this article we witness the procedures and networks through which texts by jihadists in one language become mainstream news reports in another language about texts by jihadists. Nexus analysis offers an essential openness to new and emergent phenomena rather than a reification of existing institutions and structures (as exemplified by some more traditional static media content approaches) and is thus a more effective tool for studying communication networks in flux. Furthermore, the majority of existing research has not engaged in a substantive and methodical way with potential consumers of such literatures in motion and has tended therefore to lack an understanding of patterns of reception and interpretation. This has contributed to a generally poor understanding of how any extremist literature is understood by its target audience. Given that the efficacy of such literature relies on its successful persuasion of individuals within the target audience, this has been an explanatory gap and a significant problem in understanding dynamics of radicalization and counterradicalization. We argue that, by exploring the resonance which extremist messages hold for vulnerable sections of the UK population, it is possible to gain insight into how, when and why those messages spread and the relationship in which this transmission stands to radicalization. The analysis in this article represents one strand of our wider nexus analysis, in which we took the original (Arabic) and the translated (into English, as used widely in a range of media texts) texts and sought comparative analyses from our interviewees (see below). All three texts were chosen because they had received much publicity on jihadist forums and in western media alike upon their release. The texts were all statements made by major Al-Qaeda figures:

27

Text one: Address by Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the American people. The message is related to 9/11, released in October 2004 and entitled The best way to avoid another Manhattan. Text two: Address by Al-Qaeda second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, mainly to the British. The message is related to the 7/7 London bombings, was released between September and November 2005 and was entitled Wills of the knights of the blessed London raid. Text three: Address by Al-Qaeda third-in-command, Abu Yihya Al-Libi. The message is related to the Gaza conflict in 20082009, released on 22 January 2009 and entitled Palestine, fierce fighting is now.

Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: political violence in the new media ecology, funded by the ESRC New Security Challenges programme, award no. RES-181-25-0041, led by Andrew Hoskins: see http://www.newmediaecology.net/radicalisation/.

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin The main context of our approach may be summarized as follows. Not long after the 7/7 bombings it became clear that many Muslim communities in the UK, and specific groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, felt overresearched as well as suspicious of potential collaboration between academics and state institutions. Drawing on the research teams network of contacts, access was facilitated to a diverse range of participants within groups that were both potentially vulnerable to extremist messages and part of the target audience of extremist literatures. Our work proceeded through a series of semi-structured interviews and a focus group. Details of the interviewees and focus group participants are given in the appendix. Questions covered a range of topics (also set out in the appendix). Interview transcripts were coded using the qualitative software package NVivo 8, which is established as an authoritative analytical tool across the social sciences. An initial coding framework was formulated from the interview schedule and the aims of the project. The findings of this strand of the project are not intended to be statistically representative or generalizable to local populations. The purpose of the analysis is rather to generate rich insight into the reception and interpretation of extremist messages by western target audiences. In approaching this project we draw upon our experience of ESRC New Security Challenges (NSC) research,28 in which the sensitivities of both audiences and professionals presented more of an issue than we had initially assumed, and the concurrent ESRC NSC project Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: political violence in the new media ecology.29 In the course of this work we were aware of notable sensitivities on the part of many of our audience research subjects about issues of confidentiality, anonymity and the proposed uses of the research, even after they had received a full briefing about the project and granted informed consent. The initial suspicion towards not only our own but also other similar public perceptions research projects on security reflects a political climate in which many people are very guarded about expressing their opinions in public arenas about Islamist terrorism and security policy. Common reasons given were that they feared appearing to be racist or seeming sympathetic to terrorism, if they criticized government policy. This reluctance reflects a very widespread view that whatever public perceptions are uncovered by the research will not be taken into account. The particularly high sensitivity of British Muslim and other racialized minority ethnic groups meant that we had to be constantly vigilant about the ethical as well as the political dimensions of our research. Muslims, in particular, report feeling they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance and must negotiate accusations of terrorism (implicit or explicit, subtle and overt) on a daily basis. This discourages public expression of views, and encourages a retreat into alternative spheres of political discussion and debate. As a result of such sensitivities, all names used
28

Gillespie et al., Shifting securities: television news cultures before and after Iraq 2003, funded by the ESRCs New Security Challenges programme. 29 www.newmediaecology.net/radicalisation.

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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 in the research were pseudonyms. Only the interviewer has knowledge of the true identity of the interviewees. Analysis Our first finding is that interviewees treated jihadist texts as they would treat content in the non-radical news media, in terms of the texts bias, the agenda of the source, and the effects they presume such texts would have on other audience members. British media were criticized for perpetuating official discourses that were perceived to be representing Islam as a threat to Britain and the West, such that news organizations were culpable of being manipulated. However, interviewees rejected the jihadist texts not only because of what they identified as a hatred expressed within them and the violence the texts advocated, but also because the interviewees felt the rhetoric and styles were manipulative. JP said: I feel they use Islamic issues for their own purposes and interests, so I cannot see it as convincing. This sentiment was echoed by a number of participants who saw jihadists as manipulating more generalized Muslim concerns for their own particular ideological ends. In other interviews this perception was underscored through discussions of the outcomes of jihadist actions. Rather than furthering the Islamic cause, such actions were seen to actively undermine the interests of Muslims. As LN said, Look what happened after just one attack in 2001, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, threatening Iran and putting the whole Middle East on the edge of civil war as [is] the case now in Syria and Lebanon. There are two separate but related points here: first, that extremists are seen to manipulate talk of Muslim interests to further their own agenda; and second, that this agenda itself often produces geopolitical consequences which run contrary to Muslim interests. Our second finding is that interviewees could simultaneously reject jihadist texts and politics and affirm some or all of the stated grievances upon which the jihadists politics are based. Interviewees wished to repudiate the actions of violent extremists but resist any mainstream or official media/political discourse which seeks to discount the grievances underlying those actionsgrievances that are legitimate in the eyes of the target audience if our sample is any indication. It would make no sense, therefore, to ask whether a British Muslim person (or anybody for that matter) was pro- or anti-bin Laden, for/against a jihadist message, or radicalized/non-radicalized. Individuals understandings and interpretations are more complex than this. Our findings suggest that reducing these attitudes to a stark dichotomy may even lead members of vulnerable communities to feel they must pick a side. The manner in which these issues are represented in the media and by officials both obscures the relative sophistication and nuances of individuals attitudes and potentially contributes to radicalization within that group. A first consequence of these two findings is that mainstream media may have the potential to radicalize by reporting on Muslim suffering: many of our participants said they found any news about Muslim suffering upsetting and enraging; 913
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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin their emotional response is not determined by particular framings or styles of reporting, whether that of the jihadists or that of BBC News. Asked about whether online jihadist material might be persuasive to some audiences, AT said that these materials simply feed a kind of long-time feeling of oppression that has come into existence even before inventing online ways we have a deep-seated feeling the western world is biased and these presentations just add to it. FP said he was persuaded in cases featuring long political struggles: The most convincing messages, I would say fighting occupation forces such as in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Southern Ireland. Most of the participants identify the Arabic jihadist materials as more persuasive than the English versions. JA said: The Arabic version plays on chords of feelings. Although the literal [English] translation is fine, [it] does not give the implications of how the Arabs feel when they read or hear the word of Palestine. However, he added: I am already convinced, regardless of the presentation. Hence the distinction between mainstream and extremist media becomes irrelevant because what provokes feeling is not the form but the substance; not the representation but what is represented, and the sense of a continuity to what is represented. A further consequence of this pattern is that people may fall into an extremist category because they sympathize with issues on which, it transpires, extremists or jihadists focuseven though they support these causes whether or not jihadist media propagandize about them. Given that participants treated jihadist and mainstream texts alike and were able to reject jihadist texts while affirming the perceived historical injustices and struggles to which jihadist texts refer and represent, it comes as no surprise to find that several interviewees articulated critiques of the jihadist texts and the uses to which they are put. Studies show that multilingual, multi-ethnic news consumers are more media-literate and reflexive about how news is produced and consumed than the British population as a whole,30 and we soon observed interviewees identifying weak points in Al-Qaedas strategic communications products. Many participants showed a conceptual grasp which is rarely reflected in academic or media discourses concerning the target audiences of extremist messages. Through an empirically grounded conceptualization of the production and format of jihadist materials, participants were able to identify actions of Al-Qaedas strategic communications which undermined the communicative efficacy of such producers and speakers in relation to properties of the texts. For instance, there was a consensus among focus group participants that both videos they were shown (texts 1 and 2, the bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri addresses) were produced and presented in a way that renders them ill-equipped to communicate effectively with a western audience. Their vantage point as Muslims living in Britain allows them to recognize both those aspects of the videos that draw on
30

Marie Gillespie, guest ed. of special issue, Television news and transnational publics after September 11, in her article, Transnational television audiences after September 11, 2001, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32: 6, 2006, pp. 90323. Marie Gillespie, Media, security and multicultural citizenship, European Journal of Cultural Studies 10: 3, 2007, special issue of the same name, pp. 275293. This finding varies by country, however: for a comparison of multilingual and multi-ethnic audience media consumption habits across Europe, see the Media and Citizenship project findings at http://www.media-citizenship.eu/, accessed 14 April 2010.

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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 an Islamic context and also how such references and modes of argumentation are likely to fail to move a western audience. This is suggestive of a weakness which perhaps inheres in all such extremist messages when received in a western context.
CL, text 1: If it were in my capacity, I would change the whole message. The repetition of the same images or sentences is not working. The language of the text seems to [be] still in the past centuries. I would rather listen to everyday language and avoid all these words that call for violence or arms because simply we have been struggling for years but whats the result, more suffering and more wounds. CL, text 2: I think it is hard for Muslims living in Europe who enjoyed the support and the freedom of thoughts would take the video seriously. This talk can be message to Muslims who live in isolation but in situation like nowadays is difficult. The numbers of those whom the message appeal to are very few and I think have exceptional circumstances that make them go for this way of life. LA, text 3: I am as an Arabic native speaker felt the message boring after three minutes, I can guess what about other who cannot speak the language and receive it in translated form. BB, text 1: I think the main problem with Osama bin Laden here in this video is that he misses the approach. He is unable to address the western people and he cannot go beyond the traditional speech of a Muslim preacher. BB, text 2: Al-Zawahiri made the same mistake which Osama bin laden made in his speech by addressing the western world in Muslim and Middle Eastern discourse. The speaker believes they can understand the points and the history of examples mentioned in the video. It is a scene from a modern drama where actors lack the capability of communication. BB, text 3: He repeated the same images used by bin Laden and nothing new in this speech. LN, text 1: He is unable even to address Muslims, and he is a leader of a minority of Muslims, but not all Muslims. Now he is addressing the western world and in the mean time the Muslim people who live here do not understand or comprehend what he is saying. LN, text 1: To be honest from my point of view I still believe that his speech is contain a repetitive sentences like fighting the infidels, call for Al-jihad and driving the crusaders from the Arab homeland and Afghanistan. To be honest he did not give a new ideas or thoughts to show that is updating himself with the current of international events. LN, text 3: He is trying to take some examples from history to match them with new events. And that way does not work. I think there is a gap of how to address the western people and how to address the Muslim people. TC, text 1: The film is not convincing it wants to express the concerns of a Muslim person to a British person who has not the same things in life and do not care about the daily routines in the Middle East. TC, text 1: Osama bin Laden believes he can deliver a message to the Americans. He started with a Quranic verses as he was giving a lesson to religious seminary school. I can tell you it is not a style used by lay person in an ordinary speech. Second, he used a very classical

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin

language that like he is coming from old ages.

For all those who share, however marginally, a western vantage pointeven one they actively repudiate in their politicsthe construction and characteristics of many extremist texts will seem at points anachronistic and socio-culturally incongruous. While these weaknesses have presumably been outweighed by other factors in the minds of those western Muslims who have been radicalized, these findings suggest that placing stress on such perceived anachronistic and socioculturally incongruous elements may prove effective within counterradicalization campaigns. As CL put it: I think it is hard for Muslims living in Europe who enjoyed the support and the freedom of thoughts would take the video seriously. While there are obviously many countervailing factors, emphasis on the elements which make it difficult to take [such] videos seriously would be an effective strategy for adoption in counterradicalization campaigns. Far from being a throwback to pre-modern times, contemporary radicalization and extremismparticularly of a westernized varietyare phenomena very much rooted in the confusions and antagonisms of modernity. Hence there is a basis for emotional appeal to a common experience situationally rooted in western modernity. This could take positive forms, such as appealing to the support and freedom of thoughts which western target audiences enjoy, or negative forms, such as emphasizing and rejectingperhaps even deriding and satirizingthose elements in extremist discourses and literatures which seem archaic and socioculturally incongruous from the vantage point of westernized youth among the western target audiences of such extremism. The process of translation was identified by interviewees as integral to these cross-cultural communication and interpretation practices. It was commonly reported that in the process of translation from Arabic to English by which jihadist texts move from their original context to western news reporting, there is a diminishing of the meaning, impact and persuasiveness of the original text. Elsewhere we have explored the western news medias selection and remediation of translated excerpts and found an apparently simple and settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission whereby lengthy, complex jihadist productions are reduced to short aggressive outbursts.31 We found that particular audio-visual juxtapositions common in jihadist online material are regularly edited out of the versions transmitted on western news; missing too is the online context of a list of comments under the line of the production (as with YouTube). We also found that scriptural references, references to the speakers status and credentials, and any speech by actors other than the lead speaker are translated out. Also omitted are the political contexts referred to by jihadist leaders. In fact, the socio-cultural incongruities of jihadist productions are further complicated through the translation process itself, as illustrated by the three extracts below:
31

Hoskins and OLoughlin, Remediating jihad.

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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7

AF: The whole sense of the English language is unconvincing. Certain themes which understood for Arabic speakers are unclear for the West and many may find unsatisfied. FP: In fact, the film (Al-Libi) is much more an Arabic version. The English translation is fine, but cannot give the same impression if an Arab got when I see or hear the message. The Arab version expresses the Arab anger clearly while the English states the issue is lacking the enthusiasm, I would say, you have in the original one. JA: The Arabic version plays on chords of feelings. Although the literal translation is fine, but does not gives the implications the Arab feel when they read or hear the word of Palestine. The text in English does not give the same sense of anger running deeply inside Arabs and the general thought that the westerns are biased about this key cause and its subsequent cases.

Finally, our third finding concerns the construction of a social mainstream by and through the media. We found a consistent othering by respondents in the categorization of those individuals and groups who were presumed by interviewees to be the intended or unintended recipients of extremist messages and/ or to be members of a mainstream audience. This othering also occurred in the differentiation of themselves as outside these groups. In other words, our interviewees by default did not identify themselves as part of the groups and debates defined as of interest by the project, but nonetheless they possessed a keen sense of those groups, debates and media. In one interview, for example, the respondent (PS) is employed as a TV reporter for an Arab satellite channel. In answering the question on his use/knowledge of media, he states:
There is a big difference between the traditional media and the digital one. The latter work depends largely on the Internet. The ordinary people believe there is no editorial control over the digital media and that its contents of films, articles go freely without any censorship.

This findingthat individuals identify themselves as separate from any community of concern, as not influenced by media, as not-your-typical-vieweris consistent with that of our ESRC NSC research,32 but is also apparent across lay audiences and among media workers. This reveals assumptions about others media and digital competencies or literacies. Furthermore, a connection appears to be made between the unknown or unquantifiable characteristics of ordinary understandings of the internet, and a perception of vulnerability on the part of people who dont understand how it works, different spaces and how these are accessed or gated, and the threat posed by those who use or inhabit it, in contradistinction to more traditional media. Interestingly, this discourse mirrors government and journalistic discourses on extremist threats. Yet it is not clear what ordinary people, government or journalists base this assumption upon. Our findings suggest that the elements of extremist content found in mainstream news media, and the processes through which these are filtered and edited, are a crucial aspect of this equation that appears underexplored in research in the field.
32

OLoughlin et al., Keeping the extraordinary at a distance.

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Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin Conclusion Since the 7/7 London bombings a new genre of security journalism has become established in British news. This has contributed regular representations of terrorist threats to a presumed national audience, offering coverage of the threat we face in the form of Al-Qaeda leaders speeches, bomb attempts, criminal trials and radical protesters in Britain. Security journalisms delivery of Al-Qaeda speeches is particularly significant. By repackaging and remediating jihadist media productions from one context and language to another, reporters offer to British audiences messages presumed to be radicalizing to would-be jihadist recruits. Such reporting serves a further function: it constitutes a version of British society made up, on the one hand, of a small set of vulnerable or threatening individuals to whom Al-Qaeda productions must be appealing and, on the other, a majority or mainstream who must be aware, concerned, vigilant and, if called upon, resilient in the face of such projected threats. These functions and the assumptions upon which they rest require scrutiny, however. The systematic reduction of complex jihadist texts to a few presumed newsworthy elements impedes understanding of the apparent threat. On the basis of the evidence from our study of the response of British Muslims to jihadist texts in Arabic and in English translation we have drawn three conclusions. The first is that participants treat jihadist and mainstream texts alike, seeking to identify the biases, institutional agendas and styles of reporting that might manipulate audiences. A second finding is that participants could reject jihadist texts while affirming the perceived historical injustices and struggles to which jihadist texts refer. From this we have inferred that any media representation of Muslims suffering could activate emotional responses and potentially trigger an urge to take action, though in the case of our participants that action would be restricted to political debate rather than violence. Furthermore, the manner in which participants could critically compare different jihadist and mainstream texts enabled them to articulate critiques of the jihadist texts and the uses to which they are put. This led to our third finding: that participants assumed othersordinary people, as PS put itcould be affected and manipulated by jihadist texts but they, as not-your-typical-viewer, were immune. Our participants had a keen sense of the vulnerable group jihadists are targeting but felt themselves somehow exempt from membership of that group even if they sympathized with the same issues and struggles. Such individuals could easily be treated as extremist, then, despite occupying a position across the mainstream and margins. This blurring of the mainstream and extreme in one regard at least is part of the conditions of diffused war and will present an enduring challenge to journalists, policy-makers and citizens through the second decade of the twenty-first century. Our aim in this article has been to illuminate the potentially unfortunate iterations of the output of security journalism. In doing so we recognize the tremendous pressures on contemporary journalism in relation to the disinvestment in investigative journalism by news and media organizations in a new media ecology 918
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Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 driven to new extremes of competition. In an ideal world, security journalists in possession of relevant language skills and religious knowledge would be afforded the time and space to interpret original Al-Qaeda productions rather than rely on incomplete and selective translationsin other words, to perform their own nexus analyses. Instead, those who do not have or wish to have access to original extremist texts, or the language skills to interpret them, are fed a very particular diet of extremist messages. Our small interviewee corpus revealed just some of the complex interpretations available from multimodal extremist messages that are lost in translation. Much more work is needed to illuminate the understandings and misunderstandings of extremist messages held by mainstream publics people who are rarely afforded such comparative and interpretative opportunities through contemporary security news. Appendix Table 1: Interviewees; Table 2: Focus group participants; Table 3:Interview topics and questions: see following pages.

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Table 1: Interviewees
Location London Network engineer Reporter Cameraman London London 54 58 London 62 125 Occupation Location of interview Length of Questions Texts shown* interview asked (minutes) Qassam Mujahida 125 125 Al-Libi (Al-Qaeda) Qassam Mujahida (Al-Qassam forums) Nottingham Administrator Baker and Chef London Salesman London 61 125 Al-Libi (AlQaeda) on Gaza 69 125 Al-Libi (AlQaeda) on Gaza London London 69 125 Al-Libi (AlQaeda) on Gaza London 61 125 Al-Libi (AlQaeda) on Gaza

Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin

920
London Nottingham London Salesman

No. Initials Age Background

SA

British-born Somali. Muslim born to conservative family

PS

29 British-born Iraqi. Grew up in conservative Muslim family

AT

26 British-born Arab and Muslim. Family originally from London an Arab Gulf country

JP

28 Syrian-born Muslim. Family were political exiles

JA

21 British-born. Family originally from Egypt

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AF

24 British-born Muslim. Family displaced from Palestine in 1967

FP

26 British-born. Family originally from Libya

No. Initials Age Background Chef London 69 125

Location

Occupation

Location of interview

Length of Questions Texts shown* interview asked (minutes) Al-Zawahiri (Al-Qaeda) on London bombings 125 Qassam Mujahida (Al-Qassam forums) 61 125 Al-Zawahiri (Al-Qaeda) on London bombings

AC

26 British-born Muslim. Family fled civil war in Lebanon London

CL

25 Iraqi-born British Muslim. Family were political exiles London

Satellite technician and sports trainer Sales assistant London

London

68

10

DT

24 Born and raised in UK. Family originally from Syria

London

Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7

11

BS

Car dealer Salesman

London London

65 62

125 125

Bin Laden Al-Zawahiri (Al-Qaeda) on London bombings

12

FS

24 British-born Arab and Muslim. Family originally from London Morocco 25 British-born Algerian. Muslim born to conservative London family

13

RP

23 Born and raised in UK. Family originally from Egypt

London London

Student Taxi driver

London London

64 66

125 125

Bin Laden Bin Laden

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LA

25 Born and raised in UK. Family political exiles from Iraq

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* For reasons of

space we have concentrated on audience responses to the original and translated versions of only three texts, bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and Al-Libi.

Table 2: Focus group participants*

Location Occupation Location of Length of interview interview (minutes) 52 Texts shown

Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin

922
56 111, 19-25 London See above London 170 1218

No.

Initials Age Background

1 [individual interview]

TC

45 Worked as a presenter in London Journalist London Iraq. Lived in Iran and Syria before moving to UK

111, Al-Zawahiri (Al-Qaeda) on London 1925 bombings; bin Laden Al-Zawahiri (Al-Qaeda) on London bombings; bin Laden

2 [individual interview]

LN

46 Worked on different London Journalist London Jordan ian newspapers and and on Jordanian tv. Lived and researcher worked in Iraq for 5 years before moving to work in Dubai from 2004 onwards

3 [individual interview]

BB Al-Zawahiri (Al-Qaeda) on London bombings; bin Laden

FOCUS GROUP

TC, LN, BB

45, See above 46

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Some participants asked for some details to be withheld.

Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7 Table 3: Interview topics and questions
No. 1 2 Topic Biographical Use/knowledge of media sources Question Can you say a word about yourself ? Age/background/ occupation What terms do you use to describe digital media such as internet, mobile phones, social networking sites, in comparison with traditional media such as television, radio, etc.? Do you treat these very differently? Do people you know make clear distinctions between these? Can you say a bit about your own consumption of new and traditional media? Which do you tend to use most and how often? Do you use social networking sites/services, e.g. Facebook and/or Twitter? If so, how much and when? What is the main purpose of your use of these? Do you use mobile web services? Do you think some people/groups fear what is out there on the internet? If so, why do you think this is? What is it that people fear? How is the internet represented in news reports around terrorism? Do you think that the advance of the internet has caused certain terrorist activities or made existing terrorism worse? Can you give some examples? What do you understand by the terms violent extremism and radicalization? Have you recently come across any literature or media or people that you would consider to be extremist or radicalizing? Can you give some examples? What extremist messages have you found to be most and also least convincing? Would you say that the opportunities for spreading violent extremist messages are greater online or offline? Or how do you think these environments might operate together? Do you think that there are particular media forms (nasheeds [songs], video, graphics) or websites that are more convincing than others in presenting extremist messages? Any examples? I want to show you now some texts that you may consider as containing extremist messages. I would be interested to know if you could identify themhave you seen them or heard of them before? What are the key differences between the original and the translated versions? Who do you think the main message of the text is aimed at?

Use/knowledge of media sources Use/knowledge of media sources

Use/knowledge of media sources

Use/knowledge of media sources Extremism Extremism

7 8

9 10

Extremism Extremism

11

Extremism

12

Shown texts

13 14

Shown texts Shown texts

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No. 15 16 17 18 19 Topic Shown texts Shown texts Shown texts Shown texts British government policies to counter extremism British government policies to counter extremism British government policies to counter extremism British government policies to counter extremism British government policies to counter extremism British government policies to counter extremism British government policies to counter extremism Question Does the meaning of the texts change and if so, how? Which elements of both (original Arabic and translated to English versions) do you find most and also least persuasive, and why? For example, what particular phrases, words, images, sound would make most impact on you? What would you change or add to this text to make them more convincing? Are you aware of any policies the British government is using to limit what it calls violent extremism?

20

Do you think the British governments policies have changed since 9/11?

21

22

Do you think it is right for the British government to try to identify individuals who might be vulnerable to what it calls radicalization? Do you think government really knows what causes people to hold extremist views or call for violence? Have you heard of the Prevent strategy?

23

Should the British government try to go online to counter extremist messages?

24

Should the British government encourage ordinary citizens to go online and try to argue against those holding extremist views? Is it pointless for the British government to try to reduce what it calls radicalized individuals in Britain when Britains military is still in Iraq or Afghanistan?

25

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