Kozmopolitan ve ulusal bakış arasında: BBC world news'ün Suriyeli mülteci krizini haberleştirmesi

The Syrian refugee crisis has been a staple in international news media agendas for over a decade. Many of these media outlets proclaim to reach a cosmopolitan/ postnational audience in global and transnational contexts. Yet closer scrutinization reveals that their reporting seems to be more national/parochial in scope than genuinely cosmopolitan. The tensions between the local and the global appear to make it difficult for self-proclaimed cosmopolitan news outlets to fully meet their ambitions. This raises important questions about the role of such news media in discourses on global crises, the construction of audiences, othering, and formation of in- and outgroups. To date, there are few empirical studies that operationalize cosmopolitanism in audiovisual content and more specifically in TV news packages covering crises. The present doctoral thesis addresses this research gap by using news framing theory as the main theoretical and methodological lens and explores journalistic practices that shape the news frames. The BBC World News' coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis from 2011 to 2017 serves as a case study. The aim is to assess the extent to which the BBC World News's coverage of this highly politicized issue can be considered 'cosmopolitan' and to chart what audience(s) they try to reach. In other words, the study critically explores whether the BBC World News practices cosmopolitan journalism in the coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis and how journalists perceive their work when covering global crises for global audiences. The empirical approach connects a complementary content analysis with semi-structured interviews; the research subjects are 1) news content retrieved via the BBC World News' as well as BBC's web archives and 2) journalists who covered the Syrian refugee crisis. Previous literature on cosmopolitan outlook (Beck, 2006), risk society and culture of fear and many useful theoretical concepts from the field of journalism studies and provided the thesis with an in-depth understanding and conceptualization of an idealistic journalism and its normative aspirations. The thesis is guided by three research questions: RQ1: How does the BBC World News frame the Syrian refugee crisis in their video news packages? RQ2: To xviii what extent do the BBC World News' packages on the Syrian refugee crisis reflect a cosmopolitan vision? RQ3: How do BBC journalists perceive their own practices in TV reporting about crises? The introductory chapter contextualizes the thesis, investigates the limits of a cosmopolitan outlook in journalism, shares the aims of the thesis, and its relevance for journalism studies. Overall, this comprehensive chapter initiates the critical discussion of the topic and identifies the research gap in focus. Finally, the reader is presented with the research questions and provided with a brief chapter outline for the following chapters of the thesis. The introduction is followed by an extensive literature review. This chapter consists of six subchapters. The first sub chapter explores previous research on cosmopolitanism and the news media; then the second subchapter reviews the literature on news selection and news framing in which essential media effects theories are discussed. Next to this, key concepts such as visual framing, emotions, mediated distant suffering, and compassion fatigue are explained and are connected to the original research in the empirical part. The third subchapter discusses journalistic performance in crisis reporting, which is an important for understanding how TV journalism works. This is followed by the fourth subchapter on risk society, culture of fear, and the framing of uncertainties. Here the works of Beck, Furedi, and Altheide - among other scholars - are critically reviewed. The fifth subchapter focuses on the BBC World News' as an organization and its global outlook. In this chapter, the editorial guidelines of the BBC are closely analysed. Finally, before moving on with the research design and methodology chapter, a transition is made with the final sub chapter, namely: "Analyzing TV news packages and journalistic performance". The third chapter, "Research Design and Methodology" first explains the mixed methods research design and the rationale behind its use in this study. Then the chapter in divided into two main subchapters; the first one explains content analysis and the second one the interview method. For both, the respective research steps are outlined, which include the unit of analysis, sampling strategy, data collection, data analysis, validity, and reliability among other method specific components. All of these steps are carefully explained and accounted for before moving on with the empirical part of the study. For the content analysis, 240 video news packages were sampled, a codebook was prepared, then the data were coded and analysed in SPSS. xix To complete the coding of more latent variables and patterns that may have been missed in quantitative coding, Atlas.ti was used for qualitative annotations. This allowed the researcher to take notes systematically and to cluster the data to explore trends and patterns across the data (both text and visuals). The semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 journalists who work for the BBC, covered the Syrian refugee crisis, and whose output was shared online on bbc.com. For this method, a thematic analysis was used to reduce the data and chart the themes across the interview transcripts. Another Atlas.ti project served for coding the interviews. Introduction, Theoretical Framework, Research Design and Methodology are followed by three results chapters and a conclusion chapter. Next, these results chapters will be shortly explained. The fourth chapter, Framing the Syrian Refugee Crisis in TV News Packages shares the most comprehensive results of this study. It is divided into four sub chapters namely, Events-based Journalism, Emotional Angle, Generic & Issue-specific Frames and the British Perspective: Us vs. Them. Several findings from the content analysis confirm the constraints of TV journalism found in the literature, as well as in the interviews conducted for this study. One of the most striking findings concerns how refugees are framed as passive subjects although there seemed to be an obvious effort to include them in the news and give them a voice. Another interesting result -revealed through the qualitative analysis of the videos- is the prevalence of an explicitly British perspective in the news. This manifested itself in various ways; for instance, when journalists take Britain as the main point of reference or context, place Britain and the British government's position and actions on the international stage etc. Overall, the study concludes that the BBC World News seems to be caught in a tension (and at times contradiction) between a national and cosmopolitan outlook in its coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis. This means that the news content shown on the BBC Global's two main news outlets, the BBC World News and bbc.com, neither displays a decidedly parochial/national nor cosmopolitan outlook. The fifth chapter further investigates the BBC World News' coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis along the cosmopolitan and national spectrums. The empirical analysis shifts focus on how the BBC organises its foreign news and takes a closer look at how foreign correspondents reflect on their own practices in the context of xx continuous change in journalism. In this chapter, Beck's conceptualization of "imagined cosmopolitan communities of global risks" is critically discussed and advanced; based on the findings, a new theoretical concept of "imagined communities of glocal risks" is introduced to the literature. Finally, the (im)possibility of a cosmopolitan journalism is discussed. The sixth chapter focuses on the challenges of covering long-running crises. The Syrian refugee crisis started over a decade ago and it has been a particularly challenging topic in news agendas due to its complexity, duration, and human impact. Journalists struggle emotionally with the difficulties of covering a humanitarian crisis on the ground, but they are also under constant pressure to cover this long-running crisis in creative ways that capture audiences' attention. In connection to the latter, journalists' own accounts on compassion fatigue are shared and discussed. Finally, a glimpse at the present and future state of journalism at the BBC and the increased media convergence in the newsroom have been taken. The research contributes to the wider academic debate on the possibility of a cosmopolitan journalism; whether it currently exists or whether it is merely a normative aspiration and how international news media approach this in their crisis coverage. This thesis can also be read as a cosmopolitan manifesto while acknowledging the persistence of nation states and their unique national outlooks as revealed in the findings. The strength of the study not only lies in its normative call for a cosmopolitan journalism but also in its methodological application. Studying audiovisual content requires a systematic approach which implements mixed methods. The rigorousness of the quantitative step of the content analysis ensured reliability of the study. A second coder helped the researcher to code 10% of the data to see if they can reach agreement and the intercoder reliability test for most variables met satisfying standards according to Krippendorf's alpha scores. Next to this, the qualitative approach gave the flexibility needed for the research to operationalize the complex theoretical concept of "cosmopolitanism". While this study offers theoretical and methodological contributions to the wider field of media and communications studies, it has several limitations that can be addressed in future studies. First, the study is an individual PhD project with a xxi relatively small dataset, which puts clear confinements on the generalisability of the findings to other international news media. This is a potential downside of the vertical approach that went in-depth on one case (the BBC) as applied in this study. Future research may investigate the possibilities of cosmopolitan journalism by sampling several international news media outlets and interviewing a larger group of journalists who cover foreign news with a focus on crises. The second limitation concerns the content analysis. The coding was done manually as there is no tool known to the researcher that could facilitate the data collection process with computer aid. Future studies may develop methodologies for an automated content analysis on audio-visual content that would allow researchers to study larger volumes of news content; a larger dataset would allow for generalisations of findings on a more robust basis. However, a qualitative and/or human coding at some stage in the research design is advised for future studies to complement the analysis on a large scale with an in-depth analysis of small but representative data from the sample. Third, interviews allowed the researcher to build rapport and receive indepth answers to the questions. Although for this research interviews were a great fit and the saturation point was reached to provide rich answers to the research questions, future studies can also consider conducting surveys next to content analysis if the study is scaled up to include several news outlets and journalists. The practical benefit of this would be saving time and financial costs. Online surveys are relatively cheap to conduct and allow for much quicker data analysis than interviews. This research touches upon media ethics but did not investigate them in-depth. As quality journalism -and in this case cosmopolitan journalism for a cosmopolitan audience- is set out to adhere to certain journalistic ideals and norms, inevitably media ethics played a role in the study. The editorial guidelines for instances, had to be investigated for the purposes of the study. Future research can connect this discussion on a cosmopolitan journalism closer to media ethics. That said, the current study sheds new light on the discussions around cosmopolitanism while looking at this through a news framing lens in audio-visual content. Both theoretically and empirically, this study hopes to contribute to the field xxii of journalism studies, media and communication studies in general, and potentially to other interdisciplinary studies.