Dissecting Visual Conflict: A Comparative Analysis of ISIS and the Egyptian Military\u27s Photographs in 2016-2017

Non-state actors can now easily spread their visual messages and directly communicate with their publics online. ISIS is a prime example for a militant group that has built a relatively robust structure for its visual campaign both at the central and provincial levels. In response, numerous states have been complementing their military operations against militant groups with a visual media component. In Sinai, ISIS’s local province (Wilayat Sinai) and the Egyptian military have used photography to project their contesting messages over the past few years. In this dissertation project, I conduct content and visual framing analyses on a sample of 1905 images to examine the interactions between military conditions and photographic output, opposing visual frames, and visual semiotic constellations. An interactive model of visual contestation emerges from this case study to map the key contextual factors, image components, and visual message prongs necessary to understand visual contestation in the online environment

Entertainment-Education Versus Extremism: Examining Parasocial Interaction among Arab Viewers of Anti-ISIS TV Drama

Radicalization amongst youth is a challenge facing the Arab world. Recent reports indicate that over 20,000 Arab fighters traveled to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria and another 5-15 percent of millennials across seven Arab countries consider some violent extremist groups to be on the right path. In response, Arab countries have experimented with entertainment-education (E-E) by using anti-extremism narratives in popular culture to address radicalization at the societal level. This study explores whether those narratives can elicit viewers’ parasocial interaction (PSI)—pseudo friendships with or animosity toward mediated personas that can catalyze persuasion—with fictional characters. Using qualitative and quantitative content analyses of more than 8,600 YouTube comments, this study explores Arab viewers’ responses to a recent E-E project, al-Siham al-Marika (The Piercing Arrows) drama series, that portrays life under ISIS’s control. The findings identify recurrent themes in the pool of comments, such as show debates, religious contestations, political disputes, empathy for victims, and engagement with plotline/characters. More importantly, they reveal at least one out of six comments (n=1477) exhibits PSI with fictional characters, addressing them as part of their social milieu. The study further traces the variations in the nature of PSI in relation to mediated positive role models, negative role models, and transitional characters in the narrative. It concludes with a discussion of E-E’s potentials as an anti-extremism messaging strategy and PSI’s role as a useful metric in assessing such narratives

Media Framing in the Centennial Olympic Park Bombing: How Media Coverage of Terrorism Shifts When a Suspect Is Revealed

Terrorist attacks often dominate news cycles as reporters seek to interpret the attack through their own desired framing tools. Since “humans are predisposed to attend to negative and threatening information” (Sui et al., 2017), news coverage of terrorist attacks receive a lot of attention thus, how the attack is framed can manipulate the narrative portrayed to the public. This study utilized the Nexus database to examine framing techniques used by a local and an international newspaper in reporting on the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park bombings both before and after a subject was identified by the FBI. This paper explores how perpetrator identity, legitimacy in sources, and perceived future threats effected how the bombing was covered. Overall, once a suspect had been named, both news outlets utilized “othering” techniques to deemphasize the domestic terrorism label, the sources used became less qualified, and they stopped speculating about the possibility of another attack

2017 Charlottesville Riots – Media Coverage Paper Media and Terrorism

This paper intended to dissect the similarities and differences of media coverage for a very significant recent event--the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right riots and anti-racism protests. A focal moment within this series of events is the car attack by perpetrator James Alex Fields Jr., a white-supremacist responsible for the death of one woman and countless other injuries. The analysis reflects the coverage of this event through the lens of MSNBC and Fox News, two politically contrasting domestic news sources. An emphasis on media framing, which is loosely how media is manipulated to make the consumer think about a certain topic in one way, helped categorize and describe the differences of these two sources. This discussion of multiple framing variables ultimately showed that these two sources captured a single event in very different ways. These discrepancies illuminate a significant contrast in perspectives of this violent and hateful event

CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media

The essays that comprise CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media began their lives as presentations at a small, by-invitation workshop, “Emerging Work on Communicative Dimensions of Islamic State,” held on May 3-4, 2017 at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. Consistent with CARGC’s mission to mentor early-career scholars, the workshop was a non-public event featuring graduate students, some affiliated with the Jihadi Networks of Communication and CultureS (JINCS) research group at CARGC, and others from around the United States and the world, in addition to postdocs and faculty members. Parameters were purposefully broad to encourage independent thought and intellectual exploration: contributors were asked to write short essays focusing on any single aspect of Islamic State that was part of their research. The result is a group of fascinating essays: using mostly primary sources (textual, visual, or audio-visual), examining several media platforms and modalities, considering multiple levels of theoretical deployment and construction, and shedding light on various aspects of Islamic State communication against the broad back drop of history, ideology and geopolitics, the following include some of the most innovative approaches to Islamic State to date, and promise a wave of fresh voices on one of the most important challenges to global order.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_briefs/1000/thumbnail.jp