Mortensen, Nikolaj Houmann

This projekt investigates Danish media’s framing of civilian casualties in respectively the coverage of the Syrian state troops’ invasion of Aleppo in 2016 and the international coalition’s offensive against Mosul in 2016/2017.Linguist and activist Noam Chomsky and media theorist Edward S. Herman argue that the media tend to give victims to the brutality of hostile states far more exposure than those exposed to the same or worse treatment from their own government or its allies. According to the American philosopher Judith Butler, the media even becomes part of the infrastructure of war when differentiating between lives as either grievable or non-grievable since this is necessary to legitimise engaging in violent conflict. It has long been official Danish policy that Bashar al-Assad should step down while currently in Mosul, Danish aircrafts participate in the coalition bombings of the Islamic State. Can one detect diverse ways of framing “our” and “their” victims in Danish media?Through a framing analysis of Politiken’s and Jyllands-Posten’s coverage, the project concludes that there is a clear differentiation in the framings of civilian casualties in respectively Mosul and Aleppo which is in line with both what Chomsky and Herman terms “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims as well as Butlers theory of grievable and non-grieavable lives

Værdige og uværdige - en analyse af danske mediers framing af civile ofre i Aleppo og Mosul

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Roskilde Universitet