The thesis explores the state of European foreign conflict reporting by public sector broadcasters, post-Cold War and post-9/11. It provides a comparative analysis of the news values of three television news providers from three differing public systems: BBC’s News at 10, representing a British public service broadcaster, nominally independent of government control; Russia’s Vremya on Channel 1, a state-aligned broadcaster used, to a large extent, as a mouthpiece for the government; and France 2’s 20 Heures, a public service broadcaster, from a media system with a long history of state intervention. By investigating their reports, the study identifies and analyses the differing roles of public and state-aligned broadcasters. It examines the priority they place on certain values leading to particular aspects of a news story becoming news in one part of the world but not in others. The case study under investigation is a two-year period (2006-2008) from the ongoing Middle East conflict which both pre-dates the change in East-West relations and the events of 9/11 and provides a meeting point of many of the geo-political and post-imperial global struggles facing the three selected news reporting countries. The analytical chapters examine a peace conference, Israeli-Palestinian fighting and intra-Palestinian fighting, which reflect discrete aspects of this conflict and enable the broadcasters’ overarching and specific narratives to be considered. The thesis uses these events to assess relations between state and broadcaster and the attendant associations with the war on terror which emerge in the foreign conflict coverage. It investigates possible imbalances in the reports to the detriment of one of the warring parties and contributes to understanding how the broadcasters perceive their own and other countries. The study examines the broadcasters’ news values and agenda-setting techniques. By focusing on these two areas, which influence the shaping, length and positioning of broadcasts, news reports are analysed both quantitatively (e.g. running order, airtime, number of items per programme and subject matter) and qualitatively (e.g. the portrayal of news values and agenda-setting attributes displayed). The overarching argument illustrates that the hierarchy in news values is never arbitrary but can be explained, in part, by the structure of the broadcasters and by events occurring within, or associated with, the reporting country. As a result, the thesis investigations help identify nationally differentiated perceptions of conflict throughout the world and, in a broader context, contribute to studies in the areas of media, foreign conflict and Middle East conflict reporting.

As climate change becomes more destructive to our planet, some governments have taken action towards a more sustainable future. One being the UK, where a Climate Emergency was declared in 2019, which affects public corporations and news outlets. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how do news reports portray natural disasters from an eco-linguistic perspective. This qualitative study focuses on analysing data regarding the 2019-2020 wildfires in Australia through the linguistic choices made in the texts by incorporating a combination of corpus linguistics, eco-linguistics and media discourse. The corpus under investigation consists of 41,055 words collected from 4 different UK-based news outlets. In order to analyse the data, I chose three search words (fire, climate and animal) to further investigate by using both corpus- and eco-linguistics. The results showcase a consistent pattern within the selected search words: fire and climate are portrayed as threats whereas animals are portrayed as victims. Yet, the most remarkable finding is regarding climate, as it is viewed as a cause rather than an effect caused by human actions. This study is a step towards a better understanding of climate change in news reporting; providing an insight on what the discourse is lacking but should be included.

The present thesis compares media representations of Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ or the Women’s Protection Units), an all-female Kurdish military organisation, in British media versus the organisation’s own media outlets, with the aim to see how they differ, more specifically in terms of representations of their ideological agency. By utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA) in combination with postcolonial theory, the media construction of four soldiers’ deaths have been scrutinized in 30 media texts in order to provide a deeper understanding of the hegemonic discourses and sociocultural practices which underpin these constructions. The result shows a discrepancy in terms of representations of YPJ’s ideological agency. On the one hand, YPJ adopts an explicit effort to assert their ideology through a propagandistic discourse that emphasises their values of resistance, freedom, egalitarianism, gender emancipation and democratic confederalism, portraying their fighters as fearless martyrs and heroines that are determined to die for their cause. On the other hand, the UK media represent YPJ’s ideology in generic ways in which hidden ideological ‘us vs. them’ representations are deeply rooted in a broader naturalised Western hegemonic discourse, with portrayals of YPJ’s fallen soldiers mostly characterised by sensationalism and victimisation. One part of such hidden ideological agenda is the way in which YPJ constantly gets included in, and excluded from, ‘us’ (the West), depending on who the enemy is, in addition to mainly receiving media coverage in direct relation to ISIS, a common Western enemy. The result is a representation that endorses YPJ’s fight within a hegemonic Western discourse, neglecting their ideological agency. This has sociocultural implications since such hegemonic discourse misrepresents YPJ’s struggle, constructing their fight mostly as part of a Western counterterrorist strategy, which further legitimises the Western power to construct history based on its own premises and claims of truth.