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AbstractThis paper addresses the coverage by habitual Western legacy media of the 2023/24 Israeli genocidal war against Gaza. It considers the observable media-related practices these media used in coverage of the war and how these practices have helped define, articulate, imagine and intervene implicitly and explicitly in the war, its securitisation, visualisation, mediation, narration, and representation. Together, it suggests, these practices serve to normalise Israel’s epistemic violence against the Palestinians while also depriving them of agency as knowable subjects/agents. It suggests the practice of devoicing the colonised through epistemic violence aims at sowing a narrative that sustains the asymmetry of power in global affairs and attributes a higher moral authority in the ‘Global North’ while widening the gap between the West and the Rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I argue that during moments of extreme flux and danger, such as the ongoing Israeli war against Gaza, it becomes relevant to consider how Palestinian identity is constructed and performed by a variety of actors, by Palestinians and by their supporters, as the most compelling contemporary form of a transnational anti-colonial identity emerging within and in opposition to persisting colonial structures, oppression and subjugation. It is also in these moments, I propose, that it becomes necessary to resituate, reconfigure and re-center Palestine in the imagination, not as a pre-determined bounded entity, but as an entity that is always in conversation with its imagined spatiality and temporality and with national and transnational communal anti-colonial struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Palestine Liberation Organization has been extensively studied and researched in a variety of disciplines and perspectives. However, little attention has been paid to its media and/or political communication strategies that went hand in hand with its political evolution and aims from 1969 to 1982, a period marked by flux and political uncertainty as well intensive PLO state-building processes. This paper seeks to partially fill the gap by addressing political communication not only as a fundamental political practice and strategy but also as an arena in which political elites compete to achieve media legitimacy and ensure support for their objectives and ideologies. Drawing on archival research of the PLO mass media platforms during the period under review, primary sources and interviews with former PLO media personnel, the paper begins with an overview of the PLO's investment in mass media institutions and other cultural genres before discussing its political communication strategy and its aims in the period from 1969 to 1982. The paper then addresses how the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat actively competed in the political communication arena to achieve media legitimacy and secure public consent for the PLO's ideologies and aims. In doing so, the paper does not suggest Arafat achieved total domination of the political communication space nor that other guerrilla leaders, Arab and other actors did not compete in this arena. Rather, the approach emphasizes the relationship between political agency and structure during moments of flux and change, thus complementing dominant approaches in political communication research that focus on framing and discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between journalists and news source has been challenged by new digital technologies, the crisis in public communication and the multiplication of sources of information and news, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which has transformed journalistic routines and audience behaviour. Existing research on news sources has contributed to our understanding of which voices dominate the news agenda in normal conditions, but there remains little research on the news sources and journalists’ relationship during crisis, particularly in non-Western contexts. In this paper, we seek to partially address the lacuna, drawing on semi-structured interviews with selected journalists from across the Arab world to address the effect of COVID-19 on journalists’ relationship with their news sources and what we call source cultivation practices in a region where traditional forms of personal networking as well as cultural norms have defined the relationship between journalists and news sources in the legacy media. In addressing these issues, this paper contributes to research on news sources during crises while drawing attention to the theoretical and methodological gaps in news sources research in the region as well as the continued dominance of Western- and media-centric paradigms in the broad field of the sociology of news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the implications of 11 September 2001 and its mediation in UK and Arab/Muslim news media for the ways Palestinians in Britain, as an ethno-national minority and diaspora, [...]