War, Geopolitics, and Foreign Policy Advocacy in International Media: A Comparative Perspective.

Variations in the degree of public support for war in Iraq can be traced to differences in the way news media in different countries represented the crisis to their publics. We present related studies of news coverage of the Iraq war in news magazines of five nations over a one-year period leading up to and including the war and its aftermath. We draw on a sample of stories about Iraq in major news magazines from France, Canada, the US, the UK, and Germany. We find support for the hypothesis that international (non-American) media framed the issues of war and foreign policy objectives by advocating a less aggressive, more internationalist, and more diplomatic foreign policy approach than US media, and that these distinctions reflect the widening gap between the United States and Europe on issues of geopolitics and global cooperation. Such differences not only reflect critically important distinctions in national policy positions towards Iraq, they also have likely contributed to differences in public perceptions of the need for war at all. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]