http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/28317/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37776/ 2012-08-01T00:00:00Z In January 2009, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) denied a request from the Disaster's Emergency Committee (DEC) to broadcast an emergency appeal to relieve human suffering in Gaza in the wake of the Israeli ground offensive 'Cast Lead'. The decision marked the first time in the over 40-year relationship between the two organisations that a request was refused by the BBC, but an appeal went ahead. BBC Executives argued that airing the appeal could pose a threat to public confidence in the BBC's impartiality. This article, both descriptive and exploratory in scope, first reconstructs a chronology of this 'impartiality argument', providing a detailed overview of the key players, the (historical) relationship between them, and the run-up to and aftermath of the BBC's decision. The second part of the article analyses the BBC's denial of the DEC request and explores how the BBC's concerns over impartiality articulate its new 'wagon wheel' approach to impartiality. Finally, the authors study the BBC's decision and the-rekindled-centrality of impartiality within the context of the BBC being increasingly bound by the nature of its brand and the visibility of the Middle East conflict. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/32761/ 2012-03-01T00:00:00Z This article, which is part of larger research project, considers the justification discourse of BBC Executives following the public outrage over the BBC’s decision not to air the 2009 DEC Appeal for Gaza. The BBC’s justification is characterised by a recurrent conceptualisation of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as embedded in an ‘ongoing news story’. The article analyses media interviews with BBC Executives together with relevant BBC documentation is applied to consider three affordances used to justify the controversial decision. We argue that the discourse of ‘ongoing news story’ allows the BBC to situate itself as a key agent in the Middle East conflict which necessitates invoking journalistic impartiality to all BBC output; facilitates boundary work between journalism and humanitarianism and thus allowing discourses of impartiality to unfold strictly in journalistic terms. This leads, we argue to the construction of ‘journalistic inviolability’ whereby the pursuit of principled journalism is presented as a greater humanitarian achievement than airing the DEC appeal. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/23979/ 2011-08-01T00:00:00Z This article focuses on the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) decision to deny a request to air a Disasters Emergency Committee Appeal for Gaza in January 2009. The BBC argued that airing the appeal would threaten its impartiality. Despite the centrality of impartiality to the BBC, the concept's meaning is anything but unequivocal. An exploration of a media offensive, which BBC executives launched in response to public outrage over the decision, seeks to reconstruct what definition of impartiality is inferred by the BBC's rationale behind not airing the appeal. The analysis illustrates how the BBC's justification engages dialogically with the critical position of others and, by doing so, draws on diverse understandings of impartiality. We argue that this 'semantic plasticity' of impartiality does not point at institutional confusion, but rather at BBC's executives capitalising on the rhetorical potential this plasticity affords. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/23049/ 2011-04-01T00:00:00Z Drawing on "active audience studies" and recent theories of mediation, the concept of "lay theories of media" is proposed as a means to understand how social movement actors think about and interact with news media as part of the "practice" of activism. The argument is made via a case study of the Dissent! network using data gathered from participant observation in the planning and enactment of protests at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit in Scotland and 30 semi-structured interviews with activists. This article argues that Dissent! activists approached Gleneagles with existing knowledge and experience about news media and demonstrates how these "lay theories" informed their activism. The conclusion stresses the utility of "lay theories" in analyzing how perceived knowledge about how the media function influences or underwrites political activism. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/31190/ 2010-07-01T00:00:00Z