Torture in the Eye of the Beholder: Social Identity, News Coverage, and Abu Ghraib

Abstract

This study compares how the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison story was defined by journalists in seven countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States). A content analysis of leading print news outlets from each country reveals a range of politically significant descriptive labels. At one extreme, American journalists overwhelmingly avoided torture to describe Abu Ghraib, emphasizing instead more ambiguous, and arguably more innocuous, terms such as abuse or mistreatment. At the other extreme, German, Italian, and Spanish journalists tended to define what happened at the prison as torture rather than as abuse or mistreatment. In between these emphases were Australian, British, and Canadian journalists, who fell somewhat closer to the characterizations employed by U.S. journalists. Our view is that these divergences in news coverage are best explained by social identity theory, though other potential explanations are also considered.

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