The study “The named and the nameless: A comparative analysis of US and UK news coverage of civilian deaths caused by US drone strikes, 2009–2016” by Charles M Rowling from University of Nebraska, and Jason Gilmore and Penelope Sheets from Utah State University compared the coverage of civilian casualties caused by US drone warfare in an US news source, The New York Times and in UK:s The Guardian.
It seemed that after The New York Times published a two-series documentary on 19 December 2021 about the civilian casualties – and the government cover-up of them – caused by drone warfare that there would be a shift in how newspapers cover the drone warfare.
However, the question remained, whether this was a bit too little and too late? Previous research suggests that the coverage before that was largely in line with the government narrative about the importance of eliminating terrorist threats.
“Foreign”, that is, non-US, news coverage tells a different story. Non-American journalists were unburdened by the commercial, institutional and cultural pressures to report positively on US military actions. According to research, non-US journalists have been much more willing to emphasize the illegality of the drone strikes and claim that they cause more terrorism, not less.
The authors argue that the discrepancy in reporting is a reason why the US public has been more supportive to the drone warfare policy compared to the rest of the World. The contribution of this study, then, is to systematically analyze how drone strikes have been reported in the news, compare US and UK press discourses on the matter, and to provide a longitudinal analysis of the news coverage of drone strikes during the entire Obama administration era 2009-2016.
The two hypotheses in the study, based on the existing research on ethnocentrism in the news were: H1: US journalists will be significantly more likely than UK journalists, in general, to portray the policy of US drone warfare favorably.
H2: More specifically, US journalists will be significantly more likely than UK journalists to emphasize the strategic value, technological capability, international legality and domestic legality of US drone strikes.
There were other hypotheses too based on other issues: H3: US journalists will be significantly less likely than UK journalists to reference civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes.
H4: US journalists will be significantly more likely than UK journalists to reference militant casualties caused by US drone strikes.
H5: US journalists will be more likely than UK journalists to use qualifying language when referencing civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes.
H6: US journalists will be less likely than UK journalists to use qualifying language when referencing militant casualties caused by US drone strikes.
H7: US journalists will be less likely than UK journalists to humanize civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes.
H8: The more civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes are mentioned by US and UK journalists, the more critical they will be of the policy overall.
H9: When civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes are mentioned by US and UK journalists, it will lead UK journalists to report on the policy much more critically than US journalists.
For the method, the authors analyzed two newspapers, The New York Times from US and The Guardian from UK, both prestigious, somewhat left-leaning broadsheets. They were chosen because they were considered to be the national newspapers of record within their respective countries.
All articles about US drone policy were included, and false hits (e.g. the drones of insects etc.) were disincluded. A total of 2,038 news stories from The New York Times and 1,865 from The Guardian were collected and analyzed.
For coding, the units of analysis were the articles, with the variables being -1 (negative reference), 0 (neutral), and 1 (positive reference). Positive references included claims that drones were effective against terrorism, while negative included statements that drone strikes led to anti-Americanism or increased the threat of terrorism.
The second category for analysis was mentions of casualties. Both military and civilian casualties were looked for and whether qualifying language was used to describe them like ‘alleged’. When civilians were mentioned, the researchers looked whether humanizing language such as mentions of personal characteristics occurred or terms like ‘innocent’.
Strong support for both hypotheses H1 and H2 was found: US journalists were far more positively disposed towards the drone strikes. H3 was also robustly supported: civilian casualty references occurred in 23.5 percent of all casualty references (civilian, militant or unspecified) in New York Times stories; at the same time, civilian casualty references made up 42.9 percent of all references in The Guardian.
References to militants (H4) were also more frequent in The New York Times than in The Guardian: 36.8 percent mentioned military casualties in the US paper, compared to 30.1 percent in the UK paper. The expectation (H5 and H6) was also that US journalists were more likely to include qualifying language with civilian casualties and less likely with civilian casualties. These were also strongly supported.
The correctness of the hypotheses continued with H7: US journalists were significantly less likely to humanize the civilian victims (42.7%), compared to UK journalists (50.5%), supporting H7. Mentions of civilian casualties also spurred more critical coverage in both news sources, again supporting H8.
The final hypothesis was that UK journalists would report on the policy much more critically than US journalists after civilian casualties were mentioned (H9). And once again, the UK journalists were significantly more critical of the policy than their US counterparts, lending support that US journalists were consciously or unconsciously influenced by ethnocentrism.
In the discussion, the authors state that all of the hypotheses being confirmed supported the notion that ethnocentrism played a role in the US coverage. Second, the mentions of civilian casualties caused US journalists to engage in protective tendencies to downplay or minimize the impact on US attitudes.
Third, it seemed that only when the US journalists were faced with the negative aspects of the drone policy, i.e. civilian casualties, were they spurred into including more critical perspectives. In fact, when only civilian casualties were mentioned, the US journalists were as critical as UK journalists.
All in all, the results reveal that Americans have received a generally favorable and uncritical interpretation of the US drone policy, but the British have not. This may explain why the American public has been generally favorable towards the policy in poll – with the authors suggesting that Americans do not receive “a complete and accurate picture of the ramifications and implications of US drone strikes”.
The article “The named and the nameless: A comparative analysis of US and UK news coverage of civilian deaths caused by US drone strikes, 2009–2016” by Charles M Rowling, Jason Gilmore and Penelope Sheets is in Media, War & Conflict. (Free abstract).
Picture: Morning in Kabul. By Mohammad Rahmani.
License Unsplash.
