Journalism in the Crosshairs: The Islamic State's exploitation of western media practice

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Ubayasiri, Kasun
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2017
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The Islamist terrorist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) harnesses a sophisticated and nuanced media strategy to use and abuse journalists to deliver strategic outcomes favourable to ISIS. Basing its discussion on the beheadings of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Kenji Goto, this paper examines how these killings were framed in ISIS media and how the organisation justifies journalist killings as a legitimate act of warfare. It argues that ISIS’s exploitation of the western press for strategic gains – and indeed the execution of journalists ­– may be circumvented though a paradigm shift in news reporting from superficial event-based reporting that repackages ISIS frames, to a more nuanced coverage that unmasks what strategic needs terrorists aim to fulfil through their violence.

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Fusion

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2017

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011

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© The Author(s) 2017. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.

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Communication Studies

Journalism Studies

Film, Television and Digital Media

Visual Arts and Crafts

Communication and Media Studies

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