What happened in Qana?

Absztrakt (kivonat)

Generally, there is a requirement for TV news to be neutral and to display the reality correctly, especially the programs that make reports on war. This case study examines three television channels and their coverage about the Qana‐incident, where 26 civilians were killed by an Israeli air strike in the conflict with Hezbollah in 2006. The Israeli Broadcast Authority, Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN all represented the tragedy differently. The question is how they presented the story and in what context the case occurred? I state that TV‐news and reports as visual narratives base on different cultural contexts. The question of “what is news?” has not got an objective and exclusive answer. The most important pillar of the theoretical background is the concept of the mass communication of globalization. I use a comparative methodology along 2 dimensions: time and channels. The reports are analyzed as narrative contents. This qualitative methodology is able to present the soft differences among the coverage. The result confirms that news depend basically on the cultural context, not only objective professional arrangements.