The culture of framing terminologies

Research has shown that there is a practice of uneven usages of key journalistic framing terminologies applied in the Western coverage of public acts of violence, namely ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ (‘domestic’ and ‘international’), which seem to be based on religious or racial categories of the perpetrators of the acts. While engaging in a critical evaluation of journalistic practices is valuable, it also has limits because such evaluations do not include sufficient consideration of the broader ideologies and epistemic imaginaries that have permeated the public sphere of a given society, in which journalistic practices have been established. This chapter argues that journalistic practices are best assessed in close colloquy with broader discursive trends and public discourses, which recently have attracted significant attention and that have linked news media practices with extra-journalistic phenomena, such as Islamophobia, racism, Orientalism and calls for decoloniality. Guided by Edward Said’s critique of news practices and van Dijk’s conceptual principle and interdisciplinary approach of ʼnews as discourse’, the chapter argues that it is critical to situate news processes within a larger ‘macrosociology’ and the social and political climates in which they exist.