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What is Media ‘Bias'? A Case Study of

Al Jazeera's Reporting of the Iraq War
a
Annabelle Lukin
a
Centre for Language in Social Life, Department of Linguistics ,
Macquarie University , Sydney
Published online: 03 Aug 2011.

To cite this article: Annabelle Lukin (2006) What is Media ‘Bias'? A Case Study of Al Jazeera's
Reporting of the Iraq War, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, 1:1, 65-80,
DOI: 10.1080/18335300.2006.9686879

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 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

What is Media ‘Bias’? A Case

Study of Al Jazeera’s Reporting
of the Iraq War
ANNABELLE LUKIN
Centre for Language in Social Life
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney
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ABSTRACT
Despite a long history of debate, ‘bias’ and related terms like
‘objectivity’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ remain difficult to define
and operationalise. Using a corpus of news stories from the Al
Jazeera English language website coverage of the second assault
on Falluja, in November 2004, compared with stories for the same
period from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio
National’s AM current affairs program, this article argues for a
method for analysing ‘bias’ that is empirical, probabilistic,
contrastive and multidimensional. In the absence of such a
method, the term ‘bias’ is more likely to remain a political
weapon, than a tool for understanding how the media shapes our
experience of crucial events.

HUME: And how important a factor is it, in your

estimation, that for all intents and purposes Al Jazeera is off
the air in Iraq during this?
SCALES: Absolutely key. The Al Jazeera has essentially
become a propaganda machine for the bad guys. And one
of the things the US forces are doing, and I think doing
very well, is trying to shut these guys down, so they don't
create this propaganda frenzy that was a problem the last
time we went into Fallujah.
HUME: You mean the civilian casualties.
SCALES: Oh, showing the civilian casualties...
HUME: There's going to be some of those though, right?
SCALES: There are going to be some. But recall, they were
in that hospital and they were showing hour after hour of

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 65

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

tape on Al Jazeera of all the human suffering. We're going

to be able to avoid that this time.
HUME: Bob Scales, great to have you. Thanks very much.
(Fox News: Special Report with Brit Hume, interview with
military historian and former Army General Robert Scales,
8 November, 2004)

There is no doubt that the international media landscape has been

transformed with the arrival of Al Jazeera. Based in Doha, Qatar, and
funded by the Emir, Al Jazeera became a household name in western
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countries when US-led forces invaded Afghanistan, in October 2001. Al

Jazeera’s exclusive broadcast of video footage of Osama bin Laden, and
its monopoly on reporting from the Taliban front lines ensured that many
western media outlets took footage, and sometimes live feed, from Al
Jazeera during the war in Afghanistan (El-Nawawy & Iskander, 2003, pp.
21-22). In its brief history – Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel was launched in
1996, and its English language website in March, 2003 – it has been
criticised by states across the Middle East, and Al Jazeera offices have
been closed at various times by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian
Authority, Morocco and Jordan (El-Nawawy & Iskandar, 2003, pp. 114-
115). In August 2004, the Iraqi government announced a one month
closure of the Baghdad office, which was extended indefinitely
(aljazeera.net, 19 January, 2005). Currently, as under Saddam Hussein’s
regime, Al Jazeera is banned by the Iraqi government. Other countries
have recalled their ambassadors to Qatar, while others have refused visas
to Al Jazeera journalists (El-Nawawy & Iskandar, 2003, p. 115).
Meanwhile in the US, Al Jazeera has been directly criticised by the US
Defence Secretary who made the following comment:

…it seems to me that it’s up to all of us to try to tell the

truth, to say what we know, to say what we don’t know,
and recognise that we’re dealing with people that are
perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further
their case, and to the extent people lie, of ultimately they
are caught lying and they lose their credibility, and one
would think it wouldn’t take very long for that to happen,
dealing with people like this. (Broadcast on the
documentary, Control Room, retrieved from The Media
Report, ABC Radio National, 8 July, 2004,
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/stories/s11478
36.htm).

The controversy around Al Jazeera makes it an ideal case study for

exploring, and indeed extending, the notion of bias. And there is no better
field of reporting for exploring ‘bias’ than that of war, since it is a site of

66 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

such intense social and political contestation. The charge of bias against
Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, over its coverage of the Iraq War
suggests that the problem of conceptualising – and, therefore, of
operationalising – the term ‘bias’ persists (Jacka, 2005; Lukin, 2005a,
2005b). Despite the complexity apparent in terms like objectivity,
impartiality, bias and balance (see e.g., Fairclough, 1995; Fiske, 1989;
Hall, 1970; Tuchman, 1972), as Jacka notes, “very little of this
complexity is reflected in the deployment of these terms by various
government figures and media commentators” (Jacka, 2005, p. 8).
Perhaps the only dimension of ‘bias’ on which all who use it would
agree is that it implies the notion of choice. In other words, when a charge
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of bias is made, the implication is that a process of selection – of

particular words or phrases, of particular facets of a story over others, or
regarding the reliance on particular kinds of sources to the
backgrounding, or exclusion of others – is involved, and that other
choices were available, but not taken up. This assumption will also be the
point of departure in this article, and my aim will be to bring into view
some of the significant dimensions over which choice is exercised in the
construction of a news story. It is here that the linguist has an important
role to play in mapping out the potential for bias in the news, since it is
the very basis of linguistic expertise to understand how language is
organized (see e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1985/89; Halliday & Matthiessen,
2004; Hasan, 1996; Matthiessen, 1995; Martin, 1992).
Some of these dimensions of choice – for instance, how crucial
participants are named – can be probed relatively easily, and are often the
object of conscious reflection by news organisations and consumers.
Consider for instance the decision by the Los Angeles Times to direct its
journalists not to use the term ‘resistance fighters’ to describe combatants
opposing the US occupation in Iraq, on the basis that the term
‘romanticized’ them, by invoking the French resistance against the Nazis
in WWII. Instead, journalists were to use the terms ‘insurgents’ or
‘guerrillas’ (Reuters, 7 November, 2003). Public debates around bias
focus – rather narrowly – on debates of this kind. ‘Loaded’ words or
phrases – those considered by some significant individual or group to
carry a particular evaluation – are contested (see e.g., Lukin, 2005a for a
more extended discussion of this issue).
At the same time, covert patterns of selection are ignored (see e.g.,
Butt et al., 2004; Lukin et al., 2004), since they involve ‘choices’ we
make in relation to grammatical systems – decisions which include, for
instance, how participants are made central or marginalised in a text, how
agency is distributed, how the flow of information across a text is
managed, with respect to things like what we treat as given information,
and what we treat as ‘news’ (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004).

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 67

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

My article draws on analysis of news stories published on the Al

Jazeera English website, aljazeera.net, for the period 8 November to 15
November, 2004, concerning events in Falluja, a Sunni dominated town
west of Baghdad, when US-led forces began a second intense assault on
the town. The first assault on Falluja was in April 2004, after four US
contractors were killed and their bodies desecrated. This event was widely
reported across the world, and appears to have had a significant effect on
the way in which the Coalition developed its strategy in relation to Falluja
(see e.g., as reported in PBS documentary ‘Private Warriors’ by Martin
Smith, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/). This
second assault was, according to Al Jazeera, the largest military operation
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since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (aljazeera.net, 12

November, 2004). (See Lukin, forthcoming, for a more extended
discussion of the context of Falluja in November 2004, and “Terror
reborn in Falluja ruins”, 18 December 2005, for an account of Falluja one
year on).
The set of stories – or ‘corpus’, in linguistic parlance – retrieved from
the Al Jazeera website consists of nineteen stories, totalling just over
10, 000 words (these were the stories available through the aljazeera.net
archive, as they were accessed some months after their actual dates of
publication). Table 1 displays the headlines from these stories. Table 2
provides the text for one of the 19 stories, from which I will begin the
discussion of dimensions of choice in the Al Jazeera news stories (and
which I will refer to as Example 1). For the purposes of giving some
significance to the patterns found in the Al Jazeera corpus, it is useful to
have an equivalent corpus against which to compare the findings. For
such a purpose, I have created a second corpus of stories for the same
period of time, concerning the assault on Falluja, from the ABC’s A M
programme, which is a news and current affairs program. The ABC
corpus consists of 12 stories, of approximately 6, 200 words.

68 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

Table 1: Headings from news stories published on Al Jazeera

English website
(8 November, 2004 – 15 November, 2004)
8 Nov • Dozens of 'US soldiers captured in Falluja'
• US forces seize Falluja hospital
• AMS* warns Iraqi forces not to fight
9 Nov • Assault on besieged city under way
• Sunni party quits interim government
• Hospital hit as fighting rages in Falluja
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• US continues to take losses in Iraq

• 'Scores of civilians' killed in Falluja
10 Nov • British Muslims decry Falluja assault
• Group 'holding 20 Iraqi national guards'
• Falluja facing humanitarian crisis
11 Nov • Mosques bombed in Falluja fighting
• Fighting in Falluja rages amid confusion
• Iraq seeks to curb press freedoms
12 Nov • US toll mounts as Falluja battle rages
• AMS decries clerics' silence on Falluja
• Fierce fighting in Falluja
13 Nov • US wounded in Falluja hits 412
14 Nov • Humanitarian aid barred from Falluja
15 Nov no stories retrieved
*Note AMS stands for Association of Muslim Scholars

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 69

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

Table 2: Example 1: Text of “Assault on besieged city under

way” (9th November, 2004)

Assault on besieged city under way

Thousands of US and Iraqi troops backed by heavy air support and
armour have stormed into Falluja in an effort to recapture the anti-
US stronghold.
About 10,000 to 15,000 mostly US but also Iraqi troops are taking part
in the offensive.
US forces struck a railway station in Falluja with small arms and tank
machine gun fire, as fighting raged in the besieged Iraqi city.
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Warplanes staged ferocious strikes on targets after US-appointed

interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi gave US-led forces the go-ahead
for a full-scale attack on Monday afternoon.
Aircraft struck about eight times in 20 minutes, sending huge plumes of
smoke billowing up from the northwest of the city.
After intense air strikes, artillery barrages and tank fire, US marines
launched the full assault two hours after sundown, when Iraq's Muslims
mark the breaking of their daily fast during the month of Ramadan.
On one edge of the city, between thunderous explosions, a cleric at a
mosque rallied fighters for the battle.
"God is greatest, oh martyrs. Rise up mujahidin," he said, telling
fighters that waging jihad was an honour.
Casualties
Doctors said at least 15 civilians had been killed. There was no word on
early US casualties. Medical sources also told Al Jazeera
that dozens were injured during clashes between fighters and US-led
forces. 
Iraqi journalist Abu Bakr al-Dulaimi told Al Jazeera the clashes were the
most violent the city had witnessed since April 2003.
"US tanks, armoured vehicles, F-16 and C-130 fighters are taking part
in the attack on Falluja," he said.
"Violent clashes are now going on in the western areas of the city. US
forces are backed by tanks and helicopters," he added.
"Clashes have also erupted in Julan neighbourhood. Resistance in these
areas is fierce," he said. "The city's defenders are responding to the US
attacks with everything at their disposal."
US forces hit
The journalist said clashes also spread to the western parts of the city
including al-Jisrain area. US F-16 fighters also bombed sites in
northeast Falluja.
Fighters caused some damage to the advancing US forces, hitting two
tanks in the north-western area of Saqlawiya and seven oil tankers in
Qarma in the north-east.

70 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

"An unmanned aircraft was downed in central Falluja and a US military

vehicle was burnt behind the new bridge," said al-Dulaimi.
The Shura Council of the Falluja Mujahidin called for international
intervention to halt the assault.
It also called on fighters in other Iraqi cities to go to Falluja's aid.
Earlier on Monday, US marines seized control of land around the
hospital on the western edge of the city, witnesses said.
Allawi said he had given US and Iraqi forces the green light to clear the
city of what he called terrorists.
"We are determined to clean Falluja from the terrorists," he said in
the capital Baghdad.
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Sealed off
The US army closed all roads leading to the besieged city after Iraq's
interim government declared a 60-day state of emergency throughout
the country excluding Kurdish areas, sources told Al Jazeera.
The US military says 1000 to 6000 fighters - Saddam Hussein supporters
and foreign fighters led by al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - are
holed up in Falluja's alleyways and on rooftops.
Peace talks between the interim government and Falluja have fallen
through several times, most recently last month when Allawi
threatened another attack if residents did not surrender al-Zarqawi and
other suspected al-Qaeda linked fighters.
But residents of Falluja say neither al-Zarqawi nor members of al-
Qaeda are present.
Al-Zarqawi's group has claimed some of the bloodiest attacks in Iraq in
recent months as well as the beheadings of foreign captives.
Al Jazeera and Agencies
Media

What points of view are heard in the text?

There is typically a clear demarcation in any news report between the

content presented as the perspective of some external source – expressed
for instance through the use of phrases such as, “US military sources
say…”, “According to Iraqi government officials…”, “the Pentagon
believes…” – and the content from which such projecting elements are
absent. In the absence of such phrases, the content is presented as fact.
For instance, in the example text in Table 2, one can read the following
statement: US forces struck a railway station in Falluja with small arms
and tank machine gun fire, as fighting raged in the besieged Iraqi city.
The two events described in this sentence are presented as factual. By
contrast, in the sentence, Doctors said at least 15 civilians had been

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 71

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

killed, the journalist commits him or herself only to what has been said,
but not to the factual nature of what has been said. This distinction opens
up an important dimension of choice in the construction of news – what
range of perspectives is given in a news story. In “Assault on besieged
city…”, the following individuals, groups and organisations are either
quoted or their comments and views reported: a cleric, Iraqi journalist
Abu Bakr al-Dulaimi, the Shura Council of the Falluja Mujahidin, Allawi
(the then interim Prime Minister), sources, the US military, and residents
of Falluja.
This selection of sources is diverse, since it includes religious,
military, media, and civilian points of view. How does the picture look
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when we consider the selections over the stories for the whole week?
Figure 1 takes only sourced clauses, and shows the proportion given to
various external sources, for the entire Al Jazeera corpus, compared with
the ABC corpus. (A clause is a stretch of language over which we map
three kinds of grammatical choices – see Halliday and Matthiessen (2004)
for further discussion of this grammatical unit). In both corpora, the
‘Coalition’ – spokespeople for the US and Iraqi forces, and the US
administration – dominates, but where the proportion of clauses sourced
to the Coalition is over 50% in the ABC corpus, it is only around 20% in
the Al Jazeera corpus. At 20%, the contribution of Coalition
spokespeople is the largest for the Al Jazeera corpus, but only marginally.
The Al Jazeera stories provide space for the views of a number of
different ‘stakeholders’: religious organisations, aid organisations,
civilians, medical personnel, other media, the Iraqi government,
religious/militant organisations, and religious/ political organisations.

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%
"Coalition Iraqi religious/ religious/
religious aid civilian/s medical media other
" gov't militant political
Aljazeera 20% 16% 14% 12% 9% 8% 5% 5% 4% 8%
ABC 52% 1% 8% 4% 0% 21% 12% 0% 0% 2%

Aljazeera ABC

Figure 1: Proportion of sourced clauses, by source, for Al Jazeera

corpus, compared to ABC corpus

72 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

Global reference to events

The headline of the example text, “Assault on besieged city under

way”, offers another semantic environment over which significant choices
are exercised. The question here is: when events are referred to in global
terms, how does a given media outlet do this? The phrase “assault on
besieged city” carries a particular kind of emphasis, distinct, for instance,
from a phrase like “the battle for Falluja” or “military offensive in
Falluja”. To talk of an ‘assault’, in combination with describing the city
as ‘besieged’, is to construct the event in terms of a ‘doer’ and a ‘done-
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to’. An ‘assault’ implies a powerful agent, able to act directly, with a

significant impact, on some other entity or entities. The event is
constructed as unidirectional, that is the agent initiates, and acts on, the
other entity who suffers the attack. And when a term like ‘assault’ is
combined with prepositions like ‘on…’ or ‘against…’, the object of the
attack is made explicit, for example, as “attack on Falluja” or “assault on
Falluja”. Across the Al Jazeera and ABC corpora, five main terms are
deployed for this global representation of events: ‘assault’, ‘attack’,
‘operation’, ‘offensive’ and ‘battle’ (note that I have excluded uses of
these terms where they refer to a local, single event). Like ‘assault’,
‘attack’ also implies a powerful agent, able to act directly, with a
significant impact, on some other entity or entities. The word ‘battle’, by
contrast, implies two-way action, with entities acting on each other.
Meanwhile, ‘operation’ and ‘offensive’ are terms typical of military
discourse, and they represent a more general conceptualisation of events
than is implied by ‘attack’ or ‘assault’, in the sense that an ‘operation’ or
‘offensive’ involves processes like attacking/assaulting, amongst other
potential activities. Table 3 and Table 4 present the distribution of the
words used to refer to the events in global terms.

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 73

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

Table 3: Words used to refer in global terms to events in Falluja

for Al Jazeera stories
Prepositions following use of Null (i.e. no Each term as
words for global reference to further proportion
events elaboration of total
of the term instances
on against in for other
assault 12 1 10 30%
attack 6 1 8 19.5%
operation 3 6 11.5%
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offensive 1 3 1 17 28.5%
battle 1 (US
2 5 10.5%
forces)
Total
19 4 5 2 1 46
instances
Each type of
preposition
following the
25% 5% 6.5% 2.5% 1.5% 59.5% 100%
term as a
proportion of
instances

Table 4: Words used to refer in global terms to events in Falluja

for ABC stories
Prepositions following use Null (i.e. no Each term as
of words for global further proportion of
reference to events elaboration of total instances
the term
on against for other
assault 3 6 22%
attack 1 2 7.5%
operation 1 8 22%
offensive 1 10 27%
battle 5 4 22%
Total instances 3 1 5 2 30
Each type of
preposition
following the
term as a 7.5% 2.5% 12% 5% 73% 100%
proportion of
instances

74 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

Note a stronger tendency in Al Jazeera, relative to the ABC, both

towards the use of the terms ‘assault’ and ‘attack’ (combined, they
represent 50% of instances, compared with 30%), and to the use of the
prepositions ‘on’ and ‘against’ (combined, they turn up in 30% of
instances, as against 10% in the ABC corpus). The ABC stories have a
stronger tendency towards the use of the terms ‘operation’, ‘offensive’
and ‘battle’, and typically – in 73% of instances – their use of these global
references involves no further specification (as denoted by the column
headed with ‘Null’).

Naming combatants
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A further environment of choice involves the naming of the two

combatant sides in the conflict. Example 1 yields the following references
to the combatants prosecuting the war: ‘US and Iraqi troops’; ‘US forces’;
‘US-led forces’; ‘US marines’; ‘the US army’. Those fighting against the
US occupation are named in the following way (underlined examples are
not used by journalists but appear in quotes attributed to external
sources): fighters, ‘mujahidin’, ‘the city’s defenders’, ‘terrorists’,
‘Saddam Hussein supporters’, ‘foreign fighters’, and ‘suspected al-Qaeda
linked fighters’. The last two of these references are unclear as to the
source of their wording, since they appear close to commentary from the
US military and interim Prime Minister Alawi. The journalist has not
overtly signalled that they are to be considered the actual words of these
sources. Their use must be attributed to the journalist, but there is some
ambiguity here.
An interesting contrast is apparent: all of the terms referring to
combatants on the occupation side are terms which those combatants
would use themselves. None are pejorative, although the term ‘coalition’
is not used, and the terms that are used emphasise the role and power of
the US. By contrast, a range of perspectives is encoded by the spread of
terms used to refer to those resisting the occupation including: the rather
neutral ‘fighters’; the religious term ‘mujahidin’; ‘the city’s defenders’ –
which gives legitimacy on the basis that one has a right to defend an
external attack on one’s city; to terms preferred by the ‘coalition’, such as
‘terrorists’, ‘Saddam Hussein supporters’, ‘foreign fighters’, and
‘suspected al-Qaeda linked fighters’. The figures for how combatants are
named across the corpus of 19 stories gives a more substantial picture,
together with the figures for the ABC corpus, in Table 5 and Table 6. The
figures are represented proportionally, as a proportion of the total
references to each side of the conflict. Only words which represent 5% or
more of the total are listed.

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 75

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

Table 5: Representation of combatants prosecuting the war in

Iraq, contrasting Al Jazeera corpus with ABC corpus

Al Jazeera ABC
forces 38.5% forces 25.5%
troops 17.0% troops 17.5%
US military 14.0% army 10.5%
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soldiers 10.0% marine/s 12.0%

marine/s 8.0% soldiers 9.0%
The Coalition 5.0%

With the exception of four instances of reference to “forces who

respect no religion or human rights” – a quote from a statement by the
Association of Muslim scholars – the use of the term ‘forces’ in the Al
Jazeera data predominantly follows the pattern of the sample text (e.g.,
‘US and Iraqi forces’, ‘US forces’, ‘US-led forces’) but also includes
reference to ‘Iraqi forces’ and ‘Iraqi security forces’. For the ABC corpus,
the terms ‘US forces’ and ‘US-led forces’ dominate, but reference is also
made, for instance, to ‘coalition forces’, ‘multinational forces’ and
‘occupation forces’. The other selections between the two corpora are
very similar, except for the presence of the term ‘the coalition’ in the
ABC stories.

Table 6: Representation of combatants fighting against the

occupation in Iraq

Al Jazeera ABC
fighters 62.0% insurgents 43.0%
terrorists 9.0% terrorists 11.0%
the resistance 5.0% militants 7.5%
fighters 7.5%
enemy 7.5%

Table 6 shows Al Jazeera’s preference for the term ‘fighter’ when

describing those opposing, by violence, the occupation of Iraq. Typically
the term is unmodified, although there are a few instances each of
‘foreign fighters’; ‘anti-US fighters’; and ‘resistance fighters’. The term
‘terrorist’ is also invoked, though never without its being sourced. In half

76 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

of the instances, the context involves a call to Iraqi security forces not to
be “deceived that you are fighting terrorists from outside the country” –
so the term is being ‘deconstructed’, as it were. In addition, the term ‘the
resistance’ is used, a term defined in the Macquarie Dictionary (3rd
Edition, 1997) as “a secret organisation in an enemy-occupied country
working to maintain unofficial hostilities after formal capitulation”.
While Al Jazeera uses the terms ‘resistance fighters’, all uses of ‘the
resistance’ are found in material quoted from sources.
While the term ‘fighter’ appears in the ABC stories, it makes a much
less significant contribution. Instead the term ‘insurgent’ – defined in the
Macquarie Dictionary as “one who rises in forcible opposition to lawful
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authority” – predominates. The use of the term ‘insurgent’ thus

legitimises the interim government, in a way that the preferred term used
by Al Jazeera does not. In the ABC stories, reference to terrorists is made,
but, as for the Al Jazeera corpus, in all instances the term is sourced
directly or indirectly, either to US officials, or officials of the Iraqi
interim government.

Non-combatants

How are non-combatants represented in the news reports by Al

Jazeera? One measure of this is simply to see the range of words relating
to the semantic field of ‘civilians’, and again to consider this contrastively
against the ABC corpus. I define these words in two ways: ‘family-
related’ terms (mother, father, son, daughter, kids, etc.), in combination
with ‘general’ terms (citizen, refugee, people, residents, etc.). Using a
concordance program, a total set of 164 items was retrieved from the Al
Jazeera corpus, and 52 items from the ABC corpus. When calculated as a
proportion of each corpus (i.e., as a proportion of the total word count),
the semantic field of ‘civilian’ represents 2% of lexical items in the Al
Jazeera corpus, and 1% in the ABC corpus. This is some evidence of a
stronger preoccupation with non-combatants in the Al Jazeera data.
Figure 2 shows the distribution of individual words, as a proportion of
each total set of words retrieved from the two corpora. For the Al Jazeera
data, a more diverse selection is apparent, with all items selected to some
degree. In comparison with the Al Jazeera data, the ABC story selections
are more tightly clustered – for example, there are three dominant peaks
in the ABC graph, for the terms ‘people’, ‘civilian/s’, ‘family/ies’ and
there are no instances of ‘child’, ‘children’, ‘kids’, ‘daughters’, ‘son/s’,
‘mother’ or ‘father’ in the ABC stories.
There is a deeper significance to the contrast in the distribution of
words relating to the category ‘civilian’, when the grammatical context of
their occurrence is considered. In the Al Jazeera stories, there is a stronger

Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006. 77

 ANNABELLE LUKIN

tendency to represent civilians in specific and individuated terms. So

actual named civilians get to talk, act, and be acted on in the Al Jazeera
accounts, or reference is made to actual numbers of individuals or
families affected by the conflict. In contrast, in the ABC stories, the
tendency is to represent civilians in generalised, indeterminate, or
hypothetical terms, as in the following examples, in which reference is
made to civilians, all within contexts of non-real time, that is, as
projections of hypothetical situations, or potential futures:
What happens if you do take Fallujah, with significant
civilian casualties, but the insurgent attacks in the rest of
the country continue?
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Is it inevitable, do you think, that there is going to be a high

number of civilian deaths?
We can't allow the people to be suffering because some
terrorists decide to undermine the Iraqi people. (quote from
interim Prime Minister, Alawi)
These are not exclusive tendencies: the ABC coverage does involve
reference to individuated and named civilians (but on only two occasions,
and one concerns the story of the kidnapping of relatives of the then
interim Prime Minister Iyad Alawi, an event outside of Falluja). Al
Jazeera does refer to civilians in generalised and indeterminate ways, but
the greater tendency towards specificity is clear, as the spread of word
references indicates.

Figure 2: Lexical items representing 'non-combatants'

represented as proportion of entire lexical sets

45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
son/s

cousin

kin
wife

eyewitnesses

resident/s
relatives

civilian/s
kids

mother

refugees

people
women
child/ren

family/ies
daughters

misc
father

citizens

family general

Aljazeera ABC

78 Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. Vol 1. October 2006.

 WHAT IS MEDIA ‘BIAS’?

Conclusion and summary remarks

I have by no means exhausted the dimensions of choice over which

the potential for bias can be exercised. Indeed, my discussion has barely
scratched the surface. And the conclusions offered pertain only to the two
news sources investigated – Al Jazeera and the ABC, although the project
from which this analysis is drawn will extend to a much wider sample of
news media in Australia and the Middle East, as well as to other areas.
The aim of this article has been to demonstrate the potential to develop an
empirical and multi-dimensional method for the analysis of bias. My
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analysis suggests a number of important aspects to operationalising the

term ‘bias’. I suggest that a method for the measurement of bias needs to
include the following features:
1. It should be measured over a corpus of texts. This ensures an
empirical base, and a focus on ‘tendencies’, or ‘probabilities’,
rather than single, isolated instances.
2. It should be measured in relation to what is on offer from other
news sources, so that ‘bias’ is considered ‘contrastive’, rather
than inherent.
3. It should take into account not simply the obvious words or
phrases that are topical in public debate, but the deeply
unconscious patterns of choice involved in any use of language.
In other words, it should be ‘multi-dimensional’, with respect to
the many dimensions of linguistic ‘choice’ involved in the
construction of a news story.
I suggest that these basic elements of method are crucial, both for
those who wish to bring a charge of bias against a journalist, a program or
a media organisation, and for those needing to defend themselves against
such a charge. Unless we take on the difficult task of conceptualising and
operationalising the term ‘bias’, it will continue to have more currency as
a political weapon than as a tool for understanding how the media shapes
our experience of events with such crucial human consequences as that of
war.

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 ANNABELLE LUKIN

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