End of Story: Accountability Spectacle as "Closure" in National Security News

• In Event: Media Coverage and (Mis)Representation

Abstract

This paper presents findings in relation to a case study involving critical coverage of the national security state. Since the alleged conspiracy by the US and UK governments to invade Iraq in 2003, the national security state in both countries has been subjected to intense scrutiny by news organisations around the world. This scrutiny has been fuelled in part by what some describe as the development of a "networked fourth estate" (Benkler 2011) involving ad hoc alliances between professional journalists, citizen journalists, hackers and leakers.

This paper critically interrogates this through an in-depth case study of coverage relating to alleged corruption in the British arms trade. It focuses on UK television news where it finds that journalists were ultimately complicit in ‘drawing a line’ on the controversy through an accountability resolution that was more spectacle than substance.

Author

• Justin Schlosberg, Birkbeck, University of London