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British citizens tend to believe that media and government exaggerate the threat of terrorism – yet paradoxically they take that threat very seriously.

That’s one of the significant findings of recent research led by OU sociologist, Dr Marie Gillespie. 300 British citizens from around the UK and of very diverse backgrounds participated in a series of in-depth interviews between 2004 and 2006.

They displayed highly patterned responses to the 2003 Iraq War according to ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, education and gender. In particular, they expressed a growing distrust of PM Tony Blair and his government over foreign and security policy.  At the same time people realize that the fight against terrorism is going to be a long hard one.

The research also showed how increasing dissatisfaction with mainstream British news media led those in multi-lingual households to seek out alternative news sources and to consume a broad, international range of news media in order to compensate for perceived bias..

 Migrant and multilingual news viewers display a keen interest in news, especially about what’s happening in their countries of origin. Many refugees believe keeping up with the news is a political and moral responsibility.

Multilingual citizens are often skilled, ‘sceptical zappers’ – people who switch from one network and one language to the next because they want to see events from different perspectives not just from a British vantage point – they are in many ways archetypal cosmopolitans,” said Dr Gillespie.

“But while diversity of news sources is empowering for citizens it’s not such good news for politicians going to war. With so many accessible news outlets, governments can no longer control the message and that makes the task of legitimating foreign and security policies much more difficult. In multicultural societies like Britain, citizens have to negotiate plural legitimacies and in doing so they engage in passionate debate about the moral, legal and political consequences of the war in Iraq. So our research with multi ethnic and multilingual groups and households challenges assumptions about politically disaffected electorate”

Dr Gillespie and her collaborators at Kings College London and the University of Wales Swansea investigated how new security challenges are represented in the media and interpreted by diverse news audiences cum publics. The research explored the relationships between three subjects of enquiry usually studied separately: news audiences; news producers; politicians, military personnel and security experts.

The resulting report, Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond The Iraq War 2003, “challenges certain standard assumptions about the power of the media…. and the consequences of the changing media technologies and practices … for democratic debate, informed citizenship and decision making,” said Dr Gillespie, from the OU’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

The report highlighted a legitimacy deficit in respect of UK/USA foreign policy and showed that there was a need for “joined-up thinking” to tie public perceptions of security threats more closely with those of policy makers

Responses were patterned according to experiences of racism especially 
“Racialised minorities in general, not just Muslims, express greater fear about the racist backlash, loss of civil liberties and increasing state authoritarianism than they do about terrorism per se, and Muslim women wearing the hijab suffer more overt racism than other groups” wrote Dr Gillespie.

The research highlights how the “the journalism of attachment” or an emphasis on telling the human side of a story had important consequences for people’s perceptions of events and human suffering in distant lands. “Interviewees, regardless of background, felt a great deal of empathy with Iraqi civilian casualties of the war and this gives cause for hope,” she said. “(But) British Muslim interviewees felt mainstream British and American coverage failed to afford moral equivalence to the death of Iraqis as compared with US and UK casualties.

“For most of our critical multilingual news consumers, it is only by watching news in different languages, from different political perspectives, that they feel they get sufficient in depth knowledge of counter and oppositional arguments to those put forward by governments,” she said.

But she added: “Many interviewees trust news media from their countries of origin (i.e. Pakistan and Iran especially) far less than they do British media, with the notable exception of Al Jazeera which is widely respected among Muslim Arabic speakers. Interviewees deem it vital to have alternative and competing perspectives for open and informed democratic debate – they espouse the principles of deliberative democracy but bemoan the fact that their voices are not listened to by politicians.”

To read the report and find out more about this research, visit www.mediatingsecurity.com and for more details about other CRESC research www.cresc.ac.uk