The Violence of Others: 'Eastern' and 'Western' Press Discourses

Abstract

This article investigates distinctions in press discourse about violence. It compares ‘The Economist’ and ‘Heti Világgazdaság’ (HVG), a Hungarian publication very similar to The Economist. The investigation focuses on the discourses of violence in the coverage of the two publications. To avoid discourses where either publication would be talking about its own milieu, the analysis involves only articles about the Middle East and Africa in January 2008. The method of analysis involves Atlas.ti, a discourse analysis software. The findings reveal that The Economist has a professional discourse focused on the politics of Africa and the Middle East, while it also emphasizes that these regions are places of violence and inferiorizes them. HVG has a more respectful construal of Africa and the Middle East and neither inferiorizes nor Others those regions in ways that would be problematic. At the same time, HVG reifi es ‘the West’ in ways that raise questions about its concept of the self. The conclusion is that it is not the journal with the clearer sense of self and clearer professionalism (The Economist) that construes Africa and the Middle East in more just ways, but the journal with the more hesitant and uncertain discourse (HVG).