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Abstract
Following the argument that the very act of reporting shapes the raw material of news, this investigation examines “Us” and “Them” dichotomization as it is routinely insinuated into news narratives. Specifically, this investigation analyzes 215 articles from the “hard news” and commentary sections of the International Herald Tribune (IHT), the globally circulating, hard-copy emissary of The New York Times. Us/Them dichotomization pervasively structures news narratives in IHT with the United States cast as “Us” and the rest of the world largely constructed as “Them”. Whereas We are orderly, harmonious, and steeped in democratic mystique in IHT's news narratives, They are characterized by constant struggles for unity and all shades of illiberalism (e.g., Statism, corruption, mayhem). These constructions mutually reinforce each other when they appear side by side on newsprint, day after day. Particular emphases in the analysis concern coverage of China, Russia, the coup in Egypt, the “world historic” gravitas of Barack H. Obama, and the aftermath of Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing.
Notes
1. The word count for the whole corpus was estimated by counting the number of lines of text in the target articles in one randomly selected edition of the paper. In turn, the 21 articles published on July 5 averaged 140.3 lines. Next, 100 lines of text were randomly selected to ascertain an average of 6.2 words per line of text. Thereafter, the arithmetic of the word count estimate was straightforward: (215 articles in the corpus) × (140.3 lines of text per article) × (6.2 words per line) = 187,019.