Our News and their News

The theoretical assumption of this paper is that when a foreign news item is defined as ‘ours’, then journalists’ professional practices become subordinate to national loyalty; when an item is ‘theirs’, journalistic professionalism comes into its own. Thus, the article argues that there is an inverse relation between professional news values and the national identity of the journalist and the journal’s editors. Expressed as a rule, we would say that the more ‘national’ the report is, the less ‘professional’ it will be, i.e. the closer the reporters/editors are to a given news event in terms of national interest, the further they are from applying professional news values. This claim is presented in the form of a flow diagram and is investigated using qualitative content analysis of the coverage of four events in three different countries (the USA, Britain and Israel). The four events, which were all presented as foreign news, were defined as political violence based on an observational definition. The theory which is empirically tested and presented in this article can help us to understand the coverage of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and further our understanding of how events were, and still are, covered as foreign news in general, and, in particular, how political violence is covered as foreign news.