Covering or covering up? Mediating the war on Gaza

When:
13 February 2025 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
2025-02-13T17:00:00+00:00
2025-02-13T19:00:00+00:00
Where:
University of Westminster
309 Regent St.
London W1B 2HW
UK
Cost:
Free
Contact:
Toby Bennett
Covering or covering up? Mediating the war on Gaza @ University of Westminster | England | United Kingdom

Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi, exploring “the many faces of history” in news reporting around the war on Gaza.

Details

Drawing on media content from Western, Israeli, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian sources, this talk investigates the place of history, or the lack thereof, in the mediation of the war on Gaza. It analyses how mainstream Western media are implicated in covering up genocide by unpacking the deployment of history in news narratives. It differentiates between history that is produced in the present for the future, and the erasure of history as the evidence-based narrative of what happened in the past. It draws attention to the projection of power through media in shaping history as a future-oriented emotion and discursive trope. It then turns attention to the visualisation of history amid saturation in images and videos of the Hamas October 7 attack to those taken and disseminated by Israeli soldiers, to digital art and AI.

Biography

Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. He works on the geopolitics of global communications, particularly in relation to news media and popular culture. He is interested in the politics that shape the ways we talk about and use communications technologies, as well as the role of media in forging our imaginaries of the past and the future. In his research, he draws on his expertise on Arabic media and on the Middle East and North Africa region. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in communications, journalism and cultural studies journals including Communication Theory, Journalism, and the International Journal of Communication. He is currently completing a book on the politics of history in Arab media. Al-Ghazzi is an editor in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.

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