Covering or covering up? Gaza and media’s war on history
35 Marylebone Rd
London NW1 5LS
UK
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
This talk engages with the question of how structural violence can be represented in an age of spectacular distraction and overwhelming noise. Drawing on media content from Western and Middle Eastern 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 then turns attention to visual culture and how history can be visualised amid saturation in images and videos circulating on digital platforms.
Biography
Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi is Associate Professor and Deputy Head for Education in the Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He works on the geopolitics of global communications, particularly in relation to news media and popular culture. His published work explores 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. His forthcoming book Entangled Past: The Politics of History in Arab Media is under contract with Oxford University Press. Al-Ghazzi is an editor in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.
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