Abstract
Along with the “discursive turn” in social sciences over the last 40 years, communication/media studies’ approaches have been adopted in security studies at an unprecedented rate to analyze the production, transmission, and reproduction of security claims in the social or political world. During the winter of 2020, with the sudden global outbreak of COVID-19, the ongoing convergence of (social) media and security showed that national security actors at almost all levels resorted to media in their attempts to respond to potential threats or risks, and this led to the escalation of the post-Cold War evolution of “security studies” as an interdisciplinary field. The book is a welcome attempt to bridge security studies and mass communication studies by presenting securitization as “a media function” (p. 2) or a communicative practice. It sheds light on different theoretical and practical ways of understanding the role media play in shaping conflicts, crises, and threats, and in guiding the public to manage uncertainty and anxiety. In the Introduction to the book, Fred Vultee defends his decision to connect framing with securitization by explaining that in the messages delivered to the public a threat to the shared “us” must be created to make security from the metaphoric to the real and in this process contexts matter, especially cultural contexts.
The book is divided into two parts of nine chapters. Chapter 1, “Cold war to long war: security, securitization and threat”, reviews the academic ideological history of securitization and argues that “securitization is a framing process because ‘the media’ are interdependent players in the social-political process of how security is understood” (p. 20). Chapter 2, “State and nation: culture, identity and exceptionalism”, examines the role of identities—cultural and journalistic—in making securitization possible. Vultee argues that a universal discourse—the “paranoid style” in international politics accelerates the construction of the collective identity and the Other. Although “(N)ational identity structures the arguments of security, and journalistic identity structures the arguments of framing” (p. 45), political correctness complicates journalistic professional identities when it comes to national security issues. Chapter 3, “Media framing: still fractured after all these years”, concentrates on (news) framing, which is not only a way of organizing information but also imposes the storytellers’ sense-making mechanism on the public. By taking a panoramic retrospection of the classic theories of media effects, the author argues that “frames can mean more than one thing” (p. 59) and that securitization as both generic and issue framing can be “effects of media” (an influence-exerting process) and “an effect in media” (a “frame-building” process) (p. 61). Framing involves a process of evaluation of how a story of existential threat should be told to convince the public. Chapter 4, “At the paragraph factory: professional practice and the routines of objectivity”, studies the evolution of news routines or industrialized news practice in US journalism, journalism education, news language regulation, and studies on journalism. It discusses the changes in news routines due to the loss of professional staffing, the overall destruction of the industrial model of journalism, and the advent of technology. Chapter 5, “Risk and crisis: what scares you and what kills you”, focuses on risk by explaining that it is perceived as to some extent being the result of social principles and guidelines and then shaped into a piece of news. In contrast to desecuritization where “an issue is nudged from the emergency back toward the zone of political contestation” (p. 91), it also exemplifies counter-securitization with COVID pandemic threats, showing any response will be interpreted as an existential danger.
Part Two (Chapters 6–9) begins with a content analysis of the framing of the “war on terror” in three US daily newspapers in Chapter 6, “Effect in media, effect of media: securitization in the lab”. Results suggest that securitization frames can be invoked or contested by political figures and change across time. A controlled experiment follows to test whether support for government and orientation toward the news media were influenced by securitization frames, finding that frames worked in certain political and cultural conditions. Chapter 7, “Germany bans sausages: discourse, magic words and boundary work”, in contrast to the quantitative analysis used in the studies in the previous chapters, uses discourse analysis to make the point that the Other is constructed through discourse. Chapter 8, “‘Our way of life is at stake’: a century of securitization”, identifies the mediated construction of an exceptionalist US identity by reviewing the historical development of security claims in US administrative and journalistic systems. Chapter 9, “The normative turn: ethics in securitization and media”, calls for an open public debate in examining security issues from the perspective of media ethics, resorting to the promise rather than the perils of the future.
This book by Vultee, an experienced journalist and scholar specializing in media framing, is trying to link securitization studies with media/communication studies. Fred exemplifies each point with a thorough theoretical background and comprehensive historical cases in the specific field. The author's skewering of theories on media effects, cases in exceptional America, and reviews about “great debates” in international relations (IR) bestows upon readers a comprehensive understanding of how the American nation is being shaped in human history. Taylor argued back in 2017 that there existed no “studies in communication that explore the conceptual relationship between mediascapes and securityscapes” and Vultee offers precisely this type of study, including an inspiring synthesis. How security-related issues, especially concerning national interests, are told is mediated by complex determinants. The logically rigorous standpoints in the book provide a window into the social, political, and cultural collaboration of constructing the public's understanding of security. The theories and methodology employed are more multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary. It draws from IR, journalism studies, communication/media studies, linguistics, history studies, and so on. Metaphors are also used to clarify and picture a complex abstraction, but also strongly restate it, leaving a memorable image in the readers’ mind. For instance, “the US invasion of Iraq that arose from it is the signal case of securitization from nowhere: an existential threat stitched together from whole cloth” (p. 8).
Media framing, as both the effects in media and effects of media, is a social interaction in which cultural contention, cooperation, and transformation are taking place, bridging securitization studies of the Copenhagen School with studies on North American journalistic practices. The author has already recognized the significance of national/local culture (social contexts) in the American journalistic framing and the US public's acceptance of national security claims. However, what is at issue is that the author seems to vacillate on the “culturally conscious and critical modes of research committed to combating local and global cultural hegemony on the one hand and enhancing local and global cultural harmony on the other hand” (Shi-xu, 2022), neglecting the influence of US national security claims on its European allies or cultural others in the world due to its powerful journalistic capabilities and control on global social media. All in all, it is a sound reference book in political communication, securitization studies, and interdisciplinary study of Communication ←→ Security (see Taylor and Bean, 2019).