Brennen, Bonnie and Duffy, Margaret (2003).  “If a Problem Cannot Be Solved, Enlarge It:”an Ideological Critique of the “Other” in Pearl Harbor and September 11 New York Times Coverage.  Journalism Studies, 4(1), 3-14.

Brennen and Duffy use a cultural materialist approach to study how newspaper articles represent and misrepresent shared experience.  They examine how the New York Times framed Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor and also Arab-Americans after September 11.  They find that in both cases, the Times frames the groups as the “other,” thus inspiring the general public to fear certain ethnicities. 

Cultural materialism is defined as, “a theoretical framework that considers cultural artifacts to be explicit practice of communication that are created within a historically specific society and produced under particular social, economic, and political condition.”  These artifacts illustrate a culture’s dominate ideologies. In this case, they illustrate an “us versus them” framework that underlies how ethnic conflicts are constructed and understood in American society.

“Us versus them” is a frequently used framework in conflict reporting that will be explored in depth through my research on how conflict is constructed influences bias.  Obviously, an “us versus them” frame would create a biased portrait of one side of a conflict based on emotional rather than rational persuasion.  Brennen and Duffy’s analysis presents two specific situations in which this framework is employed and connects it tot a prevailing ideology.  The example provides a concrete illustration of how the “us versus them” frame is employed.