Critiques of NATO’s involvement in the Libyan crisis have argued that a sober understanding of the intervention in Libya will only come to light through future studies on those that manipulated information about the conflict. However, no empirical evidence exists on the actual textual structures and strategies brought to bear by journalists in the discursive reproduction of the framework that allegedly guided the involvement of Western powers in the uprising in Libya that eventually led to a civil war in 2011. This chapter examines textual structures and discourse strategies used by CNN between February 14, 2011 and October 31, 2011 – the period General Muammar Gadhafi was killed. The authors propose new questions that may inspire arguments on whether semantic, narrative, and pragmatic acts had impacted on attitudes that validated and inspired the war in Libya.

By analyzing news stories of old and more recent regional and global conflicts, the chapters in this book demonstrate how both mainstream and online media can be instrumental to either exacerbating conflicts or contributing to peaceful resolutions of conflicts. Some of the studies in the chapters are based on many years of research into the relationship between the media and conflict by the authors, who are themselves scholars and practitioners of linguistics and media studies. Hence, the research results presented in these chapters are the products of academic studies and funded projects by seasoned academics, professionals, and experts, as well as doctoral students.

The media not only play vital roles in the mediation of conflicts and wars, they also are involved in discursive practices and cultural politics that predict the possibilities of social transformation and peace-building (Ivie 2016). The study of these roles in the context of local and global conflicts and peace-building efforts becomes more crucial in terms of how the professional practices of a journalist are defined. According to Carpentier and Terzis (2005), a journalist has the responsibility to adopt a particular model of war or peace reporting, such as those proposed by Galtung (1998) (i.e., peace-oriented journalism, which is generally perceived as people- and solution-oriented, or conflict/war journalism, which is violence-oriented, and tends towards propaganda). Citing Galtung (2000; Galtung and Fischer 2013), Nijenhuis (2014) argues that the media in the practice of war journalism are capable of exacerbating the conflict by

This chapter argues that the discursive construction of the herders as terrorists exacerbates suspicion and fear in herder–farmer relations and further destroys the prospect of peace in Nigeria. Applying a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to analyze the representations of the main actors in the conflict, 175 news headlines of seven popular Nigerian broadsheet newspapers were studied. The study reveals that the herdsmen are consistently constructed as terrorists, as violent actions such as unprovoked attacks and killings are attributed to them. However, the farmers are constructed as non-violent and as the victims. Hence, the press explicitly constructs the herder–farmer conflict in terms of the “killer-herdsmen” script with which the herders are generally evaluated.