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12 The Framing of Opposition to the War on Iraq Dieter Rucht and Joris Verhulst Wording matters when it comes to influencing people’s hearts and minds. Many words and catchphrases are value-loaded. Because they have or evoke positive, negative, or ambivalent connotations and feelings, they are often carefully chosen by actors in a political struggle, thus becoming part of a contest over naming, blaming, and framing (Gamson 1992). It seems that the more morally loaded a conflict is and the higher the stakes, the more the actors engage in a framing contest to win support and discredit their opponents. Just consider the discursive struggles over abortion, in which each side deliberately chooses terms and slogans: “unborn baby” or “fetus,” “pro-abortion” or “pro-choice,” “anti-abortion” or “pro-life,” “abortion is murder” or “my body belongs to me,” and so forth (Ferree et al. 2002). When it comes to the protest against an imminent war in Iraq, we can also expect that the actors on both sides place much emphasis on the words and slogans they want to communicate to both their constituency and the audience at large. In part, they have control over the phrasing of their messages. This applies, for example , to the protesters’ banners and speeches during a rally. Another—and politically probably more relevant—part of the communication, however, is beyond the direct control of authors and speakers: their messages, if covered at all, are mediated by the mass media (Bennett and Entman 2001). As has been demonstrated repeatedly, the media are highly selective in what and how they report (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988), whom and what they cite literally or indirectly, whether they explicitly express their own views in commentaries and side remarks. In short: naming, blaming, and framing are crucial in the case we are analyzing. Accordingly, this chapter concentrates on 239 the communicative dimension of the demonstrations against the imminent war on Iraq. To this aim, we are using three kinds of materials: First, since we are interested in how the “ordinary” participants in the demonstrations expressed their views and motives, we analyze mainly quantitatively their responses to the open-ended survey questions. Second, we investigate qualitatively and illustratively how organizers, representatives of movement groups, and speakers expressed their views and claims during the demonstrations. Third, in addition to the analysis provided in chapter 3 dealing with mass media reports and governmental positions, we look more specifically at the media coverage of the expected war on Iraq. In methodological terms, depending on the material and the specific question in which we are interested, we use both a more conventional, quantitative content analysis and a more qualitatively oriented frame analysis, as has been developed in social movement studies in the 1980s and 1990s (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Gerhards and Rucht 1992). The Voices of “Ordinary” Protest Participants In a public protest, mere participation is a message in itself. Therefore, not all participants feel the need to explicitly voice their views during the event. Moreover, there are forms of protest—for example, a silent march or a silent prayer—where words are deliberately avoided. However, in the mass demonstrations against the war in Iraq, explicit messages in various forms were abundant. Many people were carrying handmade signs, standardized placards, or large banners. And they were shouting slogans or singing peace songs, giving interviews to journalists, and discussing the issue of war in small groups during the marches and rallies. Whereas a look at the many signs and banners unveils in an extremely condensed form what the most committed people in the crowd wanted to say (e.g., “Bush—Terrorist No. 1”; “No blood for oil”), analyzing the International Peace Protest Survey questionnaire, as done in several chapters in this volume, can give a more systematic picture of the participants’ views. While the questionnaire mainly included lists of preformulated, that is “closed,” answers, we also asked a key question that had no standardized answer options: “Why did you participate in the demonstrations on February 15, 2003? (Write down your answer in the box below).” The box provided space for about seven lines. Some demonstrators responded by writing down only one single word; most gave one or two short sentences; a clear minority completely filled the space provided. The answers to this open-ended question are, in our view, the most comprehensive and authentic data on the motives of the antiwar protesters on...

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