This article analyses the imagined threat posed by the Islamic State in the aftermath of the November 13 th Paris attacks and during the build-up to the December 2 nd 2015 House of Commons vote to extend U.K. airstrikes to Syria. Drawing together Political Communications and International Relations approaches to framing analysis, and focusing on Britain's three main television news providers (BBC, ITV and Channel 4), it questions (1) how is the Islamic State is framed for U.K audiences, (2) who shapes those frames, and ( 3) what consequences arise from adopting certain frames over others? The analysis identifies three competing representational frames (labelled here as the "(Para)Military", the "Elusive" and the "Extremist" frames), and their main advocates, and shows how, ultimately, U.K. news media tend to support an "elite"centred framing of the threat, via its foregrounding of the "(Para)Military" and "Extremist" frames, thus legitimising calls for extending airstrikes into Syria. In so doing, the article provides two contributions to knowledge: first, empirical, by generating substantive new insight into the way the Islamic State was portrayed in the days and weeks following the Paris attacks, and in particular who shapes such frames; and, second, conceptual, via its blending of Political Communications and International Relations approaches to framing and their consequences.

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This article analyses the representations of terrorism that arise out of the BBC’s coverage of the Wood Green ricin plot (2003), the first instance of al-Qaeda-related activity in the UK during the ‘war on terror’. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, the article suggests that the BBC’s representations form part of an emergent ‘terrorism’ dispositif, or apparatus, which draws together seemingly disparate and antagonistic groups into a strategic, mutually-sustaining alliance. The analysis focuses on two weeks of BBC ‘News at Ten’ bulletins, alongside speeches and press releases issued by the Prime Minister and statements released by al-Qaeda’s leadership. In particular, the article suggests that the BBC’s representations inadvertently work to the advantage of elements within al-Qaeda and the British executive due to the fact that they portray the Wood Green events in ways that are tactically useful to both groups. As such, the article not only provides substantive new empirical insights into the way representations of terrorism were mobilized in the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but also shows how Foucauldian concepts can provide creative and innovative analytical tools for understanding the dynamics of the contemporary media–state–terrorism relationship.

This article seeks to explore how the BBC made sense of the al-Qaeda phenomenon in its flagship "News at Ten" bulletin during the aftermath of the September 11 th 2001 attacks. Using Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis, it shows how the BBC's representations function as a dynamic and continually shifting site upon which a range of fears, identities, discourses and forms of knowledge and power struggle and contend, and through which a number of different "al-Qaedas" manifest themselves. In particular, three shifting modes of visual and verbal representation are identified within the BBC's coverage which each correspond to a separate understanding of al-Qaeda: the "Islamic" mode, the "Personalised" mode and the "Elusive" mode. These representations both draw upon and challenge the dominant discourses surrounding Islam, non-state terrorism, and the identities of terrorist suspects, providing audiences with a variety of, often conflicting, ways of seeing and speaking about this entity. As such, the article provides insight into the complex nature of the BBC's representations of al-Qaeda during its coverage of the September 11th 2001 attacks, and shows how such complexity serves, albeit inadvertently, to legitimise the far-reaching counterterrorism policies that were enacted in the aftermath of these attacks.

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