War in the WANA, Crisis at the Pump Economic Framing and War Journalism intagesschau's Coverage of Israeli Military Conduct : A Critical Peace Frame Analysis
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: News media play a central role in shaping the public understanding of armedconflict. As Germany’s most-watched, most-trusted broadcast, tagesschau reachesalmost ten million viewers daily. This thesis investigates how tagesschau framesIsraeli military conduct in the context of the regional WANA conflict, and to whatextent this coverage aligns with Peace Journalism criteria.The analysis reveals a dominant frame of economic consequences, present acrossall analysed broadcasts: Israeli military actions are primarily rendered throughtheir impact on German energy prices and consumer welfare. Lexical asymmetriesare systematic: Iran’s government is delegitimised through language not applied toIsraeli or US actors. The term “catastrophe” is applied to petrol prices before it isapplied to emerging humanitarian crises. Iranian and Lebanese voices appearrarely, Palestinian voices are absent. An overall strong tendency towards WarJournalism is identified.These findings are produced through Critical Peace Frame Analysis (CPFA), anoriginal framework combining Framing Theory (Entman, 1993; 2007), CriticalDiscourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992; 1995), and the concept of Peace Journalism(Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Galtung, 1986; 1998; 2015; Lynch & McGoldrick, 2005).Using abductive coding, the framework is applied to 32 tagesschau 20:00broadcast transcripts from February 28 to March 31, 2026.
Author: Kruse, Jette Paulina
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7218199534