The Semiotic Foundations of Media Narratives: Saddam and Nasser in the American Mass Media

AbstractThe article examines the impact of cultural structures on journalistic story telling. It argues that the mass media can be understood in neofunctionalist terms as a subsystem of civil society. Mass media discourses are therefore responsive to the cultural forms shaping civil discourse. At the core of American media discourse is a set of binary codes that specify civic virtues and vices. These codes provide the foundation from which more complex narrative forms are constructed in the American mass media. The proposed model of codes and narratives is briefly applied in a comparative analysis of American mass media interpretations of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the 1956 Suez crisis, and Saddam Hussein and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. (Sociology)