This article examines how Zeteo’s We’re Not Kidding narrates, contests, and ethically frames war through long-form conversation. Drawing on close analysis of 17 purposively selected episodes, it asks how the podcast’s form, humour, guest heterogeneity, and evidentiary debate shape media practice during the Gaza war that began in October 2023, which participants describe as genocidal. Four practices organize the analysis: meta-journalistic critique, debunking as evidentiary care, positional witnessing, and humour as ethical attunement. The Western-Islamic public sphere provides the overarching framework, understood as a historically contingent space of encounter and transformation in which Muslim public interventions put established terms of authority and belonging into question. Sherman Jackson’s concept of the Islamic secular helps interpret Mehdi Hasan’s ethical orientation within this space without attributing the same orientation to every guest. Differently situated Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Jewish American, Jewish-Israeli, Black American, and South Asian/British speakers converge on Palestinian personhood and freedom. The article argues that these conversations connect scrutiny of evidence to an anti-colonial commitment to Palestinian personhood, historical agency, and self-determination, while recognizing that podcast intimacy and humour can also normalize exclusion.
This study examines how international and Nigerian domestic media framed the US president’s threat of military action in response to alleged mass killings of Christians in Nigeria. Using a comparative content analysis of 155 news stories published by foreign and domestic media outlets, the study examines dominant frames, tonal orientation, and sourcing patterns to identify points of convergence and divergence in coverage. The findings show statistically significant differences between foreign and domestic reporting. Foreign media largely framed the issue through a humanitarian lens and adopted a predominantly neutral tone, while domestic media more frequently emphasised economic and imperial interpretations and employed a more evaluative tone. The analysis further reveals that framing varied significantly by source type, with humanitarian and geopolitical frames closely associated with reliance on US government officials and international actors, and economic or imperial frames more strongly linked to experts, critics, and domestic political voices.
Media coverage plays an important role in shaping people’s understanding of wars and conflicts. To understand how the emphasis of war reporting shifts over time, the article analyses the bureaucratic, defence, economic and humanitarian dimensions of Russia–Ukraine War coverage between January 2022 and February 2026. Drawing on previous research on issue dynamics, framing and war fatigue, it asks how salience of the war and these dimensions changed over time, and whether outlets’ national contexts and political leanings influenced their reporting. It applies computational social science methods to an original dataset of eight Central European news outlets. We find no evidence of war fatigue in the thematic salience of war-related coverage; instead, the war became a routine issue in Central European media. National contexts and political leanings shaped the temporal dynamics of the four dimensions, but not their overall salience.
The US Army Esports Team (USAE) was launched in 2018 as an experimental effort to use game streaming for military recruitment. The team’s efforts to engage online with gaming culture have been plagued with scandal and highlight the structural limits of dialogic communication with military services. This study is framed by a 2020 incident in which a USAE streamer on Twitch blocked users asking about war crimes, an act that civil rights lawyers argued violated the First Amendment. It analyzes the USAE’s saved Twitch videos and accompanying chat logs as paratexts, or media that derives its communicative register from gameplay while serving as a primary strategic communication channel for the Army. Using qualitative data analysis, it identifies three forms of talk in the streams: Game Talk, Stream Talk, and Army Talk. These forms of talk reveal a persistent mismatch between the participatory norms of gaming culture and the institutional constraints of military communication. The case illustrates the structural limits of dialogic public relations models when applied to federal agencies operating on commercial, participatory platforms.
