Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.
Al-Lami M. and O’Loughlin B. ( 2009) Jihadists try to make friends on Facebook. The Guardian, 12 January. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/12/facebookjihadis
2.
Antoniades A., Miskimmon A. and O’Loughlin B. ( 2010) Great Power Politics and Strategic Narratives. University of Sussex, Centre for Global Political Economy , Working Paper 7. Available at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cgpe/documents/cgpe_wp07_antoniades_miskimmon_oloughlin.pdf
3.
Awan AN, Hoskins A. and O’Loughlin B. ( 2011) Media and Radicalization: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology. London: Routledge.
4.
Barzilai-Nahon K. ( 2008) Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology59(9): 1493-512.
5.
Barzilai-Nahon K. ( 2009) Gatekeeping: A critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology43: 433-78.
6.
Bolter JD and Grusin R. ( 1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. London: MIT Press.
7.
Bruns A. ( 2007) Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation. Creativity and Cognition6. Available at: http://snurb.info/files/Produsage%20(Creativity%20and%20Cognition%202007)pdf
8.
Bunt GR ( 2009a) i-Muslims: Re-wiring the House of Islam. London: Hurst.
9.
Bunt GR ( 2009b) Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environment. London: Pluto Press.
10.
Chadwick A. ( 2007) Digital network repositories and organizational hybridity . Political Communication24(1): 283-301.
11.
Cheesman T. and Nohl AM ( 2011) Many voices, one BBC World Service? Gatekeeping and transediting the ‘Obama Elections’ 2008. Journalism12(2).
12.
Chouliaraki L. ( 2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering. London : SAGE.
13.
Deuze M. ( 2007) Media Work. Cambridge: Polity Press.
14.
Devji F. ( 2005) Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality and Modernity . London: Hurst.
15.
Devji F. ( 2008) The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics. London: Hurst.
16.
De Waal M. ( 2007) From media landscape to media ecology: The cultural implications of web 2.0. Open13: 20-33.
17.
Featherstone M.(2009) Ubiquitous media: An introduction. Theory, Culture and Society26(2-3): 1-22.
18.
Fuller M. ( 2007) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
19.
Galtung J. and Ruge MH ( 1965) The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four foreign newspapers. Journal of Peace Research2(1): 64-90.
20.
Garton-Ash T. ( 2007) In identifying those trying to kill us, we should choose our words carefully. The Guardian, 22 November. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/22/comment.religion
21.
Gowing N. ( 2009) ‘Skyful of Lies’ and Black Swans: The New Tyranny of Shifting Information Power in Crises. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Working Paper. Oxford: University of Oxford.
22.
Hine C (ed.) (2005) Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford : Berg.
23.
Hoskins A. ( 2011) Media and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
24.
Hoskins A. and O’Loughlin B. ( 2007) Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
25.
Hoskins A. and O’Loughlin B. ( 2010a) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War. Cambridge: Polity Press.
26.
Hoskins A. and O’Loughlin B. ( 2010b) Security journalism and ‘the mainstream’ in Britain since 7/7: Translating terror but inciting violence?International Affairs86(4): 903-24.
27.
Kress GR and Van Leeuwen T. ( 2001) Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold.
28.
Lewin K. ( 1947) Frontiers in group dynamics II: Channels of group life; social planning and action research. Human Relations1: 143-53.
29.
Livingstone S.(2009) On the mediation of everything: ICA Presidential Address2008. Journal of Communication59: 1-18.
30.
McNair B. ( 2006) Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge.
31.
Merrin W. ( 2008) Media Studies 2.0. Available at: http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com/
32.
O’Loughlin B., Boudeau C. and Hoskins A. ( 2011) Keeping the extraordinary at a distance: Audience understandings of discourses of ‘radicalisation’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
33.
Peters R. ( 2008) Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader, 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener.
34.
Postman N. ( 1970) The reformed English curriculum. In: Eurich AC (ed.) High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education. New York: Pitman, 160-8.
35.
Roberts C. ( 2005) Gatekeeping Theory: An Evolution. Available at: http://www.chrisrob.com/about/gatekeeping.pdf
36.
Scollon R. and Scollon SW ( 2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge.
37.
Scollon R. and Scollon SW ( 2007) Nexus analysis: Refocusing ethnography of action. Journal of Sociolinguistics11(5): 608-25.
38.
Shirky C. ( 2009) Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Blog available at: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
39.
Shoemaker PJ and Vos TP ( 2009) Gatekeeping Theory. London: Routledge.
40.
Stetting K. ( 1989) Transediting - A new term for coping with the grey area between editing and translating. In: Caie G et al. (eds) Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Department of English, 371-382.
41.
Toffler A. ( 1971) Future Shock. London: Pan.
42.
Urry J. ( 2005) The complexity turn. Theory, Culture and Society22(5): 1-14.
43.
Vincent GE ( 1905) A laboratory experiment in journalism. American Journal of Sociology11(3): 297-311.
44.
Weber C. ( 2008) Popular visual language as global communication: The remediation of United Airlines Flight 93. Review of International Studies34(S1): 137-15.
45.
White DM ( 1950) The ‘gate-keeper’: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly27(4): 383-90.
