Form and ideology: Human interest journalism and the U.S. print media's coverage of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq War, 2003--2007

Within the body of mass media research seeking to examine the news media as a site of ideology, the preferred objects of study are overwhelmingly drawn from what is conventionally understood to be hard news. Far less often is soft news, and human interest news in particular, studied for its political or ideological content. In this dissertation I seek to redress the overreliance on hard news by engaging in a critical assessment of the human interest news story. Specifically, I examine these stories as they are used to cover the deaths of U.S. military personnel killed in the war on Iraq and reported in local and national U.S. newspapers. This study examines stories drawn from selected months for the years 2003, 2005, and 2007.Informed by the theory and methodology of Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson (1980) and guided by Mike Wayne's (2003) application of Jameson's interpretive model, I consider the human interest story in terms of the way in which the form works to promote a particular way of understanding the world. I then examine the content of these stories by applying the first two interpretive levels of Jameson's model. In this way I demonstrate that the conventions of the human interest story form, as typically applied by journalists, work ideologically to suggest a particular way of viewing both the war on Iraq and the deaths of U.S. military personnel killed in the war. Specifically, this preferred view is informed by the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism and by the Bush administration's National Security Strategy for the U.S., both strongly promoted by President Bush in his major political speeches about the war.Both the form and the content of human interest stories, as demonstrated in coverage of U.S. military deaths in Iraq, work to provide a specific framework within which readers are encouraged to understand both the war itself and these deaths in particular, while foreclosing on other interpretations of these events. In this way, the human interest stories prove to be as much a site of ideological work as are the more commonly examined hard news stories.