"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" - how UK and US television news reported the 2003 Iraq conflict

Among the numerous controversies which arose from the Iraq war was that which related to the media - its role and its reporting. This is a corpus-based study (based on corpora of all news stories, transcribed) of how TV news in the UK (BBC) and in the US (CBS) presented the war to their viewers, within a framework of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. It attempts to answer the question of whether audiences on either side of the Atlantic witnessed the ‘same’ war. The principal research questions relate to whether the perceived difference between the US and UK reporting is evident in the BBC and CBS partitions of the TVNews subcorpus. The degree to which reporters were ‘with us or with them’ is explored, that is, whether the purported difference between the two news services can be linked to a representation of the ‘sides’- a simplistic dichotomy often found in traditional war rhetoric.