Author: Kristen A. Traynor

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13:

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, the treatment of prisoners at U.S. military detention centers as part of the Global War on Terror has been a widely-covered issue, and the framing of such treatment in the media has become a focus for many scholars. However, most researchers have ignored Guantanamo Bay prison in favor of the more publicized Abu Ghraib case. This study examines how the mainstream media and government elites framed prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay, and it seeks to explain whether the media relied on the government's frames or acted more autonomously in reporting on the issue. With the use of QDA Miner with WordStat, this project employs a mixed-methods content analysis and process tracing of frames used in statements made by elite government actors and portrayals of prisoner treatment in mainstream news coverage during the two largest hunger strikes. The first began in August 2005 and continued until February 2006, and the second lasted from February to August of 2013. The findings show that the media used primarily critical frames of prisoner treatment, the two most common being indefinite detention and torture across the two hunger strikes, and that the news media were not always dependent on frames from government sources to describe prisoner treatment at the facility. The results show that in both hunger strike periods the news media chose to reflect the views of government elites at times and to challenge them at others. This suggests that a new model of press-government relations is needed, and this research proposes a model that accounts for press calculations in deciding when to reflect government frames and when to challenge that portrayal by employing counterframes and including sources outside of the government.