conflict & communication online, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2012
www.cco.regener-online.de
ISSN 1618-0747

Irina Volf
Hizb ut-Tahrir in the press: A transnational perspective on what made the group newsworthy in Germany, Great Britain, and Kyrgyzstan in 2002-07

This study analyzes 226 newspaper articles from five German, 396 articles from five British and 325 articles from one Kyrgyz quality newspaper(s) in order to quantitatively and qualitatively reconstruct the newsworthiness of a radical international Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), in the period 2002-07 in Germany, Great Britain and Kyrgyzstan through a media prism. A two-step latent class analysis revealed four distinct patterns of coverage in each country and confirmed the assumptions that the group was not of great interest to the German public, but was much more interesting to the British and Kyrgyz publics. A qualitative analysis of articles written in the periods when the group received the greatest media attention identified the events that made it newsworthy, the most salient aspects of its coverage during these periods, and how it was framed in different contexts.