Mapping the War Zone: cartography, geopolitics and security discourse in the UK press

Maps are an increasingly important element of the news media's coverage of geopolitics and war. To date few comprehensive surveys of journalistic cartography have been undertaken, yet computer graphics and new spatial database technologies are allowing publishers to exploit geographic information more fully and to produce timely and vivid representations of war zones and related matters. This paper draws on the results of a longitudinal survey (1999-2001) of the five UK prestige daily newspapers ("broadsheets") to explore the role of map graphics in geopolitical and security discourse. The paper focuses on two case studies in which paradigm shifts in warfare are intimately bound up with the nature of geopolitics and threat in the post-Cold-War period. The study reveals the instability inherent in cartographic representations despite popular conceptions of maps as objective, mimetic images.