The Department of Communication and Media Studies at John Cabot University in collaboration with the Department of Political Science and International Affairs hosted our final talk of the Fall 25 DDD series with Dr. Omar Al-Ghazzi. This talk examined the effects of Western coverage of the Middle East. Taking the BBC as a prime example, it argued that Middle East coverage is characterized by a strategic orchestration of noise and silence that determines what context, words, labels, and historic legacies are used to tell stories about the region, and whose lives and bodies are deemed human. In addition to enabling genocide in Gaza, this Western media coverage is reshaping journalism into a tool for amplifying state power, suppressing dissent, and dismantling the role of witnessing as a rhetorical moral and political disposition. This transformation, he argued, aligns the Western media system more closely with those in authoritarian contexts, such as the Arab world.
Dr. Omar Al-Ghazzi is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where he also serves as Deputy Head of Department (Education). He works on the geopolitics of global communications, particularly in relation to news media and popular culture. He is interested in the politics that shape the ways we talk about and use communications technologies, as well as the role of media in forging our imaginaries of the past and the future. He is currently completing a book on the politics of history in Arab media with Oxford University Press. Al-Ghazzi is an editor in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.