ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of how the news media has constructed the Northern Ireland situation during the contemporary period. Along with the main political factors which have affected reporting of the conflict in Northern Ireland, it provides a detailed examination of the background literature about news coverage and picks up on the central themes of that literature. Notably, those themes are concerned with representations of terrorism and the political control of reporting. Consideration of those areas will constitute the bulk of the chapter and will involve dealing with key debates about terrorism. Once the conventions of the terrorism paradigm have been established, the chapter then goes on to examine how political forces have shaped and affected those conventions. Finally, it concludes by calling for a need to rethink the existing literature about news coverage of Northern Ireland given the changing political climate.
