‘The vermin have struck again’: dehumanizing the enemy in post 9/11 media representations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the scholarly attention surrounding the media’s treatment of the so-called ‘war on terror’ has focused on its uncritical replication of the Bush administration’s rhetorical framing of the conflict, in which the September 11 attacks were seen as acts of war initiating a retaliatory war on terror. While this dominant, martial framing is now being challenged, an equally significant framing remains largely unexamined, one as significant to media rhetoric and public perception as the war trope itself. This article identifies the consistent pattern of dehumanizing metaphor that dominates Western media’s coverage. It focuses on newspaper headlines as influentially compressed narratives replicating and recycling key metaphors that systematically figure the enemy as animal, vermin, or metastatic disease. These dehumanizing media representations, which have historically prefigured abuse, oppression, and even genocide, are being circulated as uncritically through newspaper media headlines as Bush’s war framing was initially and, we argue, now requires the same critical dismantling.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it