Rob Leurs received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Since 2004 he is Assistant Professor at the department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. His fields of interest are media theory, cultural studies, and the discursive constructions of public opinion.

Rob Leurs is affiliated with the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the media constructions of morality, in particular of moral deviation.

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His current research project:

Covering genocide trials: The Netherlands and Cambodia.

A) The Netherlands:

Journalists, victims and perpetrators and the ‘social circulation of meaning’ in the production of news on genocide trials – the media/trial of Frans van Anraat.

Most research on journalism adopts a classical approach towards the industrial apparatus of journalism. In contrast to these traditional perspectives this research proposes a cultural studies approach towards the ‘social circulation of meaning’ of news production. I shall focus on the production of news of the ‘Frans van Anraat genocide trial’: the construction of media discourses of attempts to prosecute atrocities in Iraqi Kurdistan that form a ‘mediapolis’ (Silverstone 2007) which demonstrate the rhetoric on (the limitations of) being human.

In 2005 Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat was brought to court on charges of supplying chemicals for the poison gases with which Saddam Hussein killed thousands of Kurdish civilians in 1988. For this worst ever poison gas attacks on civilians, Van Anraat was indicted for genocide and complicity to war crimes. In the international (and especially the Dutch and Kurdish) media attention has been given to this trial in several ways: from television interviews with lawyers to newspaper descriptions of the suffering of survivors, and from rerunning historical documentary material to books by research journalists on the business network Van Anraat was involved in.

In order to answer the question how truth and morality were encoded in news about this genocide lawsuit, I’ve held semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the production of journalistic media. This makes it possible to describe and analyze how journalists, members of the Department of Justice, members of (Dutch) Parliament and (representatives of) victims and indicted criminal attempt to transform their ‘viewpoints’ into media representations.

The (preliminary) interview results show a binary opposition in dealing with journalistic media between on the one hand victims and lawyers and on the other the Department of Justice, Parliamentarians, and journalists. The first group has founded its involvement in producing news reports on the assumption that media is able to show the truth, and that this generates justice. In other words, victims and lawyers see media as guardians of a deeper (moral) truth. Contrary, even before the trial the second group has actively developed media strategies to define what the trial should include (in both a legal and a moral sense), what the events underlying the lawsuit are, what the construction of criminality is and those who belong to it, etc.

Thus, in short, the interviews with stakeholders show the binary assumptions underlying the dealing and cooperating with journalistic media of on the one hand 'true events as reality' and on the other 'media as reality construction'. By comparing these positions both cultural and ethical dimensions of the circulation of meanings in the production of news is uncovered. This lays bare the ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’ (the ‘contemporary of the non-contemporary’; Bloch 1935), or in other words, the role of media in the simultaneous existence of several forms of social conscience becomes apparent.

B) Cambodia:

The discursive position of genocide victims in Cambodia.

In the Cambodian society victims of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) are taking up an uncommon discursive position. Anyone that has suffered from the Khmer Rouge is considered to be a victim including former Khmer Rouge members who were brutaly disadvantaged by their own party. Within this context perpetrators can also be considered victims. For example a tortured prisoner who used to be a member of the Khmer Rouge or a former Khmer Rouge executioner who was forced to commit his crimes to escape his own death.

The nuanced discourse on victims and perpetrators is in contrast with Cambodian state politics; it also contrasts with non-Cambodian discourses on victimhood that are characteristed by a sharper distinction between victim and perpetrator. A discourse analysis of interviews with participants in the ‘Khmer Rouge Tribunal’ (judge, lawyer, Victim Support Section staff, victims) and of an exhibition in former torture prison S-21 demonstrates this nuanced discourse.