Framing Impeachment: How US diplomacy and ethno-nationalist conflict informed impeachment coverage in Ireland and Northern Ireland

Abstract

In the past two decades, relations between Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the United States have gradually weakened, as has the Irish media’s coverage of US events. President Bill Clinton’s diplomatic intervention in the decades-long sectarian conflict known as the Troubles, and his work in moderating the Good Friday Agreement, made his impeachment trial some of the top news in Ireland at the time. The outcome of the trial would have impacted Ireland directly, and newspapers had the task of reporting on an impeachment process that could spark conflict at home if Clinton were removed. When President Donald Trump was impeached twenty years later, his administration did not have a serious seat at the table in ongoing Irish peace negotiations threatened by Brexit, and Irish media coverage had shrunken and conglomerated. This thesis will examine agenda-setting techniques used by three newspapers in Ireland and Northern Ireland during the Clinton and Trump impeachment trials, to determine how the sociopolitical context in Northern Ireland and its diplomatic relations with the US affected media framing.