Global media

Terrorismus-Berichterstattung zwischen nationalen Spezifika und globaler Standardisierung. Eine Inhaltsanalyse der Hauptnachrichten von CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC und ARD

by Mike S. Schäfer

with Jürgen Gerhards. in M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 2012/Sonderband 2. 115-140.

In this paper, we ask if news reporting on terrorism is globalised (i.e. similar across all countries), regionalised... more In this paper, we ask if news reporting on terrorism is globalised (i.e. similar across all countries), regionalised (i.e. similar in only some countries) or country-specific. Using quantitative and qualitative content analysis, we compare the coverage of four terrorist attacks in the main news programmes of the US edition of CNN, Al Jazeera’s Arabic language service, the British BBC and the German public broadcasting service ARD. The results reveal that reports on terrorism show many cross-national commonalities. Hence, it is possible to speak of a far-reaching global standardisation of news reporting. All stations give the events nearly identical importance, and the stylistic devices used to describe the attacks are very similar as well. The evaluation of the perpetrators’ actions and the attitude towards the victims is also similar across all four channels. The attacks are uniformly condemned, and the victims are depicted as innocent civilians. However, there are also differences between the various tv stations, in particular concerning their expression of a “clash of civilizations”. Fundamental differences were found between CNN and Al Jazeera; i.e. those stations who serve countries or regions that are intensively involved in certain geopolitical conflict. Further differences were found between the BBC and ARD. While the BBC interprets the attacks as an expression of a global ‘war on terror’, the ARD depicts them as criminal attacks by a few individuals against civilization itself. In discussing these empirical results, we make reference to different theories of media-politics.

Key words: terrorism – television – news coverage – globalization – Al Jazeera

‘Warning: Do Not Dig’: Negotiating the Visibility of Critical Infrastructures

by Nicole Starosielski

published in the 'Journal of Visual Culture' April 2012.

This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majority of transoceanic... more This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majority of transoceanic telecommunications traffic, in order to make visible the material systems that support an ‘immaterial’ internet. The author documents the cultural production of these traces, recording how infrastructural visibility must be negotiated at points where cables cross through public spaces, including beaches, highways, and state parks. By examining the cultural conflicts over cables in California and O‘ahu, the article shows how telecommunications companies reorganize visual space to protect the cable, using diverse media such as nautical charts and warning signs. The cultural specificity of these representations testifies to the ways in which global cable systems develop in relation to local spatial politics. The article seeks to broaden research on infrastructure’s invisibility, disruption, and sensationalization to include the ‘existing visibilities’ of undersea cables as they are constituted in everyday life and material environments.

American Dreams – Israeli Formats: How Israeli TV Became a U.S. Success Story

by Sharon Shahaf

2011 proved to be a break-out year for Israeli formats in the U.S.
The jewel in the Israeli television formats... more 2011 proved to be a break-out year for Israeli formats in the U.S.
The jewel in the Israeli television formats crown for 2011 is, without a doubt Showtime’s adaptation of the Israeli drama Hatufim (Prisoners of War) – Homeland.The show won two out of its three Golden Globe nominations (for best drama and best actress Clair Danes), emerging as the big winner of this year’s award.
Homeland’s achievement, after only four years of U.S. presence for Israeli formats far surpasses that of more established television industries. This year, as result of the rising interest, U.S. networks bought as many pitches based on Israeli formats as they did formats coming from the U.K – despite the much longer standing tradition of British-American exchange, spanning over four decades and dozens of shows.

The most obvious questions at this point are Why Israel? Why now? The answer of course lies first and foremost in the rise of global television formats trade and its revolutionary influence on the ways television programming get conceptualized, bought, sold, and licensed.

The format – sold as a televisual concept rather than finished text - opens up new opportunities for players from previously hopelessly marginalized markets, who can now compete on the home turf of the world’s most influential industry. No longer insulated by linguistic barriers, producers from insignificant national TV industries can now pitch their work globally in a manner that flies in the face of growingly outdated theories of media globalization as “cultural Imperialism"

Looking at the diverging discourses of Israeli and U.S. producers, executives, format right owners, trade and popular press this paper focus on mapping out some initial explanatory discourses emerging in both Hollywood and Tel Aviv to begin answering the questions raised by this case study

Critical Nodes, Cultural Networks: Re-mapping Guam’s Cable Infrastructure

by Nicole Starosielski

Published in Amerasia Journal 37:3 (2011): 18-27.

This essay delineates the cultural history of Guam’s undersea cables. It traces how broader social forces interested... more This essay delineates the cultural history of Guam’s undersea cables. It traces how broader social forces interested in locating Guam at the center of transpacific traffic have kept the island a crucial node in the cable network. These forces include the U.S. military’s establishment of Guam as a strategic space; private telecommunications companies’ investment in Guam as an Asian hub; and the expansion of infrastructures that depend on and generate traffic for cables, including networks of sea transport, air transport, and migration. As the location where interconnection occurs, Guam has become a place of power in transpacific networks, and this power resides in part in the island’s physical geography. Due to the geographic concentration of communications resources, however, Guam is also a pressure point in the network. Here, local actions and environmental forces have disproportionate consequences for network operation, and must be continually negotiated in order to sustain the flow of electrical and political power. Describing these cultural geographies, I suggest that, rather than an anomaly, Guam should be considered as a critical node of transpacific systems; it is a geographic location critical to the system’s operation (and to U.S. national security), as well as a place from which a critique of the virtual nature of communication systems is possible—it is a point from which we can best perceive the material investments in the interconnection of America, Asia, and the Pacific.

Digital Media: Hot or Cool?

by Nicole Starosielski

published on FlowTV.org, Volume 15, No. 5 (2012).

Underwater Flow

by Nicole Starosielski

published on FlowTV.org, Volume 15, No. 1 (2011).

Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin and the makeover of Indian soaps

by Abhijit Roy

Published in Locating Cultural Change: Theory, Method, Process ed. Partha Pratim Basu and Ipshita Chanda, Sage India, June 2011, pp.19-53

In this essay, I have investigated how perceptions
of originality and uniqueness are constructed in culture... more In this essay, I have investigated how perceptions
of originality and uniqueness are constructed in culture industries, and
in what ways the existing ideological frameworks of a range of popular
tastes are negotiated to create the ‘new’. With respect to the particular
serial under examination, the key aspects of concern are the generic
trope, the market, consuming patterns and the narrative. 'Jassi Jaissi Koi
Nahin' (henceforth JJKN), the Indian version of 'Yo soy Betty la fea', ran between 2003 and 2006 on Sony Entertainmemnt Television, India. It is particularly important in understanding
what is projected as a novel tendency in popular culture, because the
serial itself is thematically premised upon the idea of the ‘makeover’,
one key form of ‘change’ that has found major currency in consumerist
perceptions. I refer to the much hyped ‘makeover’ of Jassi the lead character, but not only
that. A close examination reveals that with JJKN, at least two aspects of
Indian television got a makeover: marketing strategies and the genre of
soap. If one includes the context of adaptation from the Latin American
telenovela, itself possibly a process of makeover, and the transformation
of image that ‘SET India’ as a channel accomplished through the serial,
one possibly has a chance of examining ‘makeover’ as a much wider
category in studies of global consumerist cultures. It was indeed interesting
to note how the serial triggered a context of reception in which
the central thematic of the bodily makeover resonated with a broader
thematic of societal and representational changes. The opportunity here
for Television Studies is to examine how the public domain is suffused
with a certain image of TV itself as a change-agent and how interfaces
between global television formats conjure the ‘local’ narratives of transition.
The location of issues in gender at the centre of this theatre makes
the whole investigation a major imperative of our times.

Indian media (paperback)

by adrian athique

Introduction to Handbook of Global Media and Communications Policy with Marc Raboy, Wiley Blackwell 2011

by Robin Mansell

‘God is technology’: mediating the sacred in the Congolese diaspora

by David GARBIN

Forthcoming  in:

Fortunati, L., Pertierra, R. and Vincent, J. (Eds) 2011: Migrations, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies. London and New York: Routledge.

‘God is technology’:
mediating the sacred in the Congolese diaspora

David Garbin (CRONEM, University... more ‘God is technology’:
mediating the sacred in the Congolese diaspora

David Garbin (CRONEM, University of Surrey)
Manuel A. Vásquez (University of Florida)


Forthcoming  in:

Fortunati, L., Pertierra, R. and Vincent, J. (Eds) 2011: Migrations, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies. London and New York: Routledge.


In this chapter, we explore the creative use of electronic media to advance charismatic and prophetic/messianic Christianity among migrant and diasporic populations located at various nodes of an asymmetrical power-geometry (Massey, 1993).
What is the nature and function of ICT networks between places in the diaspora and places in the homeland, and between places across the diaspora? What can transnational communication strategies and practices tell us about the symbolic and sacred importance of social spaces within a global diasporic territory? To which extent is the use of media connected to the production of religious identities and embedded in particular politics of the sacred?
We take African religious scapes as a case study, drawing on ongoing fieldwork in the Congolese diaspora in London and to a lesser extent in Atlanta and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). We will show how ICTs are deployed by Congolese religious actors to draw and redraw symbolic geographies of the sacred as they negotiate the multiple (dis)embeddedness that accompany diasporic and migrant livelihoods. We will first examine the role of ICT mediation in the performance of the sacred and in the diasporic configurations of Pentecostal/charismatic churches. In our second case study, we will focus more specifically on the Kimbanguist church, one of the largest transnational Congolese churches, in order to analyze the linkages between diasporic belongings, politics of the sacred and ICT mediation.
As we shall see in the case of the Kimbanguist church, the use of ICTs is embedded in particular politics of religious legitimacy and authenticity and may have unintended, and even unwanted consequences. The more mediation there is, higher the danger of conflicts over orthodoxy and the greater the probability of emergence of alternative nodes of sacrality which may contest the authority and power of a sacred axis mundi like Nkamba, the Holy City of Kimbanguism in the DRC. However, despite these dangers, African diasporic churches have come to rely heavily on electronic media and global popular culture to link their nodes and (virtual) sacred territories but also to generate the collective spectacles that are the essential ingredient for the personal experience of the Holy Spirit, fusing the medium and message in ways that even Marshall MacLuhan would never have anticipated. 

Rednecks, Bluenecks, and Hickphonics: Southern Humor on the Electronic Frontier

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H. 2006. “Rednecks, Bluenecks, and Hickphonics: Southern Humor on the Electronic Frontier.” The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor, Louisiana State University Press (edited by Edward J. Piacentino), pp. 261-278.

Vampire as a Metaphor: Gothic Imaginary and 'the serbs'

by Tomislav Longinovic

in Balkan as a Metaphor, eds. D.Bjelić and O. Savić (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2002), 39-59.

Media networks in the U.S.-led West have established “the serbs” as the post-modern incarnation of the vampire.... more Media networks in the U.S.-led West have established “the serbs” as the post-modern incarnation of the vampire. Represented as the major predatory race inEurope, “the serbs” have resurrected the vampire’s eternal hunger in its Balkanhome, or so the producers of our daily world of information would have us believe.Most of the present knowledge of the Balkans is tied to this excessive violence,which marks the return of “old centuries.” The sacrificial mechanism of collective becoming has been made visible on the bloody altar of Kosovo, a locality “the serbs”guard as a precious wound that is also a reminder of slavery to Islam.Because “the serbs” desire freedom at any cost, the U.S.-led West discounts theirnotion of a common state as a dangerous fantasy. The real war crimes committedduring the wars of Yugoslav succession (1991–1995) and the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia (1999) are viewed through the lens crafted by the gothic imaginary,so that the collective phantasm of “the serbs” emerges as a justification for the exis-tence of NATO. Written between quotes and with a lowercase initial letter, the noundefining the largest Balkan nation demotes “the serbs” from a proper name to themedia incarnation of evil. This vampire-inspired collective entered the new millen-nium led by international war crimes suspects, its castle ruined by NATO bombsand missiles. Since “the serbs” are represented by the global media as a monolithof ethnic hatred, the so-called “international community” has withdrawn the notionof the nation from this imagined community.

Media and development in the Pacific: Reporting the why, how and what now

by David Robie

Robie, David (2008). Media and development in the Pacific: Reporting the why, how and what now. In Shailendra Singh & Biman Prasad (Eds.), Media and Development: Issues and challenges in the Pacific Islands (pp. 11-26). Suva: Fiji Institute of Applied Studies. 326 pp. ISBN 978 982 301 031 1

Introduction
IN FIJI, coup leader Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama and cabinet colleagues sit down with the country’s... more Introduction
IN FIJI, coup leader Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama and cabinet colleagues sit down with the country’s bankers to put together plans to ‘engage’ with the private sector and revive the flagging national economy. In American Samoa, a wage rise of U$S0.50 cents an hour introduced to match a new minimum federal wage leads to layoffs for more than 200 workers at the Chicken of the Sea (COS) Samoa Packing tuna cannery and a halt to plans for plant expansion.
In Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands, angry rival tribesmen
burn houses to the ground in two Dunantina villages, leaving hundreds of men, women and children homeless. News media report that the destruction of Numuri and Megusa villages is in retaliation over the death of a man during an armed hold-up on the Dunantina Road.
In an editorial, the Samoa Observer comments on the dilemmas
facing migrating Samoans seeking opportunities in a richer country—such as New Zealand—where an ill housewife and mother, Folole Muliaga, died on an oxygen machine barely two hours after electricity was cut off from her Auckland home. This tragedy was the result of an unpaid NZ$168.40 bill. Noted the Observer (2007): To help their children, parents will ‘sail the highest seas, climb the highest mountain, to ensure they have a bright future’.

Pacific media freedom 2011: A status report

by David Robie

Perrottet, A., and Robie, D. (2011). Pacific media freedom 2011: A status report. Pacific Journalism Review, 17(2): 147-186. ISSN 1023-9499. October 2011.

Pacific media freedom has been under siege for more than a decade, particularly since an attempted coup in Fiji in May... more Pacific media freedom has been under siege for more than a decade, particularly since an attempted coup in Fiji in May 2000, when a television station was attacked and ransacked, a foreign journalist was shot and wounded and a local journalist ended up being imprisoned for treason. Since then various Pacific countries, notably Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu have faced various periods of media repression. Since the military coup in December 2006, Fiji has faced arguably its worst sustained pressure on the media since the original two Rabuka coups in 1987. The Bainimarama regime in June 2010 imposed a Media Industry Development Decree that enforced draconian curbs on journalists and restrictive controls on foreign ownership of the press. This consolidated systematic state censorship of news organisations that had been imposed in April 2009 with the Public Emergency Regulations that have been rolled over on a monthly basis ever since. Promised relaxation of state censorship after the imposition of the Decree never eventuated. This research report covers the period 1 July 2010-30 June 2011 and examines the trends in the Pacific region. In addition to Pacific Islands Forum member nations, it covers the French Pacific territories and the former Indonesian colony of East Timor and current twin provinces known collectively as West Papua.

Keywords: censorship, Fiji coups, freedom of expression, freedom of information, journalist safety, media ethics, media freedom, media law

Cultural Translation, Global Television Studies, and the Circulation of Telenovelas in the United States

by Kyle Conway

Online First version available upon request.

‘Cultural translation’ is a metaphor whose currency is increasing in the broad field of cultural studies, but it has... more ‘Cultural translation’ is a metaphor whose currency is increasing in the broad field of cultural studies, but it has largely been neglected in narrower field of television studies. This article brings cultural translation to television studies by proposing an approach to describe how the industrial logics that govern the global circulation of programs also shape them as texts. It then uses this approach to explain the circulation of telenovelas in the English-language market in the United States, paying special attention to Ugly Betty, adapted from the Colombian program Yo soy Betty, la fea.

Beaches, Fields, and other Networked Environments

by Nicole Starosielski

published in Octopus Journal, Issue 5 (2011).

Global communications infrastructure, including the wires, towers, and satellites that transmit international signals,... more Global communications infrastructure, including the wires, towers, and satellites that transmit international signals, are increasingly private sites, inaccessible and unknown to the publics that they serve. They have been described as an “invisible city,” a space beyond the threshold of everyday observation. Fiber-optic undersea cables are perhaps the least perceptible of these technologies despite the fact they carry over 95% of transoceanic Internet traffic. Submerged along the seafloor, they are out of reach, disconnected from the social sphere above. As they reach the shore, these cables must be extended through inhabited and contested environments in order to interconnect with national systems. Here, they intersect public space and emerge into the visual landscape. Even when they are visual, however, these networks rarely become visible to the publics that they intersect, in part because we tend to believe that contemporary information traffic is transmitted wirelessly, through the air, rather than underground and under the sea. Network Environments (1-10) is a series of photographs taken between 2009 and 2010 documenting the material traces of communications cables in their natural environments and marking the threshold of network visibility.

Consuming News Translation: The New York Times Online and the "Kremlin Rules" Experiment

by Kyle Conway

In 2008, the New York Times published a series of articles by Clifford Levy, collectively titled “Kremlin Rules,”... more In 2008, the New York Times published a series of articles by Clifford Levy, collectively titled “Kremlin Rules,” about contemporary Russian society. Journalists at the Times translated the articles into Russian and published them electronically. Levy and his collaborators then solicited comments from readers in both languages, translating Russian comments into English for readers of the Times. In this article, we examine the structure and content of these comments and reach the following conclusions. The more comment sections allowed for interaction between readers, the less comments tended to relate to the content of the article itself. When comments did relate to the article’s content, they frequently provided details (and opinions) glossed over by the journalist. However, readers appeared to read only a limited number of comments, which limited the potential of comment sections to fill in gaps inherent in the processes of news translation. Ultimately, then, reader comment sections hold some potential to improve communication across linguistic and cultural lines, but their potential is limited by the behavior of readers themselves.

Translation in Global News: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Warwick, 23 June 2006

by Kyle Conway

News Translation and Cultural Resistance

by Kyle Conway

News translation, which takes many forms, encounters two types of cultural resistance that hinder intercultural... more News translation, which takes many forms, encounters two types of cultural resistance that hinder intercultural understanding. The first is apparent in the need to transform a text in order to make it meaningful in a new context, while the second results from the irreducibility of culture as a way of life to the form of a text. This article illustrates both forms of resistance by analyzing a story originally broadcast on The National in Canada in 1992, and it concludes by considering the implications of the power relations between journalists and the people they describe in acts of news translation.

Paradoxes of Translation In Television News

by Kyle Conway

Translation in television news is an important site of intercultural contact, especially for broadcasters serving... more Translation in television news is an important site of intercultural contact, especially for broadcasters serving increasingly multicultural and multilingual audiences. However, it has gone largely untheorized. This article begins to theorize translation in television news by providing a case study of coverage of two recent events in Canadian constitutional history, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's English- and French-language news programmes. Specifically, it addresses the historically informed practices influencing the ways in which journalists incorporated translated speech into their stories. It concludes that, paradoxically, news translation did not expose viewers to new ideas but instead tended to confirm their pre-existing assumptions, a conclusion with important implications for broadcasters and policymakers in other multilingual societies such as the European Union.