Global 24/7 news providers: emissaries of global dominance or global public sphere?

Simon Cottle, Mugdha Rai

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

34 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The study of international and global news to date has focused on the operation of foreign news values, the unequal flows and emergent contra-flows of transnational news as well as the phenomenology of 24/7 live broadcasts. Today these debates are often played out under opposing 'global dominance' and 'global public sphere' positions. Each in its own way is concerned about communications democracy - whether its discerned curtailment by processes of geo-political economy or temporal-spatial extension by increased global cultural flows. In this article we contend that there is a 'democratic lacuna' at the heart of these debates. This silence concerns how exactly leading world news channels - principally CNNI and BBC World but also international competitors such as Sky and Fox News - communicatively present the voices, views and values of contending interests and identities from around the world. Elaborating a new conception of 'communicative frames' based on contemporary positions of social and political theory and applying this to a large corpus of news output, we begin to evaluate generalizing theoretical claims, both critical and celebratory, about the contribution of global 24/7 news to processes of global dominance or an emergent global public sphere.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)157-181
Number of pages25
JournalGlobal Media and Communication
Volume4
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • BBC World
  • CNNI
  • Communicative frames
  • Fox News
  • Global dominance
  • Global news
  • Global public sphere
  • Sky

Cite this