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 language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 157-181 |
Number of pages | 25 |
Journal | Global Media and Communication |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2008 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- BBC World
- CNNI
- Communicative frames
- Fox News
- Global dominance
- Global news
- Global public sphere
- Sky