By Brigitte L. Nacos
Pointing out that lead stories about
last week’s G-8 summit in Germany were different in different countries and
regions (Africa and AIDS in the United Kingdom, climate change in Germany,
President Bush’s stomach ache in the United States), Anne
Applebaum concludes in her column (“The Forgotten Threat”) in today’s Washington
Post, “it's not exaggerating at all to say that the events of the past week --
and the wildly divergent international news coverage that accompanied them --
illustrate a profound transformation that has taken place, slowly and quietly,
over the past several years. Call it post-post-Sept. 11, or maybe just a return
to status quo ante: Either way, it's pretty clear that that brief moment of
consensus -- those very few years when the world's most powerful governments
all believed that the world's worst problem was international terrorism -- has
now passed.”
Does a very cursory look at the reporting accents of a few media organizations in a few countries allow such sweeping generalization? This morning, I consulted the electronic Lexis/Nexis media archive and found for that today the listed European print media published 77 articles containing the term “terrorism” either in headlines or lead paragraphs. The total for last week was more than 1,000 articles. As for the listed U.S. print media, they published today 185 items with “terrorism” in headlines or lead paragraphs. The total for last week was more than 1,400. These numbers do not support columnist Applebaum’s claim that the “world’s attention has wandered away from international terrorism—and so, if I may say, has ours.” Certainly not as far as the news media are concerned.
Based on the divergent lead stories coming out of last week’s G-8 meeting, the columnist concludes that “the world's divided attention proves once again that global Internet access and global television have not created anything resembling a global conversation. On the contrary, the BBC fights hard for its viewers, so it tells them what will interest them; the German press fights for its readers, who care most about climate change; and so on. It's not just that different readerships hear different opinions; the actual news events covered differ as well. For all the cant about globalization, the world is as provincial as it ever was, maybe even more so.”
A look at this morning web sites of the New York Times, the Times of London, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reveals that all three reported prominently on the latest Fatah-Hamas clash and two newspapers (New York Times and Times of London) on the death of 7 Afghan police officers by friendly fire. But beyond truly important international developments that make the news around the globe, there are particular interests and preferences and problems and issues in literally every country and every region that affect what is reported and how in a given country and perhaps a whole region. Thankfully, domestic and regional media systems have not been replaced by the global media and communication means. Instead, global, regional, and domestic news media continue to exist side-by-side.
And, yes, just as the emergence of ever more domestic news channels diminishes the likelihood of national conversations in domestic settings, there is little chance for global conversations in spite of the multitude of global media systems. Even when people everywhere receive the same news, they react vastly different based on their own interests, experiences, ideologies, values, etc. For example, when President Bush spoke about the “axis of evil” in his first post-9/11 State of the Union address, his words were well received by many Americans but sharply criticized by many people abroad—not only in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
All of this does not mean at all that the world is as provincial as in the past--or even more so.
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