Remapping the News of the World

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American philosopher, once said that he never read newspapers. The papers contained nothing but accounts of train wrecks, he claimed, and once you knew the theory of a train wreck, there was no reason to read repeatedly about recent occurrences.

Thoreau -- who invented civil disobedience and lived alone for a year at Walden Pond in Massachusetts -- would find a familiar echo of his complaint today. Just about everyone complains about the preponderance of bad news and especially the coverage their group gets. Business and labor, young and old, Third World -- especially the Third World -- are convinced that they and their interests are largely ignored and, when covered at all, subjected to ridicule, cynicism, and abuse.

The Newsflow Debate

A generation ago, complaints from the Third World -- the poor nations, mostly in the southern hemisphere and largely independent of the then-distinguishable First and Second Worlds -- led to calls for a redefinition of news as part of a broader redistribution of information resources. The debate became known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and occupied the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) for a decade before a compromise resolution on the role of the media, the withdrawal of the United States, Britain, and Singapore from the organization, and world events moved the issue out of the international spotlight. The complaints, too, seemed to recede as the "emerging democracies" of central and eastern Europe joined the "developing nations" of the old Third World in a rush to embrace the glittering new communication technologies of the West. And with them, the best and the worst of Western-style journalism.

The old charges of "news bias" -- the vague claim that the news was unfair or inaccurate, although usually without a definition of how the day's events should be portrayed -- inspired a modest body of theory and research. It tended to start from the premise that news is not a random sample of people, places, and events but rather is driven by -- or at least influenced by -- either or both of two forces.

One is the global structure of news gathering and dissemination, which more or less follows the global flow of economic and political power. Reporters are stationed in New York, Tokyo, and Brussels because that's where the power is. We don't read or see much about Albania, Bangladesh, Cameroon -- or Zaire -- because they are poor and powerless, at most minor regional players in a global news map dominated by a handful of superpowers. To understand the world of news, the argument goes, examine the structure of world politics and economics.

But Zaire does occasionally make the news, usually as now when overwhelming human tragedy briefly attracts the attention of the world's media. This is an example of the second force shaping the news: the values invoked by key gatekeepers throughout the global news system as they pick and choose among the flood of information the system generates. The tiny snapshot of the world that ends up in our local media -- and presumably in our heads as well -- is a product of countless gatekeeping decisions based on a more or less uniform set of news values. Violence, disruption, tragedy -- especially when they are captured in dramatic pictures -- are irresistible. That is, of course, why the one plane that crashes is news, not the thousands that land safely. And why Zaire emerges from the heart of media darkness not when its 40 million go about their ordinary lives in normal fashion but when civil war erupts or when the country's bizarre dictator does something more outrageous than normal.

Both approaches to the study of world news lead to a common conclusion: the media map is ethnocentric and narrow. It emphasizes neighboring countries and those with whom our country has close economic, political, and cultural ties; news is mostly politics and economics, and newsmakers are mostly government officials. In every country's media on any given day is a small set of common stories that are reported with virtually identical pictures or words. They include one or two disruptive events -- the war in Bosnia or Zaire, an earthquake in Japan or forest fire in California -- one or two predictable political or economic events from power centers -- the presidential election in the United States, the latest directives from EU headquarters in Brussels, the exchange rate of the mark and yen -- and one or two human interest events that range from the bizarre to amusing -- record multiple births, lovemaking between pandas, the six-year-old suspended from school for kissing a classmate.

The Unesco-Inspired Study

The NWICO debate was important enough that it inspired an increased interest in the study of foreign news and international news flow and led to an important study that has more or less remained a model since then. The study was coordinated by the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) at the request of Unesco and included, eventually, 29 countries and the Big Four global news agencies. I was part of a research team at the University of North Carolina that analyzed U.S. media and later supervised an expanded team that contributed data on 17 of the 29 countries and the four news agencies. I also was a member of a "Gang of Four" that wrote a little-publicized final report for Unesco and co-editor of a book summarizing various analyses of our 17-country data.

Not surprisingly, the study confirmed what other, less ambitious research had found. And not surprisingly, the study changed very few opinions about the state of global news flow or need to restructure the global news system.

Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, who wrote the final Unesco report, noted two overwhelming conclusions that echoed results of studies carried out in previous decades with a variety of definitions and methodologies:

In terms of the topics covered by international news, we found that politics dominated international news reporting everywhere.... Indeed, "hard" news represented by these two political categories [international politics and domestic politics] and by items on military and defense and economics, accounted for the majority of all stories. This was even more the case in the news media of the South, where few "soft" stories are either generated or reported. Similarly, we found that political figures dominate, embracing 25 percent to 60 percent of all actors in international news; few other categories of actors received significant mention. Political news with political actors constitutes the bulk of international news coverage everywhere.

The other overall finding was the prominence of regionalism. Every national system devoted most attention to events happening within and to actors belonging to its immediate geographical region.... Although there is little evidence of a "Third World perspective," a "continental orientation" is strong.

Kaarle Nordenstreng, longtime president of the communist International Organization of Journalists in Prague and a major architect of the study, concluded that the study had been hijacked:

[The original] idea called for the use of a delicate methodological instrument that would get at the qualitative sphere of image building, instead of just employing conventional categories of content analysis such as topic/types of news, countries/regions, etc. The final project was dominated by "vulgar" categories that capture ad hoc aspects of media content, rather than a comprehensive imagine carried by the content.... Perhaps the greatest contribution of this enterprise has been through a negative case -- by demonstrating the scientific inadequacy and political risks involved in a one-sided quantitative consideration of mass media content.

On the other hand, I concluded that the project demonstrated that the NWICO's ideological rhetoric was misplaced:

First, many of the charges against the Western media and news services are without evidence to support them. Second, the lack of differences among media of very different political systems argues against the theory of cultural imperialism. And third, much of the rhetoric addresses outdated questions.

The study changed no minds but may have had a tiny influence on the nature of the debate about the shortcomings of international news. By the time the Unesco report appeared, the United States and Britain were on their way out of the organization, and the debate burned itself after the West promised to aid Third World media development.

The interest in foreign news research continued, however, and the project did seem to provide a framework for other studies. Our book stayed in print for ten years. The appeal, we suspected, was more for the details of the research methodology than for the substantive results or our interpretation of them. The pages of major communication research journals and conference programs of major academic research organizations continue to report studies of foreign news and international news flow, many owing some intellectual debt to the Unesco study.

Global Changes and the News

By the early 1990s, just about everything related to the study and to the political issues that spawned it had changed. Consider these truly revolutionary differences between the 1970s and 1990s:

  1. The collapse of communism changed the face of Europe and sparked democratic reforms around the world.

  2. Innovative new media and live reporting around the world, unknown in the 1970s, were common two decades later.

  3. The Internet, laptop computers, and other products of the information age had changed academic research as much as it had revolutionized news and global politics.

It was time to revisit the world of global news.

The three surviving members of the "Gang of Four" that prepared the Unesco report -- Frank Ugboajah from Nigeria died a few years after the report was written -- and other participants in the earlier study maintained casual contact over the years and occasionally discussed the possibility of updating the project. Finally, in 1993 and 1994, the outlines of a new project began to take shape. I asked Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, by then director of the Center for Mass Communication Research at Leicester, to serve as co-director of a research project that would begin with the 1978 study but update it to the 1990s and broaden participation. An invitation to participate went to the original group with a request to extend the invitation to colleagues in other countries. We made a special effort to find participants in regions at the periphery of the international research community -- Latin America, Africa, the old Soviet Union.

The rationale of a new look at foreign news was specified in the opening paragraph of the project proposal:

The end of the Cold War demands new maps, both cartographic and conceptual. The many political and technological changes of the past decade have in their various ways produced changes that our old maps cannot register. The schema of three worlds, of developed centers and underdeveloped peripheries have given way to market globalization and a new world (dis)order.

The new(s) environment in the 1990s was described in some detail:

While access to media is still radically uneven between the industrialized North and the South, broadcast signals are available to more and more of the world's population. News gathering has changed also, with the rapid distribution of live television news perhaps the key new ingredient in the global news environment. There are also new corporate and regional players in international news provision, with CNN, BBC World Service Television, and Reuters among the major global players. The tendency toward global concentration in the production and distribution of video news footage may be even more marked than the "Big Four" domination of wire service news in the 1970s. There has also been a growth of Southern international news-gathering agencies attempting to provide something of a "contra flow" to the major Western agency news flow. There is also a new tier of organizational actors -- the regional news exchanges -- which take in mainly non-regional news feeds from the agencies and distribute them to their respective national broadcasting organizations.

We need new maps of the emerging global news geography, both in terms of the major suppliers of news, the geographic and cultural maps that news coverage represents, and the discourses and images of "otherness" that define "foreign" news. Indeed, one of the concerns of this study, in a period of challenge of the sovereignty of the nation-state is to examine how much news about the "foreign" is actually located at home.

In the emerging geopolitical order, it is not clear where friends and enemies are to be found, and since international news coverage has often had a very close connection to the prevailing attitudes toward international relations, even in societies with the "freest" media, a mediated news map provides indication of emerging trends in international relations. It would also show whether the geographic regionalism evident in older studies is now reinforced, or whether there are new criteria of selection emerging, using notions of "cultural proximity" such as Islam, for example, that work to construct a cultural, not geographic map of relations. With tendencies both toward globalization and toward localization, it is a pertinent moment to analyze this new, emergent geography or "foreign" as well as international news.

We need a large-scale baseline research project that could provide a reasonably complete analysis of the current geography of international news coverage, at least as represented via mainstream media channels in different countries. All other established social science disciplines generate regular baseline data, and international communication in 1994 badly needs a new baseline study of the geography of international news available in major national media outlets.

In addition, we hoped to encourage participation with the following operating principles:

  1. "Give a little, get a lot." Each contributor would have fast access to the full data set and full authority to analyze all data and publish independently of the group.

  2. A multi-faceted project, combining qualitative and quantitative data, that would allow participants to "triangulate" their examination of key questions by addressing them from multiple perspectives with multiple data sources.

  3. Collaboration on analysis and publication with opportunities for individually authored chapters in several summary volumes.

  4. Use of the Internet to establish a global "university without walls" of participants and, later, others interested in the study and issues it addressed.

Slowly and with a touch of the chaos that characterizes the Internet, the project evolved to include these elements:

  1. A two-day "trial run" quantitative study of foreign and international news in May, 1995.

  2. A qualitative assessment of coverage of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, which occurred during the test period.

  3. A two-week quantitative study in September, 1995.

  4. A qualitative assessment of coverage of the United Nations Women's Conference in Beijing, which overlapped part of the two-week period.

  5. An ad hoc study of coverage of several incidents of disruption, violence, and terrorism that occurred during the two-week period.

The quantitative part of the study included many of the variables in the Unesco project but simplified and updated to include issues of gender, agenda-setting, and disruption. We recognized that many potential participants were short on resources and experience and that the unique value of such a project could be its breadth rather than depth.

The search for participants started with the original list from the 1978 study expanded to include a few colleagues and former studies in other countries. In all cases, we urged the people whom we contacted to extend the invitation to potential participants in other countries. The growing roster of potential participants was remarkably varied in geography and research experience, although Latin America, Africa, the old Soviet Union, and the Latin world were less well represented than we had hoped. Most of the participants had access to email, but we had use fax and old-fashioned mail as well to reach a few, which excluded them from the electronic worldwide "university without walls" and from the last-minute changes and frequent dialogue among participants that characterized the early part of the study.

We were never surely exactly how countries would be represented, and even now we cannot be certain of the final number of participants. Some individuals expressed interest but lacked either the perseverance or resources to carry the project to completion. Others more or less disappeared but emerged unexpectedly months later with the data in hand. A few others participated in only part of the study and contributed a small subset of the data specified in the proposal. Early presentations of preliminary results in 1996 produced several new participants who promised to catch up with the rest of the participants. The composite data set for the two-day trial run in May included contributions from 44 countries; the larger September data set promises to be larger, although we will not have a final count until the deadline to contributors of January, 1997.

Despite occasional misunderstandings and largely because of a universal spirit of cooperation and tolerance, it became clear as the project progressed that we had created a new kind of collaborative research structure out of the technology that is, for most of us, only a few years old. It also became clear that the final data set would be unique in size and scope. Plans for publication of the results moved quickly from a single book to several books supplemented with new electronic media and the Internet itself.

Results and Next Steps

Preliminary results based on the May two-day trial were presented at three conferences in 1996: the International Communication Association (ICA), meeting in Chicago in May; the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), meeting in Anaheim, California, in August; and the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR), meeting in Sydney in August. Much more extensive analysis of the full data set is expected at several major international conferences in 1997 and at several regional conferences already planned or proposed.

A curious element of the panels at ICA, AEJMC, and IAMCR was lack of agreement among participants on the meaning of their examination of first results. Some changes were apparent: the dominance of the Western agencies seemed diminished, and news in central and eastern Europe was more directed toward the West; the United States enjoyed unique prominence as a news superpower. On the other hand, geographic proximity and national linkages remained the dominant new values in media worlds mostly defined by politics and economics. The importance of sports, excluded from most previous studies, was documented, especially in regional coverage.

If technology had redrawn the media maps of the world, it was not immediately clear from the first-pass analyses of the data from the two-day trial run. The news, as captured quantitatively, was still the familiar daily picture of world politics and economics with the unpredictable blockbuster event briefly illuminating one unknown part of the world, then another. However, the important change may be in the quantitity of information and variety of sources available, especially in developing countries and in the old dictatorships. On the other hand, the emergence of a handful of global sources, particularly CNN and multinational ownership of domestic media, may lead media in all parts of the world to a common definition of news and homogeneity in standards of presentation. Panels at academic conferences next year will surely debate these and other issues.

On the whole, changes in the world drawn by the media seemed less dramatic than the technological changes in the global news system itself and in the political landscape it covers. But examination of the full data set has just begun, and subtle but significant changes may become apparent as the data are subjected to multiple analyses. We may see evidence of more dramatic changes in the media in countries that have undergone political upheaval and can look forward to insights from participants whose voices have not been heard in previous discussions. We anticipate spirited discussion on all aspects of the data and disagreement at least as frequently as agreement. The participants from all over the world with research perspectives as different as their national media systems may never agree on a single set of conclusions from a uniquely large, complex, multi-faceted data set. For now, priority of access to the results belongs to those who contributed data, but the debate on the role of news media and the insights that can be derived from this unique research project are open to all.

References

Here are sources cited in the text and several other recent studies of foreign news and international news flow:

Galtung, Johan, and Richard C. Vincent (1992). Global Glasnost; Toward a New World Information and Communication Order? Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press. A thorough review of issues and recent studies is included in a broader look at global communication.

Hess, Stephen (1996). International News & Foreign Correspondents. Washington DC: Brookings. A new study of foreign news in U.S. media and the people who report it.

Martin, L. John, and Ray Eldon Hiebert [Eds.] (1990). New York: Longman. An edited volume with contributions from a wide variety of sources.

Merrill, John E. [Ed.] (1995). Global Journalism; Survey of International Communication, 3d Ed. New York: Longman. A basic text with several chapters pertinent to news flow issues.

Sreberny-Mohammadi Annabelle, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Robert L. Stevenson, and Frank Ugboajah (1985). Foreign News in the Media: International Reporting in 29 Countries. Reports and Papers on Mass Communication No. 93. Paris: Unesco. The full report, hard to find.

Sreberny-Mohammadi Annabelle, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Robert L. Stevenson (1984). The "World of the News" Study. Journal of Communication, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter), pp. 120-142. An overview of the findings with two interpretations at odds with each other.

Stevenson, Robert L., and Donald Lewis Shaw, Eds. (1984). Foreign News and the New World Information Order. Ames IA: Iowa State University Press. Spanish edition published in 1985 by Editorial Mitre, Barcelona. A collection of multi-country analyses of the data set contributed by the U.S. team.

Stevenson, Robert L. (1994). Global Communication in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Longman. A broad-based undergraduate textbook with a chapater on the global news system.

Wallis, Roger, and Stanley Baran (1990). The Known World of Broadcast News. London: Routledge. Multi-perspective study of broadcast news from a European viewpoint.