Page 195 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere
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184 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

              with 10,000 people with AIDS, because I believe it’s so far away
              from me and it will never touch in my life.
            For the most part, however, the human impact theme reflected a caring
            and worrying for others:

              When David was  dying from it, my friend saw him a month
              before he died. And he said, ‘How are you feeling, David? How
              are things going?’ He said, ‘Great. Everything’s going great.’ You
              know, he’s one of those…. If he had said, ‘Well, they gave me
              like 3 weeks to 2 months to live’, you’d be like, ‘Oh, my God.’
              You know what I mean. And people would feel bad for him. He
              didn’t want that. He wanted people to treat him how they usually
              did, so he didn’t say anything. And then when he died, it was kind
              of a surprise to everyone. But I feel worse for his mother, because
              David died and two weeks later his father died of a brain tumor.
              So that poor mother had to sit there and watch her husband and
              son die slowly (pause) another thing that I speak from experience
              in. It’s not like I’m just reading out of a book, because I know
              someone who died of it.


            While in the Danish sample the sorts of human impact referred to are
            rather  specific,  centering  around   unemployment,   the
            Danish respondents also tend to discuss this in terms of an impact on
            individuals, and sometimes social groups, to which they belong or with
            whom  they  can empathize. As already mentioned, unemployment is
            linked  with the intervention of the  state, or  lack  thereof, but  the
            economic mechanisms involved are not elaborated by the interviewees.
            Instead, also in a story about a recycling plant which had just opened,
            some of the Danish respondents focused strongly on the workers who
            were interviewed on the news, and who were happy about their new
            jobs in times of unemployment.


                                 Center-periphery
            In the case of international news, it appears that the different roles of
            Denmark and the United States in global politics may account for the
            respective conceptualizations of international issues in the two samples.
            In the American case, interviewees tend to understand the issues from
            center stage, aligning themselves with their country and positioning the
            United States in relation to other players of international politics, with
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