Page 195 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere
P. 195
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