Page 207 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

196 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Like many other utopias, this one too foundered on the harsh realities
of the post WWII world, riven by cultural differences and conflicts,
political and ideological antagonisms and immense economic
inequalities. The information and knowledge resources on which a
global citizenship must be based—free speech and free access to
information, the capacity to process, comprehend and ‘negotiate’ such
information, a sense of having a stake in the global flow of information,
of being fairly represented in it and of the relevance of that information
to one’s interests, concerns and aspirations—were never evenly
distributed around the globe, either at the level of the production of that
information, or at the level of consumption.
Nevertheless, the technological precondition for the emergence of a
global community—the development of a communication technology
capable of creating a global communication system— has, indeed, been
fulfilled. For the past decade or so, a global communication system
based on communication satellites has been in place (Wallis and Baran
1990). We may inquire, therefore, what implications flow from this
global communication system for the development of a globally
knowledgeable audience.
This chapter attempts an initial examination of that question, by
focusing on one aspect of that global system, namely the convergences
and diversities in news events and news stories broadcast by different
television news organizations, who are participants in a cross-national
news exchange system. Two aspects of these convergences and
diversities are examined; the topics, or events covered, and the
meanings given to these events, as conveyed in the stories broadcast in
different countries. The contribution that a news exchange system might
make toward creating shared perceptions of the world across national
boundaries is then discussed.

‘THE SKY IS FULL OF STUFF’
We begin with a familiar observation. Every day, hundreds of miles
above the earth, images that become the substance of television news
span time zones, continents and cultures; images of social unrest, of
peaceful political change and of natural and man-made disasters;
vignettes of human triumph, suffering and folly; pictures of an
increasingly interconnected world. ‘The sky is full of stuff,’ says one
American news executive. ‘We just take it down from the satellites’
(Small 1989:27). As a result, viewers of television news around the
world might see the same, or similar ‘stuff on their evening news