Page 208 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 197

programs. McLuhan’s hyperbolic ‘global village’ appears to have
arrived, courtesy of a satellite-based global television news system.
But in what sense is television news becoming ‘global’? True,
viewers around the world may see the same, or similar pictures, and
witness the same events, but are they told the same ‘story’, or do they
indeed decode those stories in similar or diverse ways? Moreover, in
what sense is the globalization of television news a truly new
phenomenon, deserving our attentions in new ways?
Claims concerning the globalization of the news media are not, of
course, new or even recent (see, for example, Schramm 1959 and
Hachten 1987). The printing press crossed national and cultural
boundaries long before television. The international news agencies have
been in the business of disseminating news materials around the world
for almost a century and a half (Boyd-Barrett 1980, Fenby 1986). Radio
and films were oblivious to national boundaries almost since their
inception. Yet the advent of satellite technology, facilitating the instant
transmission of visual materials around the world, may be argued to
have ushered in a qualitatively new stage in the globalization of news.
On what grounds do we make this claim? Our reasons are two-
pronged. First, we would argue that the institutional arrangements for
transmitting and exchanging television news materials, spawned by the
availability of satellite technology, have transformed the global
structure of news dissemination around the world, toward a greater
decentralization of the system. Second, we argue that the differences
between the flexibility and degree of ‘openness’ (see, for example,
Fiske 1987) of verbal vs. visual texts render the dissemination of visual
materials qualitatively different from the ‘old’ system of news
transmission by the wire agencies. Let us elaborate.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF TELEVISION
NEWS
The globalization of television news is the product of the harnessing, in
the service of news production and dissemination, of the new
technologies of recording and transmitting visual materials. The
introduction of satellite technology into the global dissemination of
television news has not only extended the reach and increased the speed
with which visual news materials are transmitted around the globe, but
has also spawned new institutional arrangements dedicated to the
international dissemination of television news materials (Sherman and