Page 216 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 205

variation that we find fascinating. It is through this diversity and
variation that the question of the production of meaning can be best
addressed.

COMMONALITIES AND DIFFERENCES
For the purposes of our comparative analysis we identified in the
materials we gathered (two weeks of evening/nightly broadcasts from
eighteen services in twelve countries) those stories which dealt with the
‘same’ event and were broadcast on eight or more of the television
services studied, typically on the same day. Stories dealing with the
‘same’ event could be of two kinds: first, they could be stories reported
by special correspondents of the different news organizations, using
their own visuals, filmed by their own crews; or, second, they could be
based on visual materials taken, in part or in whole, from the news
exchange system. These stories may be narrated by a reporter or an
anchor/newsreader in the studio or by a correspondent in the field. We
shall discuss two examples, one for each kind: first, a scene-setting
story about the elections in Ireland in 1987, as told by three
correspondents, for the BBC, Belgian television (RTBF) and the
American network CBS; then, the coverages of Gorbachev’s speech at
the ‘Peace Conference’ convened in Moscow in June 1987.
Before we proceed to discuss these examples, let us briefly present
two themes that emerged from our analysis, that is, the ways we attempt
to explain the commonalities and the differences in the stories. We
labelled the first ‘the domestication of the foreign’, whereby we argue
that ‘foreign’ news events are ‘domesticated’ and told in ways that
render them more familiar, more comprehensible and more compatible
for consumption by different national audiences. The second theme
addresses ‘the stability of narrative forms’, that is, the ways in which
accounts of news events are couched within the framework of ‘stable’
narratives, i.e. narratives that are already stored, as it were, in the
collective memory of different societies and cultures.

Domesticating the foreign
One of the consequences of a highly developed news exchange system
is the erosion of the ‘traditional’ priorities accorded by television news
to ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ stories. Depending in part on the availability
of ‘dramatic’ footage, news events of potentially global interest, e.g. a
presidential election in the US, an earthquake in Armenia, a soccer