Page 217 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

206 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

tragedy in England or the rescue of three whales trapped underneath the
Alaskan ice (Rose 1989), have become staples of television news
services around the world. Thus, ‘foreign’ news stories are often
accorded the airtime and prominence more commonly reserved to
stories of domestic interest. In a picture-driven medium, the availability
of dramatic pictures competes with, and often supersedes, other news
considerations.
But the globalization of television news has not diminished the
uniquely national character of news programs in different countries. In
fact, one of the more salient impressions emerging from an examination
of our materials has to do with the ways in which television news
simultaneously maintains both global and culturally specific
orientations. This is accomplished, first, by casting far-away events in
frameworks that render these events comprehensible, appealing and
‘relevant’ to domestic audiences; and second, by constructing the
meanings of these events in ways that are compatible with the culture
and the ‘dominant ideology’ of the societies they serve. Thus, for
example, US television coverage of recent events in Eastern Europe has
been consistently couched in the terminology of the triumph of
‘freedom’ and ‘democratization’, thus conveying a sense of America’s
triumph in the cold war. (CBS’s report from the Berlin Wall, showing
pictures of East Berliners returning home from their shopping spree in
West Berlin carrying colorful plastic bags filled with their purchases,
prompted CBS’s anchor, Dan Rather, to describe the returning shoppers
as carrying ‘the fruits of freedom’. ‘Freedom’ has thus become the
‘freedom to shop’.)
But the significance of the ‘domestication’ argument goes further. It
serves to counter uncritical assumptions about the globalization of the
media. Indeed, the tendency to ‘domesticate’ news stories may be
regarded as a countervailing force to the pull of globalization. Thus, the
convergence of different news services on the ‘same’ set of stories
should not necessarily be viewed as leading to a ‘homogenization’ of
news around the world. Indeed, if the ‘same’ events are told in
divergent ways, geared to the social and political frameworks and
sensibilities of diverse domestic audiences, the ‘threat’ of
homogenization might have little basis.

The stability of narrative forms
Our analysis is also located firmly in the perspective of news as story-
telling. This approach borrows its concepts and strategies from literary