Page 218 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 207

criticism, and proposes that specific news stories should be examined as
related, in the same way as documented historical facts and incidents, to
one or another myth or super-story or cultural theme, as these appear in
different cultures. The meaning of a concrete news story is always
produced in the public space of culture, and in the framework of a
relevant family-of-stories, already familiar to the members of a given
society. Indeed, it can be argued that for an event to be judged
‘newsworthy’ it must be anchored in narrative frameworks that are
already familiar to and recognizable by newsmen as well as by
audiences situated in particular cultures. The events are then narrated in
ways which invoke these familiar, stable frameworks, thus also
contributing to the stability of that culture. Moreover, not all human
stories are, or must be, culture specific. Indeed, many themes are
universal. Let us illustrate. A recently published book describing
television’s coverage of the ‘rescue’ of the three whales trapped under
the Alaskan ice attributes the global reach of the story to the proximity
of the event to a satellite dish. But the universal appeal of the story may
also be explained through its basic, universal theme, which could be
defined as ‘the plight of the innocent’. Perhaps that is why television
news editors everywhere are so enamored of ‘animal stories’. The
universal appeal of these stories is immediately apparent.

TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
Let us turn now to our two examples. First, a story from Dublin. On 16
February 1987, the day before a general election in Ireland, ‘scene
setting’ stories about the election were broadcast on the BBC, CBS,
RTBF (Belgian television) and TF1 (French television). Unlike the raw
materials disseminated through the news exchange system, these stories
did not come from the same source. Rather, they were produced and
narrated by the broadcasting organizations’ own correspondents in
Dublin. Nevertheless, there are interesting similarities—and differences
— between the BBC’s and CBS’s stories on the one hand, and the
Belgian and French stories on the other.
Both the BBC and the CBS stories focus on Ireland’s economic
problems, and more specifically on the high rate of unemployment
among Irish youths. Both correspondents describe attempts by these
young unemployed to secure a better economic future outside Ireland—
primarily in the United States. The similarities between the stories are,
in fact, quite remarkable. Apart from the correspondents’ accents and
the occasional phrase (e.g. the reference by CBS reporters to the ‘Irish