Page 219 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

208 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

sport of hurling— which looks like hockey played like baseball on a
football field’) there are hardly any differences between the stories. For
American viewers, however, the story may evoke memories of the
‘potato famine’, thus invoking a recognizable theme in American
culture.
On the other hand, the stories on French and Belgian television
‘domesticate’ the story by focusing on the role of the Catholic Church in
Irish politics. Images of multi-children families, and of young mothers
pushing baby-strollers, serve as a background for a discussion of the
resistance of the Church to contraception and abortion, and more
generally, the political powers of the Church. The choice of that issue
by the correspondent suggests an attempt to present the Irish election
story in ways that would resonate among the viewers at home, who
might be similarly preoccupied with the issue of the relationship
between church and state.
TF1 (French television) also focuses on the religious aspect, but on a
Catholicism that is ‘different from ours’. The story exhibits an
ambivalence toward the ‘innocent’ Irish, who are loved because of their
wish to preserve their Catholicism, while paying a heavy price for it:
youth unemployment and painful immigration, due to the restrictions on
contraception and abortion. Amongst us, says the French reporter, even
hard times do not result in immigration. The story implicitly contrasts
the Irish and the French positions on limiting the size of families.
Throughout, the story weaves pictures and text to produce a rhetorical
contrast between the ‘authenticity’ of Irish society’s preservation of
traditional values (rural scenes; an old couple dressed in authentic
village clothes, with an accordion playing in the background) and
images of young unemployed struggling in a hopeless labor market.
The coverage of Gorbachev’s speech at the ‘Peace Conference’ in
Moscow raises different questions. Unlike the previous example, the
visual materials here are either very similar or identical. By and large,
the stories are narrated by the news organizations’ own correspondents
in Moscow, although some of the less affluent services are fully
dependent on the news exchange for their visuals, and narrate the story
from the studio, based, presumably, on wire services dispatches.
In spite of the near-identity of the visual materials, however, the
event is presented differently to American and British audiences. This is
not to say that the American and British versions are totally disparate. In
fact quite the opposite. All the stories share the same five narrative
elements: (1) the growing openness in Soviet society, as seen in
Gorbachev’s emphasis on human rights; (2) the presence of Andrei