Page 224 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 213

approving presence. His approval is seen as significant because, as ITN
reminds its viewers, Kristofferson starred in ‘what even America
regards as the most vigorously anti-Soviet TV serial ever made’, a serial
(Amerika) that represents (like Reagan and the arms talks) the United
States’ continued reluctance to participate in the peace process.
European acceptance of Gorbachev’s sincerity may not have come
easily, but when it did it was reinforced by the long-standing irritation
at the United States’ apparent reluctance to budge from its cold war
mentality. It is the framework of American-European relationships on
the one hand, and European-Soviet relations on the other, that
constitutes the narrative framework of the British stories.

CONCLUSION
What, then, are the implications of this analysis for the issue with which
we began—namely, the contribution of the globalizing of television
news to the emergence of a ‘global citizenship’? At least two potentially
major consequences of instant global communication could be
hypothesized here. First, it seems plausible to assume that the
opportunity afforded to television viewers around the world to become
witnesses to major events in far-away places, often ‘live’, as these
events unfold, is likely to have major shaping influences on the cognitive
maps of the world that these viewers carry in their heads. While at this
point in time we can only speculate what ‘scratches’ (Isaacs 1958) were
left on the minds of viewers around the world as a result of the recent
flood of images from, say, the Berlin Wall or from Wenceslas Square, it
is tempting to hypothesize that these images, and some of their meanings,
have become parts of a shared view of the world, and thus constitute a
contribution to a shared global citizenship. Second, we should also
consider the extent to which the eventual success or failure of large-
scale social and political movements ought to be credited to the global
publicity accorded to them by a global television news system. A
revolution seen on ‘live’ television constitutes the global audience as
participants, albeit distant and passive, in the social process unfolding
on the screen, transforming it from a ‘domestic’ into a global event.
Whether or not these hypothesized consequences approximate ‘real
life’ circumstances must, at this point, remain an open question. If
anything, our analysis suggests a negative answer. Global events, we
found, are shaped and reshaped by television news reporters and
producers in ways that make them comprehensible and palatable for
domestic audiences. Thus, while the images may have global currency,