Page 225 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

214 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

the meanings given to them may not necessarily be shared globally.
Television news in different countries, feeding on an increasingly
similar global diet, facilitated by a global system of distribution and
exchange of news materials, still speak in many different voices. The
Global Newsroom is still confronted by a Tower of Babel.

The research reported here is part of a larger investigation, ‘The
Global Newsroom’ project, supported by the Smart Family
Foundation Communications Institute of the Hebrew University,
Jerusalem; the Center for Research in Public Communication of
the University of Maryland; and the US-Israel Binational Science
Foundation. The authors would like to acknowledge both
Professor Akiba Cohen’s original insight about the organization
of international television news exchanges which led to this
project, and his continuing, enthusiastic support for this study. We
would also like to thank our research assistants Anandam Kavoori
and John Cordes, coders and crunchers extraordinaires.

NOTES

1 No inter-coder reliability measures will be provided on the data reported
here, because so many different coders, speaking so many different
languages, and living in two geographically distant locations, were
involved. However, given the nature of the coding scheme, we believe
that the coding produced a highly reliable data-set.
2 From the official EBU usage reports, it is clear that coverage by the US
networks, the BBC, ITN and occasionally other services of the biggest
story of the day rarely included news tape provided by the Eurovision
News Exchange. However, since the issue under discussion here is
similarity of coverage, reports by these ‘wealthier’ national services on
topics covered in EVN-fed stories are included in the totals presented.

REFERENCES

Boyd-Barrett, O. (1980) The International News Agencies, Beverly Hills: Sage.
Eugster, E. (1983) Television Programming across National Boundaries: The
EBU and OIRT Experience, Dedham, Mass.: Artech House.
Fenby, J. (1986) The International News Services, New York: Shocken Books.
Fisher, H. (1980) The EBU: Model for Regional Cooperation in Broadcasting,
Journalism Monographs 68.
Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture, London and New York: Methuen.