Page 294 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Patrick R¨ ossler

News Geography
The UNESCO study was the first to introduce into the debate about
a“new world information order” the way in which countries are por-
trayed in the foreign news of other countries (Sreberny-Mohammadi
1991). A basic and unsurprising characteristic of almost all television
news is its orientation toward the territory (city, region, or country)
where it is distributed. Information offered by the media concentrates
on developments in the broadcaster’s local (home) region, thereby
fulfilling one of media’s basic informational functions (see Stevenson
and Cole 1984, 37). This orientation of media as overwhelmingly
“local” corresponds with observations made within international au-
dience research, in which television viewers unanimously emphasized
the difference between here and there as an important dimension of
television news (Jensen 1998, 165). Schulz (1983, 283) found a pat-
tern that he called “universal regionalism”: No matter where a pro-
gram was distributed, the home (local) region always played the most
important role in news coverage. This result has regularly been con-
firmed by studies in single countries (for an overview see Kamps 1999,
278).
Inastudy done in Germany, purely domestic news amounted to
about 50 percent of coverage for the ARD, ZDF, and RTL in the mid-
1990s (Kamps 1999, 284). Similar results were reported by Heinderyckx
(1993, 431, 440) for different European news programs, with Italian
RAI 1 coming out on top, broadcasting 69 percent domestic news.
Compared internationally, the share of domestic news varies markedly,
from Belarus (38 percent) and Mexico (45 percent) to more Western-
oriented countries with more than two thirds of coverage (United
States: 72 percent; Israel: 73 percent; Italy: 79 percent; see Jensen 1998,
201). Even for explicitly internationally oriented channels such as CNN
or ITN, a high portion of coverage deals with the locality, although
the percentages do not reach the level of domestic channels (Meckel
1996, 202–3).
Of course, national news programs also include coverage of foreign
and international events. Such coverage varies insofar as it focuses on
different countries. The term communication magnetism reflects the ex-
tent to which events in one country are reported on by another country.
“Some nations cover each other, regularly reporting on the events in the
other country; these nations attract each other in their coverage, while
other nations are ignored” (Kamps 1999, 111 [translated by the author]).
In German and Anglo-American news programs, France, Great Britain,

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