The World News Prism E-Book

William A. Hachten

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 484

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Fully revised and updated, the eighth edition of The World News Prism analyzes the changing role of transnational news media in the 21st-century globalized world and its impact on rapidly changing news events. * Includes a new chapter dedicated to evolving traditional and new social media in Middle East * Expands the discussion of news systems in developing nations, comparing media growth in India and Africa * Explores the impact of digital media on traditional societies * Features important updates on the decline of print media in the West and the challenges this poses to global reporting * Surveys the latest developments in new media and forecasts future developments

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

The World News Prism

Title Page

Copyright

Preface to the Eighth Edition

Introduction

Chapter 1: News Communication for a Global System

A Big, Cloudy, Blue, Agate Marble

The Importance of Foreign News

Moving Together or Apart?

Chapter 2: Changing Ideologies of Press Control

Authoritarian Concept

The Western Concept

The Rise and Fall of the Communist Concept

Revolutionary Concept

Developmental Concept

Chapter 3: Global News Under Stress

The International News Tradition

Global Television News

Cracks in the Conduits

Chapter 4: Digital Media: Global, Interactive, and Free

Google vs. Old Media

The Key Role of Satellites

Personalized Media

The Internet and International News Flow

Bloggers Join the Fray

International Concerns about Cyber News

Implications of Rapid Change

Chapter 5: The Whole World is Watching: Impact of Great News Events

Election Protests in Iran

Earthquake Flattens Haiti

Dueling Videos in Israeli Sea Raid

Tsunami Batters South Asia, Killing Thousands

The 9/11 Terror Attacks on the United States

Electronic Execution of Soviet Communism

The Failed Coup in Moscow

Terrorism and Television

Chapter 6: Globalization of Media and Language

An American in Paris

Changes in World News Services

Advertising Goes Worldwide

Media Changes in Europe

Expanding Media Baronies

Other European Baronies

Diffusion of Mass Culture

The Videocassette and DVD Revolution

English as the Media Language

Chapter 7: China: New Media In An Old Political World

Television

Dating, Talent, and Contest Shows

China's “Oprah Winfrey”

Newspapers

“The Best Journalist in China”

Exposing Corruption

Magazines

A Muckraker in the South

China's Tabloid Press

A New Cultural Appeal

Radio

New Threats: The Internet and Cell Phones

New Internet Controls

The Bloggers

Sex and Politics

Future of the Media

Chapter 8: The Middle East: Media Storms in the Desert

Al Jazeera

Internet

Cell Phones

Chapter 9: India and Africa: Contrasts in Development

Africa Flirts with the New Media

Cell Phones in Rural Africa and India

FM Radio and Political Change in Ghana

Job Outsourcing and Satellite Channels

Africa In and Out of the News Spotlight

Chapter 10: Foreign News in Flux

Television News in Decline: The CBS Case

Changing Correspondents

Physical and Psychological Dangers

Chapter 11: War Reporting: Fire and Misfire

Background of Press Controls

The First War with Saddam Hussein

The Triumph of Twenty-Four-Hour Global News

Marines in Somalia

NATO's Air War Over Yugoslavia

Chasing the Taliban in Afghanistan

The Second War against Saddam's Iraq

First Amendment Concerns

Chapter 12: Public Diplomacy and Propaganda

Our “Truth” vs. Your “Propaganda”

International Radio Broadcasting

US Activities in Public Diplomacy

Public Diplomacy after the Cold War

New Broadcasting Board of Governors

The Propaganda War in the Middle East

New Battle Lines

Chapter 13: Forecast: Changeable with Cloudy Periods

Checklist of Global News Impacts

The Downside of Global Media Effects

Indications of Improvement

What Can Be Done

Western Initiatives

Non-Western Initiatives

Selected Bibliography

Index

To the many journalists around the world who have been killed, kidnapped, or jailed for reporting the news.

This eighth edition first published 2012

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Edition history: Iowa State University Press (1e, 1981; 2e, 1987; 3e, 1992; 4e, 1996; 5e, 1999; 6e, 2002); Blackwell Publishing Ltd (7e, 2007)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hachten, William A.

Theworld news prism: challenges of digital communication /WilliamA.Hachten, James F. Scotton. –8th ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3858-4 (pbk.)

1. Foreign news. 2. Communication, International. 3. Journalism–Political aspects. 4. Digital media.

5. Mass media and globalization. I. Scotton, James Francis, 1932- II. Title.

PN4784.F6H3 2011

070.4'332–dc23

2011018167

Preface to the Eighth Edition

No matter where people live in the world, most “news” or public information is local. People care about what happens in their community, their country, their region. Yet in today's interconnected and globalized world, people everywhere easily learn about and are affected by important international news – terrorist attacks, wars, civil strife, economic upheavals, and great catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis, that occur in distant lands. More than ever before in history, more people are both informed and almost everywhere now have opinions – whether about globalization, the United Nations, nuclear proliferation, or about who should lead their nation. The on-rush of digital communication – the Internet, social media, cell phones – is helping make this possible.

In early 2011, international news made a dramatic comeback fueled by a series of unexpected political revolutions first in Tunisia and then Egypt where President Hosni Mubarak was ousted and then throughout the Arab world in rapid succession to Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere. The streets of long-standing authoritarian Arab states were suddenly filled with angry, mostly young, protestors demanding freedom, democracy, human rights and jobs. Communication media had clearly facilitated the uprisings. Protestors were mobilized and informed by cell phones, the social media of Facebook and Twitter and news of these startling events were transmitted to Arab publics by the Internet and Al Jazeera and other Arabic broadcasters as well to the rest of the world.

Unrest, protests, and brutal repressions continued on including warfare with Libya against NATO forces and rebels.

In March 2011, Japan took over page one when the island nation was struck by a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a massive tsunami that devastated large areas taking a toll estimated at 30,000 dead and missing victims. Severe damage to several nuclear power plants prolonged the calamity to the world's third largest economy. With prolonged revolution in the Arab world and quake/tsunami turmoil in Japan, television coverage of foreign news in 2011 was at its highest levels since the 9/11 attacks ten years earlier. News, it has been said is a process and it may be years before the full implications of the “Arab spring” and Japan's recovery will be known.

The terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, DC abruptly altered the lives of Americans and sharply impacted on international news communication. With the collapse of those two skyscrapers and about 3,000 lives lost, Americans (and many others) no longer felt secure and personally safe from the perils of a dangerous world. Terrorist hijackings and bombings were not new – from 1983 to 2001, ten attacks had claimed the lives of 100 or more Americans. But the 9/11 attacks were the largest violent taking of life on US soil since the Civil War. Most of us agreed that the nation was at war with terrorism – the first war of the twenty-first century.

So, as in early 2011, on 9/11 the news media responded quickly, professionally, and at times magnificently. Global television – up-to-the minute and non-stop, with vivid color video and without commercial interruptions – reported the horrifying details of the tragedy to every corner of the world. The horrific but awesome video of the two airliners crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center was etched into the minds of millions. Supplemented by radio, the Internet, and print, much of the world saw the same video and reports as Americans and Britons. This elicited unprecedented responses of sympathy and empathetic support from many other nations. Yet in some places of the Muslim world, there was elation and celebration. Yet in 2011, Arabs generally supported the anti-authoritarian uprisings in their societies.

The evolving events – war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the quick military defeat of Saddam Hussein's army followed by the long insurgent conflict in Iraq – were followed with great interest. The reporting of the horrific events and the world's response were reminders of how much we have become a global society. Not just in trade and economic affairs but in social and political ways, we are increasingly coming together. But continuing acts of terrorism also were grim reminders that deep divisions between rich and poor countries remain. Democratic societies, with their open borders and individual freedoms, were vulnerable to stealth attacks. Radical terrorism was termed the dark underside of globalization.

As the first decade of the twenty-first century ended and 2011 political eruptions began, the world was still an unstable and dangerous place as war ground on in Afghanistan and terrorism threats emerged in the failing states of Somalia and Yemen. As nations slowly emerged from a global recession, people everywhere sought news to plot their futures and to comprehend the import of the multiple Arab uprisings.

Yet another less apparent series of technological changes in news communication has both facilitated and disrupted the traditional news media and the many publics or audiences for serious news and commentary throughout the world. The digital media – the Internet, personal computer, email, cell phones, bloggers and social web sites, Twitter, Facebook, and so on – have encroached on and reduced the journalism practiced by the great newspapers and journals, news services, and television and radio services that have historically reported the world to itself. News printed on paper or broadcast on television screens and radio receivers has been sharply diminished. The audiences have been diminished as well.

In this revised edition, we will show how the news media have responded to great crises as well as to technological changes. Journalists from everywhere flocked to the Middle East even as armed forces mobilized. But within months, media coverage and public interest in Iraq had diminished.

Only subsequent events and history will determine how significant the events will become in modern history. But there is no doubt that the year 1989 was historic. Then, the world watched on television in dazzled amazement as communist regimes were toppled in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself, after a right-wing coup failed, went through a convulsive revolution of its own, outlawing the Communist Party and its media as well as dismantling the Soviet Union itself. These historic events also heralded the end of the Cold War, and the demise of the propaganda or “information wars” that had enlivened international communication for forty-five years. However, new propaganda wars, now focused on terrorism and the relations of Muslim nations with the West, have gained momentum in recent years.

The post Cold War world of the 1990s proved to be a harsh and forbidding place. The forces of intense nationalism and unleashed ethnic animosities have led to civil wars, genocide, terrorism, political instability, and economic and social chaos starkly evident in the prolonged and agonizing strife engaging the Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims, Croatians, and Serbs of the former Yugoslavia. Elsewhere, various experiments in democracy and market economies sputtered and foundered.

The decade of the 1990s was also one of great global economic expansion. In China and throughout East and South Asia, economies grew at spectacular rates and world trade expanded as a new phenomenon, globalization, was recognized and elaborated. Globalization is an inexact expression for a wide array of worldwide changes in politics, communications, business and trade, life styles, and culture. Even before the quake Japan's economy has had severe problems. In our new post-Cold War world with its increasingly globalized economy, economic concerns have sometimes taken precedence over political concerns.

Elsewhere, over 120,000 innocent civilians died in an irrational six-year civil war in Algeria, a half dozen nations have fought a nasty and prolonged regional war over the Congo, genocide flared up again in Rwanda and Burundi, and in Israel bitter violence continued with the Palestinians; and North Korea's erratic and starving Communist regime, with its potential nuclear threat, has worried the West. Other global concerns: India and Pakistan have both tested nuclear devices but may have moved somewhat toward reconciliation. In the horrendous earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005, Indian soldiers joined Pakistani troops in relief efforts after 86,000 died. Peace and stability were tantalizingly near, but not fully realized, in Northern Ireland. The recent disastrous earthquakes in Haiti and Chile brought forth an unprecedented surge of relief funds and manpower to alleviate the great suffering that still continues.

Recently, as the world has worried over potential nuclear bomb threats in Iran and North Korea at the same time genocide has appeared in Sudan and has challenged the United Nations to intervene in the Darfur conflict, which has claimed over 180,000 lives and made 2 million people homeless refugees.

International communication in general has been affected by world events as it has continued to expand its reach. International broadcasting has become less propagandistic and more informative and entertainment-minded. In most countries, journalists have enjoyed greater access to news. New independent and outspoken publications and broadcast outlets have sprouted like mushrooms in spring. Communication satellites transmitting news and pop culture have proliferated, and media audiences have greatly expanded, especially in China and India.

Personalized digital media have proved to be a many headed hydra that has greatly increased the ability of people everywhere (and we mean everywhere) to receive news and comment AND to communicate it onward. But the old model of global communication based on a few great news organizations has been undermined and diminished. The downsizing of print and broadcast media have significance for global news communication. But the future of media is unclear – just as it was when Gutenberg's printing press shook up the middle ages.

Further, personalized media – videos, VCRs and DVDs, audiocassettes, personal computers, cell phones, and fax machines – have continued their rapid global penetration, as did cablevision and the Internet. Western Europe has been going through its own regional communication revolution, with transnational competition between commercial cable and satellite systems, as it moves haltingly toward economic integration.

The ongoing rush of technological innovations in foreign reporting has accelerated. Direct broadcasting from portable transmitters to satellites and then back to dish antennas – bypassing complicated, expensive ground installations – has become commonplace. Small portable earth terminals, for example, have enabled broadcast journalists reporting remote news events to send their video reports directly to satellites and thus to the whole world. The cell phone and the videophone have played unexpected roles in news dissemination. A news report in Afghanistan or, for that matter, in almost any faraway troubled area, can instantly become a global news event. In just a few years, the Internet has become a player of great and ominous potential in international communication for both journalism and as a device that lets people share ideas freely on a global network. Bloggers and even hackers have joined the fray as controversial conveyors of news and comment that critique and challenge traditional news media.

In this age of information, communications systems are at the leading edge of social, economic, and political change. With the unprecedented growth in global telecommunications, an informed global community has developed a more immediate concern with both world news and the symbiotic relationship between events and those who report them. For this eighth edition, the text has been thoroughly revised, with new material added to every chapter. More attention has been given to significant media developments in developing nations, particularly those in the Arab world – some of which have been producing many more media users who respond in different ways to the world news prism. The chapters on China and the Middle East provide in-depth analyses in the ways that digital media are changing traditional societies.

– W.A.H. and J.F.S.

Introduction

After years of global fretfulness about the brute effectiveness of modern armaments, it turned out during one of the most pervasively revolutionary years of the twentieth century, if not of all recorded history, that the most potent single weapon in nearly every conflict was the video camera. In nation after nation, vastly superior military forces were stood off and frequently compelled to retreat before the symbolic and testimonial power of televised images.

– William A. Henry III

As the tragic and war-stained twentieth century (and the old millennium) came to an end, we were reminded both of the changes as well as continuities that have marked journalism and international communications in our times. In 1900, all the elements were in place in Western nations – great metropolitan newspapers, rotary presses and linotypes, the typewriter, the telegraph and the undersea cable, the Associated Press, Reuters, and other cooperative news gatherers – as building blocks for the changes to come. News was recognized as a valued and useful commodity in itself and as an essential means of comprehending and coping with a strange and distant world. At the same time, sensationalism and trivia had long been standard fare in the press and entertainment media.

But no one could have foreseen the political and social changes to come in our tumultuous times as a result, in part, of the greatly enhanced speed, volume, and reach of international news and public knowledge. Journalists and broadcasters jetting about the globe with videocameras, Comsat phones, and laptop computers reported great events instantly via satellite and Internet networks and, in so doing, often became participants and catalysts in global news stories. Sometimes they became celebrities themselves.

For over a century, the press has reported news from abroad, but it has been only in the past three decades that we have seen how great events abroad vividly illustrate the technotronic age, the melding of technology and electronics, that planet Earth has entered. It is a new era of information whose potential we but dimly perceive; whose complicated gadgetry only few of us totally grasp; whose social, political, and economic consequences are accelerating change and cleavages among the nations of the world.