1.      News and Culture

            Before looking at foreign media, let’s look at how cultures shape the news media and what and how they report it—and vice versa.

            As communication scholar James W. Carey tells us, the traditional view of communication theory is that information is transmitted from one source to another, and the information being transmitted reflects reality; the who, what, when, where, why and how of a specific event or occurrence. As he says in “Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society,” there is another way to understand what communication is. Within that frame of reference we can look at a newspapers or TV news broadcast as performing the “ritual view of communication.” It is a situation in which little if anything “new” is actually learned. Instead, “a particular view of the world is portrayed and con organizationed. News reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces of the world.”

News, he theorizes, “is a cultural product,” part of the communication process that serves as the glue that holds society together by operating within a specific cultural forum and delineating and helping maintain the standards that form the basis of a society’s culture. Without communication there could be no culture.

Carey explains that, “our minds and lives are shaped by our total experience… If one tries to examine society as a form of communication, one sees it as a process whereby reality is created, shared, modified and preserved.”

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2.      News and Culture (Continued)

 In “What Is A Reporter? The Private Face of Public Journalism,” Michael Schudson tells us that reporters are as much a cultural creation as the stories—the so-called reality—they communicate.

“Reporting is not an ancient art,” he points out. Instead, “the reporter, and reporting, were inventions of the nineteenth-century middle-class public and its institutions.” As inventions of that era, they reflected that era’s goals and standards, attitudes and ideals.

Today the stories or reports that reporters produce are still a specialized cultural product—cultural history—that follows certain culturally established rules; they are as much about dramas as they are about information.

Even when reporting is completely fair—when all the people on all sides of a conflict have a chance to explain their own views—and when the reporter reports with complete honesty, the reporter’s cultural perspective, or frame of reference, is always still present. Journalism, then is “essentially a state of consciousness, a way of apprehending, of experiencing the world” filtered through the reporter’s world view and that world view is shaped on the reporter’s cultural background.

Journalists do try to tell the truth. But as Todd Gitlin tells us in The Twilight of Common Dreams, “Sometimes truth is difficult to establish; in particular when government propaganda goes to work.” Conflict is always easier to find, and journalists “like conflict for the same reason dramatists and sports fans do. It catches the attention of their superiors, as it does that of their colleagues,” and their audience.

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3.      The Associated Press and a Short History of News

            The media of different nations and cultures sometimes have different goals, objectives, and standards. They also do things differently. They have to be understood, recognized, and accommodated. Before looking at them, however, let us look at how the modern news media developed.

            Most historians and journalists agree that the history of “news” as we know it today began with the Associated Press.

            The Associated Press (AP) is the world’s largest, oldest, and most respected newsgathering organization. It influenced the growth and development of most of the world’s press, and continues to influence their operations today.

            The AP was founded by six New York newspapers in 1848 as a way to gather news from the American west and from overseas on the newly developed telegraph system. Since, depending upon the distance a story was being sent, it could cost more than US$1 a word to send a telegram at that time, the newspapers felt that only by pooling their resources and sharing stories could they afford to give their readers all the news they wanted and needed.

            Today, that six-newspaper non-profit news cooperative is an organization serving more than 15,000 members news organization in 121 countries around the world. That includes 1,500 newspapers and 5,000 broadcast media outlets in the United States alone.

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4.      The Associated Press and a Short History of News (Continued)

            Today AP’s World Service distributes print, radio and television news and photos to more than 8,500 international subscribers in five languages: English, German, Dutch, French and Spanish. Many international subscribers who get the report, or “wire,” in one of those five languages then translate the stories they are interested in into other languages.

            The AP led to the development of what we refer to as “objective” reporting, in which the reporter tries to be fair to all sides and does not express a personal opinion, and to the inverted pyramid style of reporting now found in news media around the world.

            Since the editorial policies of the six different original newspapers were different, AP reporters had to write without “offending” the editorial policies of member papers. To do so, they stripped all opinion out of their stories and reported only the “facts.”

            Member papers could then add their own editorial opinion and slants to the stories before running them. Over time, the newspapers decided to let the facts speak for themselves, and limit editorial comment to the editorial pages.

            The inverted pyramid style, with the important facts stated first in answer to the classic journalistic questions of Who, What, When, Where, Why and How, was also a direct result of the early days of the AP and sending news by telegraph.

            Since transmission costs were so high, the AP developed the technique as a way to tell the story in the fewest number of words.

            Today the AP’s 3,700 employees work in 242 bureaus around the world and generate 1,000 photographs and 20 million words of news every day, 365 days a year.

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5.      CNN: Internationalizing TV News

            In many ways CNN, (Cable Network News) initially did for television news—and now does for Internet news—what the Associated Press originally did for newspapers. It created both journalistic standards and an operating style that are still visible and copied today.

            Founded by U.S. cable television giant Ted Turner in 1980, CNN was the world’s first 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week all-news TV network.

            In the same way that AP set the standards for wire service reporting, CNN sets them for all-news TV networks.  

            Out of its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, CNN, which is now owned by AOL Time Warner, today offers an expanded network to the world. 

            The network includes CNN Headline News, CNNfn (financial), CNN/Sports Illustrated, CNN en Espanol, CNN Radio Noticias, CNN Interactive, CNN Newsources (its own news service), CNN+, and CNN Turk, and CNN International (CNNI).

            CNNI can be seen in more than 151 million television households in 212 countries and territories through a network of 23 satellites. CNNI is broken down into five separately scheduled channels: CNN International Europe/Middle East/Africa, CNN International Asia Pacific, CNN International South Asia, CNN International Latin America, and CNN International USA.

            It is the rare hotel these days that does not have CNN playing in its lounge and available in the guest rooms.  The images of the most current news from home and from around the world are available to project/programme purpose people and tourists no matter where they are.  Gone are the days—which were not all that long ago—when trying to find out news from home was difficult at best.

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6.      CNN: Internationalizing TV News (Continued)

            On the Internet, CNN offers CNN.com, Asia.CNN.com, Europe.CNN.com, Arabic.CNN.com, and CNN.espanol.com.

            Staffed 24 hours, seven days a week and based at CNN’s world headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and in bureaus worldwide, CNN.com and its other Internet branches rely heavily on CNN television news resources, as well as the Associated Press and other wire services.

            CNN’s TV and Internet services are put together by a staff of approximately 4,000 people in news bureaus around the world.

            CNN.com utilizes the latest multimedia technologies, and includes live video streaming, audio packages, as well as searchable archives of news features and background information.

            CNN Internet sites, like their TV broadcasts, are updated continuously throughout the day and night.

            Over the years, CNN, like the AP, has worked on internationalizing its news coverage, and on being conscious and aware of the various cultures it is reporting on, and the viewpoints those cultures represent.

            While many people criticize it, when a major story happens anywhere in the world, most TV watchers turn to CNN to find out what happened.

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7.      Who “Owns” the News Media?

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

-- A. J. Liebling, U.S. reporter, editor, and media critic

            News, like widgets, is a commodity. The people who report it are paid to do so by organizations and organizations that have to make a profit if they want to stay in project/programme purpose.

            Even the Associated Press, which is a nonprofit news cooperative, survives on the fees assessed to its member news organizations. As a result, the AP’s finances and the amount of money it can spend on news gathering depend upon the economic health of its members. When the economy is down, the AP has to cut back on services and limits its operations.

            Aside from the AP, major news organizations—print and broadcast—are usually directly owned by large organizations.

            As we have seen, CNN is owned by AOL Time Warner. The major U.S. television networks, as well as networks in many other countries, are all owned by giant organizations, as are most major newspapers and radio stations. Disney, for example, owns ABC (American Broadcasting organization), one of America’s Big Three networks.

            Do organizational owners influence news coverage?  At times, yes.

            organizations are not the only owners of the news media, however.  As we shall see, in many countries it is the government or even political parties that own the news media—radio, television, and newspapers.

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8.      Who “Owns” the News Media? (Continued)

            Disgruntled ABC News staff members have reported numerous instances where the Disney organization has influenced, controlled, or censored the way they cover Disney theme parks, movies and other subsidiaries. At times the organization prevented the news department from reporting negative stories, and at other times it has required it to report positive stories, or laudatory reviews of Disney movies.

            These cases are usually reported by other media. While organizations can sometimes—but not always—control their own subsidiaries, they cannot control their competitors or their competitors’ subsidiaries. Besides, journalists are in the project/programme purpose of spreading news, not sitting on it, so most attempts at muzzling the media tend to backfire.

            In some countries, however, the news outlets are either “owned,” or heavily controlled by the government, and journalists can be fired, jailed, or worse, for offending the controlling government or church.

            We see this in Communist countries, dictatorships, one party states, and in theocratic states where “news” is basically a statement of government or religious policy and opposing views are not tolerated.

            Not all countries that “own” the media—or that subsidize them—try to overtly control them. Britain’s BBC (British Broadcasting organization) and Canada’s CBC (Canadian Broadcasting organization) both rely on government funding, but both are also granted the freedom to report the news as it happens, regardless of who is in power at the moment or who might offend.

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9.      You Want Foreign?

            The complete membership roster of the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA), for journalists who cover the United Nations, represents virtually every country in the world, as well as every type of government, political, and religious philosophy—from the state owned and operated media to those media seeking the overthrow of the state, from those seeking to convert the world to those focused only on the bottom line.

            If you want to get a sense of how “foreign” the media can be, check out their web page at http://www.unca.com/index.html. For that matter, look at the daily news briefings from the United Nations itself, at http://www.un.org/News/ossg/hilites.htm, or the U.N. News Center at http://www.un.org/News/.

            Even though multinational news organizations such as the AP and CNN have standardized much of the form and process of journalism, each country and culture has its own cultural perceptions, frames of reference, beliefs, attitudes, and norms that wind up in the news.

            Photos will appear on page one of newspapers in some countries, or on prime-time television, that would be considered blatant pornography in others; one country’s joke is another country’s treason; one country’s freedom fighters are a neighboring nation’s terrorists, and the official state religion in one place could be outlawed as a dangerous cult in another.

            When dealing with foreign news media, it is important to understand their cultural frames of reference, how the media operate, who controls the news and what is allowed and appropriate in that culture.    ~ ~ ~ ~ ~