Journalism and Globalization

Like every other social practice, journalism cannot now fully be understood apart from globalization. As part of a larger platform of communication media, journalism contributes to this experience of the world-as-a-single-place and thus represents a key component in these social transformations, both as cause and outcome. These issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization define an important and growing field of research, particularly concerning the public sphere and spaces for political discourse. In this essay, I review this intersection of journalism and globalization by considering the communication field’s approach to ‘media globalization’ within a broader interdisciplinary perspective that mixes the sociology of globalization with aspects of geography and social anthropology. By placing the emphasis on social practices, elites, and specific geographical spaces, I introduce a less media-centric approach to media globalization and how journalism fits into the process. Beyond ‘global village journalism,’ this perspective captures the changes globalization has brought to journalism. Like every other social practice, journalism cannot now fully be understood apart from globalization. This process refers to the intensification of social interconnections, which allows apprehending the world as a single place, creating a greater awareness of our own place and its relative location within the range of world experience. As part of a larger platform of communication media, journalism contributes to this experience and thus represents a key component in these social transformations, both as cause and outcome. These issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization define an important and growing field of research, particularly concerning the public sphere and spaces for political discourse. The study of globalization has become a fashionable growth industry, attracting an interdisciplinary assortment of scholars. Journalism, meanwhile, itself has become an important subject in its own right within media studies, with a growing number of projects taking an international perspective (reviewed in Reese 2009). Combining the two areas yields a complex subject that requires some careful sorting out to get beyond the jargon and the easy country–by-country case studies. From the globalization studies side, the media role often seems like an afterthought, a residual category of social change, or a self-evident symbol of the global era–CNN, for example. Indeed, globalization research has been slower to consider the changing role of journalism, compared to the attention devoted to financial and entertainment flows. That may be expected, given that economic and cultural globalization is further along than that of politics, and journalism has always been closely tied to democratic structures, many of which are inherently rooted in local communities. The media-centrism of communication research, on the other hand, may give the media—and the journalism associated with them—too much credit in the globalization process, treating certain media as the primary driver of global connections and the proper object of study. Global connections support new forms of journalism, which create politically significant new spaces within social systems, lead to social change, and privilege certain forms Sociology Compass 4/6 (2010): 344–353, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2010.00282.x a 2010 The Author Journal Compilation a 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd of power. Therefore, we want to know how journalism has contributed to these new spaces, bringing together new combinations of transnational élites, media professionals, and citizens. To what extent are these interactions shaped by a globally consistent shared logic, and what are the consequences for social change and democratic values? Here, however, the discussion often gets reduced to whether a cultural homogenization is taking place, supporting a ‘McWorld’ thesis of a unitary media and journalistic form. But we do not have to subscribe to a one-world media monolith prediction to expect certain transnational logics to emerge to take their place along side existing ones. Journalism at its best contributes to social transparency, which is at the heart of the globalization optimists’ hopes for democracy (e.g. Giddens 2000). The insertion of these new logics into national communities, especially those closed or tightly controlled societies, can bring an important impulse for social change (seen in a number of case studies from China, as in Reese and Dai 2009). In this essay, I will review a few of the issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization and consider a more nuanced view of media within a broader network of actors, particularly in the case of journalism as it helps create emerging spaces for public affairs discourse. Understanding the complex interplay of the global and local requires an interdisciplinary perspective, mixing the sociology of globalization with aspects of geography and social anthropology. This helps avoid equating certain emerging global news forms with a new and distinct public sphere. The globalization of journalism occurs through a multitude of levels, relationships, social actors, and places, as they combine to create new public spaces. Communication research may bring journalism properly to the fore, but it must be considered within the insights into places and relationships provided by these other disciplines. Before addressing these questions, it is helpful to consider how journalism has figured into some larger debates. Media Globalization: Issues of Scale and Homogeneity One major fault line lies within the broader context of ‘media,’ where journalism has been seen as providing flows of information and transnational connections. That makes it a key factor in the phenomenon of ‘media globalization.’ McLuhan gave us the enduring image of the ‘global village,’ a quasi-utopian idea that has seeped into such theorizing about the contribution of media. The metaphor brings expectations of an extensive, unitary community, with a corresponding set of universal, global values, undistorted by parochial interests and propaganda. The interaction of world media systems, however, has not as of yet yielded the kind of transnational media and programs that would support such ‘village’-worthy content (Ferguson 1992; Sparks 2007). In fact, many of the communication barriers show no signs of coming down, with many specialized enclaves becoming stronger. In this respect, changes in media reflect the larger crux of globalization that it simultaneously facilitates certain ‘monoculture’ global standards along with the proliferation of a host of micro-communities that were not possible before. In a somewhat analogous example, the global wine trade has led to convergent trends in internationally desirable tastes but also allowed a number of specialized local wineries to survive and flourish through the ability to reach global markets. The very concept of ‘media globalization’ suggests that we are not quite sure if media lead to globalization or are themselves the result of it. In any case, giving the media a privileged place in shaping a globalized future has led to high expectations for international journalism, satellite television, and other media to provide a workable global public sphere, making them an easy target if they come up short. In his book, Media globalization Journalism and Globalization 345 a 2010 The Author Sociology Compass 4/6 (2010): 344–353, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2010.00282.x Journal Compilation a 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd myth, Kai Hafez (2007) provides that kind of attack. Certainly, much of the discussion has suffered from overly optimistic and under-conceptualized research, with global media technology being a ‘necessary but not sufficient condition for global communication.’ (p. 2) Few truly transnational media forms have emerged that have a more supranational than national allegiance (among newspapers, the International Herald Tribune, Wall St. Journal Europe, Financial Times), and among transnational media even CNN does not present a single version to the world, split as it is into various linguistic viewer zones. Defining cross-border communication as the ‘core phenomenon’ of globalization leads to comparing intrato inter-national communication as the key indicator of globalization. For example, Hafez rejects the internet as a global system of communication, because global connectivity does not exceed local and regional connections. With that as a standard, we may indeed conclude that media globalization has failed to produce true transnational media platforms or dialogs across boundaries. Rather a combination of linguistic and digital divides, along with enduring regional preferences, actually reinforces some boundaries. (The wishful thinking for a global media may be tracked to highly mobile Western scholars, who in Hafez’s ‘hotel thesis’ overestimate the role of such transnational media, because they are available to them in their narrow and privileged travel circles.) Certainly, the foreign news most people receive, even about big international events, is domesticated through the national journalistic lens. Indeed, international reporting, as a key component of the would-be global public sphere, flunks Hafez’s ‘global test,’ incurring the same criticisms others have leveled for years at national journalism: elite-focused, conflictual, and sensational, with a narrow, parochial emphasis. If ‘global’ means giving ‘dialogic’ voices a chance to speak to each other without reproducing national ethnocentrism, then the world’s media still fail to measure up. Conceptualizing the ‘Global’ For many, ‘global’ means big. That goes too for the global village perspective, which emphasizes the scaling dimension and equates the global with ‘bigness,’ part of a nested hierarchy of levels of analysis based on size: beyond local, regional, and nationa