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RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social 64 - 2009 |
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Edita: LAboratorio de Tecnologías de la Información y
Nuevos Análisis de Comunicación Social |
| Investigación
– How to cite – referees' reports – agenda – metadaas – PDF – Creative Commons Localization of international news in a global world Dr. Rafael Díaz Arias [C.V.] - Professor of the Department of Journalism II - Faculty of Information Sciences - Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) - Spain - diaz.r@ccinf.ucm.es Abstract: This paper discusses the ways in which the events that establish our image of the world are localized. It analyzes scientific literature with regards to the influence of international structure on foreign information and the tension between local and national information, as well as the coordination of these elements in the process of globalization. It proposes four categories to approach foreign information: international information (relations between states, war, diplomacy, international organizations); transnational information (international economic relations, transnational corporations); global (the problems of an interdependent world); and “glocal” (news and stories that are taken out of context and serve as a vehicle for cultural homogenization). These categories are applied in the empirical analysis of the broadcasting of TVE, the public Spanish TV channel. The results show that, in this case, the classical international information category has already been overtaken by other categories of foreign news, with a significant presence of “glocal” news, very much in line with “neo-television”. Keywords: Foreign news; Globalization, Glocalization, Local news, National news. Summary: 1. Introduction. 2. Localization of news: national, international, transnational, global and glocal news. 3. Methodology. 3.1. Sample. 3.2. Procedure. 4. Results. 5. Conclusions. 6. Bibliography. 7. Notes. Translation supervised by David Eatwell, professor of the British Institute (Sevilla) 1. Introduction Is anybody interested on foreign news? asked in the old television sitcom Lou Grant the chief of the international section of that topical and idealized local newspaper... The tension between the local, the near, what is ours, and the foreign, the distant, is one of the vectors of the development of journalism. The reader, the listener, the viewer, worried about what concerns him most directly, has also always been curious about what is different and remote. Furthermore, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the relations between countries through diplomacy and war weighed heavily on the lives of citizens. Classically, the international information was configured as the information on those relations between nations, which was sporadically joined by the visions of other lands and countries presented as something different, as an object of comparison (if the opinions came from countries with a similar level of development) or paternalistic surprise (if it was from less civilized places). In this sense, the international information was essentially political information. Today, however, just a look to any television news programme suffices to prove that the presence of foreign news is no longer of a political nature. The purpose of this paper is to study how information is located in television news programmes, based on a review of scientific literature to establish categories of analysis that will be applied to a specific case study. 2. Localization of information Since 1965 the pioneering study by Galtung and Ruge made clear the influence on the international information of the structure of the global system, much more complex than the relations between sovereign states. This global system is based, according to Galtung (1971), on the structural domination of some nations over others, with a dominant centre and a periphery associated, a centre that governs the peripheral countries, and with dominant elites in the centre and periphery, which establish direct relations between them. Schiller (1976) showed the role of domination of cultural production and international communication structures, which opened a new school of thought followed by many others like Armand Mattelart and Ignacio Ramonet. The 1980s debate about the New World Information Order showed imbalances in the information flows between centre and periphery, highlighting the role of international agencies in such imbalances. The critical schools of thought consider the economic transnationalization as the critical factor in the global integration process, in which companies impose world markets of raw materials and products in the name of economic efficiency, consumer satisfaction, and the capital benefit. For Murciano (1992: 71) “...multinational enterprises contribute directly to the modification and restructuring of the cultural values of the global system, through the introduction of dynamics at the different levels –local, national and supranational– that vertebrates the transnational space they shape”. For a rebalancing of the communicative relations, Hamelink (1994: 284-318) proposes the development of a universal right to communicate. The global system is characterized by an unprecedented degree of integration, which is identified with the concept of globalization, a concept referring to the expansion in the scale and speed of flows of capital, goods, people and ideas across borders which results in the reduction of the effect of distance (Norris, 1999: 1). Based on the synthetic characterization of Murciano (1994) we can distinguish the following processes of integration into the global system:
These integration processes occur in a world with a hegemonic military power, the US, but where economic power is multipolar. The nations maintain their traditional bilateral relations, but increasingly these relationships develop in broader multilateral frameworks. If the political universalization or globalization is very incipient, the cultural globalization is increasing and has become the most visible dimension of the phenomenon. Coca-Cola, Madonna or the CNN can be regarded as some of its public symbols (Held et al. 1999: 327). This globalization brings homogenization, but also tribalization:
Communication is the nexus of flexible articulation between the dynamics of the local, the national, the regional, and the global (Murciano, 1994). It has been television, with its abolition of spaces and borders, which has created a common information environment. For Beck (2003: 22) is as if all individuals simultaneously occupy the same indivisible space, consuming all together at the same time the same news of the world. This assertion is supported, from a practical viewpoint, by the fact that the world’s audiovisual information comes almost exclusively from only two sources, the television divisions of the two Anglo-Saxons giants, Reuters and AP. Importantly, it should be highlighted the enormous weight that the purely national information retains and the differential local treatment given to such homogenous information provided by these sources. In this world, in which the local, regional, national, and multinational areas constantly interrelate, it is impossible to approach the information on current events from the classic local-international dichotomy (Colombo, 1997: 12-18). Local news (including among them the national news) are meaningless if they are not related to global processes; one of the clearest cases is the migration processes. Colombo, from a professional perspective, proposes to put local events within a global context. In the scientific doctrine, the analysis of the informative tension between local and global has resulted in two strands (Ruigrok and Atteveldt, 2007: 69): those who believe that Habermas’s national public sphere has been replaced by McLuhan’s global village and, therefore, the issues and news are the same everywhere, against those who argue that the worldview constructed by the media continues to pass through the filter of national interests and stereotypes. There are plenty of empirical studies on the importance of local-national factors over global one [1]. These Studies have presented mixed results, but have generally highlighted the importance of the local approach. National interests remain crucial in the treatment of international information: the more national an event is, that is the more it affects national interests, the less independent and professional the treatment it gets (Nossek, 2004). Ruigrok and Atteveldt (2007) studied the treatment of September 11 and the consecutive string of terrorist attacks in the national press of the US, the UK and Holland and concluded that, although proximity is still an important factor worth of attention, the treatment was determined more by global rather than by local considerations. The national interests and the foreign policy towards a particular country, in combination with more permanent social stereotypes, are important factors in the treatment given to foreign countries. Kalyango (2006) analyzed the treatment of Uganda in the New York Times in two periods, the Idi Amin and Museveni. During the first period, 97.7% of the news showed a tyrannical regime. In the nineties, during Museveni’s government, 90% of the news continued presenting negative aspects of the country, with frequent references to Amin’s government, regardless, Kalyango says, of the progress in democratization, economic development, and the fight against AIDS. Furthermore, the number of news items was reduced, even though the direct coverage was much more difficult during Amin’s regime. For my part I would add that this case may demonstrate the maintenance of prejudice or, if you will, a certain biased journalistic independence, above the country's own strategic interests, because during the period examined Museveni became the main African ally of the US, the model proposed by Washington to other African leaders and their spearheaded in conflicts such as the Great Lakes, which the US and France tried to resolve to establish spheres of influence in the forgotten continent. We can therefore accept, in view of all these studies, that both classical international information and the information on the new global issues are filtered by local visions and conditions. But the local conditioning goes beyond this. The global world is right now more and more tribal and consequently there is a process of informative hyper-localism, through the traditional proximity media (free newspapers, local radio and television) and especially through the Internet. From this perspective, all information is local and in an interdependent world, where borders are permeable, the broadcaster will integrate the foreign events in the information of proximity, even travelling to other countries to illustrate the effects foreign events can have on local communities (Hamilton & Jenner, 2004: 306). Hyper-local information absorbs news from any other area. Without denying that there exist the tendency towards the hyper-localization, I think the so-called process of glocalization is even more influential because it affects all media, regardless of their area of coverage. Robertson (1995) was the first to apply the concept of glocalization to the social sciences. He borrowed the term from the Japanese marketing that used the term to denote the process by which export products must be tailored to the local markets to which they are intended. Overall, glocalization is the process by which, in an interdependent world, the local becomes global and the global, local (Thompson and Arsel, 2004). In this sense, proponents of the concept present it as an alternative to globalization, an explanation for the latter, or an alternative to the global-local dichotomy. From the informative viewpoint, glocalization refers to the adaptation of news of global reach to the local conditions; this is “to locate”, to approximate, to make news close to make them more interesting and understandable for the viewer. The glocal is the global “focused” from a local perspective. Historically, journalism has tried to explain distant events through familiar concepts, codes and realities. So we “glocalize” when we speak of the war in Lebanon and say “this small country has an area slightly larger than that of the Community of Madrid”, or delve into the impact of a distant event in our environment through complementary reports, chronologies or recaps, and in-depth expert analysis. A special case of localization of the distant is the “nationalization” of certain international issues. For example, in Spain all news related to Cuba, with a polarized public opinion in favour or against the Castro regime, are presented from a perspective more similar to the lines of national than international information. Glocalization also creates new informative products. The cultural globalization has led to a homogenization, where the dominant culture, the mass culture promoted by American and European conglomerates, penetrates local cultures [2]. From this asymmetric interaction arise hybrid products capable of being universally consumed because they respond to common codes (e.g. of thrill, shock, and entertain). The local becomes, in this way, universal. Glocalized information comes to resolve the tension between local and universal; is a homogeneous product that can appeal to different audiences with very different emotional attachments to, following Norris’s classification, a country, territory or community, cosmopolitan, nationalist or provincial publics. Let’s consider some examples. Hemingway transformed the local festival of the Sanfermines into a universal event, transmuted into the “Fiesta” par excellence. In this process, the local codes (the orgy, the abolition of the rules, the religious ritual, the challenge of the bullman, pop music etc.) were mystified and universalized, but remain clearly present and identifiable. In contrast, the Tomatina, the tomato fight festival of the town of Buñol, is an example of the new glocal party. La Tomatina does not go back to the dawn of time. During the celebrations of this Valencian village in 1944, a group of youths threw tomatoes to the police and the following year this peculiar event was repeated and soon the event became more and more popular and massive in successive annual editions, thanks to the local farmers who gave away the raw material for the battle. Today the tomatina is possibly the best-known Spanish party abroad, apart from the Sanfermines. Every last Wednesday of August the battle is repeated. National and regional television channels broadcast the pictures and the international agencies distribute them to their subscribers and thousands of channels across the world make these images available to millions of viewers. What is the secret? The orgiastic plasticity of this crowd, soaked in the tomato red pulp, is based on a visual code that is not very different from the mud fighting so popular among northern Americans. If the tomatina proposes the orgiastic joy, the Holy Week in Mexico, Peru and the Philippines proposes the morbid enjoyment of the cruel crucifixion. All of these are glocal events, where the national reference does not exist or is irrelevant. It is clear that advertising is one of the key channels for cultural homogenization. Billboards and commercial spots propose aesthetic codes and common values. Here is worth examining a specific case of glocalization. The beer brand San Miguel for several seasons based its advertising strategy in the slogan “where it goes, it triumphs”. It was aimed to show the success of the brand in international markets, to position the product among the domestic consumer as an international Spanish product. In one of the first spots, the beer took some glocalized Sanfermines to New York, where buffalos replaced bulls. Then, the advertisers made an African tribe to prepare paella. And finally, in a fusion of codes, characters of the most diverse cultures danced the march of “Paquito, the chocolatier” (a popular Spanish march) with a Bollywood aesthetic. This is a real lesson in glocalization. Another example of glocalization is the export of television formats, from Big Brother) to Cuéntame como pasó (Tell me how it happened, a sitcom that tells the history of a family during the Spanish transition, that has been adapted in Portugal, Italy and Greece). In the field of global media, Al Jazeera is another case of adapting international codes of informative independence and reliability to the context of the Arab umma (Miles, 2005), with a Back and forth process: Al Jazeera now proposes an Arab vision since the independence to the global audience through its new versions in English (Vázquez, 2007). As a consequence of this, this analysis must take into consideration the glocal news, vehicle for the homogenization of culture and popular stereotypes. The glocal information universalizes the local icons, the icons of tribalism and turns them into banal and common heritage. This is in definitive an example of what Beck (2003: 22) has termed “banal cosmopolitanism”, and as such does not threaten the primacy of national cultures, especially in the political sphere (Held, McGrew, 2007: 32). 3. Methodology As part of a larger study on the world image constructed by foreign news this study analyzes the localization of this informative category on the news programmes of TVE. This is a case study that nonetheless can be generalizable in the light of Soengas’s research (2007), which has demonstrated the high degree of homogeneity in the selection of information by the news programmes of the Spanish mainstream television networks, TVE, Antena 3 and Telecinco in 2003 (87% of thematic coincidence) and 2006 (83% thematic coincidence), coincidence that is largely explained by the prevailing routines in the audiovisual newsroom. It is clear, however, that the present analysis does not aim to draw certain conclusions that can be valid for all of the Spanish television networks, much less for any other television network. If anything, the findings will provide hypotheses to be tested in further investigations. The object of study is the foreign news in the world of daily news programmes in TVE and the method used is content analysis. 3.1. Sample Why choosing the daily TV news? Telediarios, noticieros, the daily newscast, the news programme is the paradigm of information on current events in television (Díaz Arias, 2006: 257). This is a supra-story that gives meaning to the fragmentation of information and tries to set the news agenda of the day from the most significant and/or audiovisual images and testimonies. Why public television? Why TVE? The public network, affected by competition from private broadcasters, may have lost the leadership of audience ratings, but is remains as the audiovisual medium byword. In regards to foreign news, Spanish studies (León, 2006; Soengas, 2005) show a greater presence in the news programmes when compared to the rival private networks (Pestano, 2008, gives a ratio of 1:2 for foreign news). Above all, the two factors that seem most relevant to focus this study to TVE are the large network of correspondents and its national-global television character, being the news programmes of the Canal Internacional of great reference in Latin America. The sample chosen corresponds to 7 continuous days selected randomly. The only requirement was that no event, in its various presentations, would capture over 30% of the transmission. Such condition was verified in the period chosen, between 1 and 7 November 2006, and no event (and there were some very prominent as the Catalan elections) captured more than a third of the programme. 3.2. Procedure But in the long term, natural disasters or certain wars, certain countries or people (not so much due to their personality, but their function) will be present and their informative treatment will be alike. Seven days, 14 news programmes (1st and 2nd editions of the newscast), 10 hours of television, are proof enough to reveal these trends, with the exception that the results will be significant only with greater representation, which will indicate trends, but not those of episodic representation. For the purposes of this work, foreign news are understood as those news whose geographical area of reference is not exclusively Spain, that is, information not strictly national. The analysis excludes all sports information (which would require a separate study to establish what is the image of the world constructed by this type of specialized information), although time and the number of items devoted to sports are recorded in the general data of the sample. Particularly, the news to analyse will have to meet to some of these conditions:
The unit of analysis is the news item, which is understood as the differentiated piece of information, whatever its format (presentation in studio, edited video, presentation in studio covered with video, live) or their function within the news programme (informative or evaluative through headlines and summaries). The differentiation is given by a formal break through any type of transition. * Category - International - Transnational - Global - Glocal 4. Results
GRAPH 1 – Localization by items
GRAPH 2 - Localization by times
In the categories relating to localization, we see that the difference between times and number of items is almost irrelevant. This is because there is less dispersion when dealing with only four variables. But nevertheless, the slightly shorter duration of glocal and transnational information indicates a more episodic treatment of these events. 45% of all the information about the world continues to be international news, as traditionally understood. But this means that already more than half of the news of the world has other references. The problems of the interdependent world, the global information, are represented in one third of the information while the glocal information is way below, with just about half of representations achieved by the global information. Transnational information ranks in last place (in this study almost exclusively relating to merger of transnational companies). These data can be applied to the sample of TV news programmes, keeping in mind that foreign news accounted for 28.4% of the duration of the 14 programmes.
According to data from this table, the percentage devoted to classic foreign information in the sample of public TV news programmes is 13%, a result consistent with other studies, such as Soengas’s (2005). At this group level, the presence of global issues seems important while in contrast, transnational news are not significant. Regarding glocal information, we should note that this category also appears well represented in purely national news, for example through festive or anecdotal events. In large measure, these glocal news, overlap with issues of the international society. The data are consistent with the study of Pestano (2008), who noted that in TVE there is a 6% of information on international policy and 15% of information on international society. The characterization offered by these categories can be supplemented with the topics covered in the news analyzed, as shown in Table 3 and Graph 3.
GRAPH 3 - Time by topics
The thematic reveals an image of the world ravaged by war, internal and cultural conflicts (both with little representation, but added to the representation of war) and international terrorism. By number of items the international terrorism surpasses the domestic policies of foreign countries, but not by time, which indicates that the treatment of terrorism is more episodic (isolated acts, arrests, trials), while the treatment of domestic politics, less frequent, is in contrast more in-depth. Domestic policy and diplomacy are well represented in number of items and time, followed by the economy. In the case of diplomacy, the result is explained by the celebration of the Ibero-American Summit, but throughout one year the result may be coherent, if we take into consideration the European summits. It is interesting the total absence of issues related to the EU. Of all the major themes of interdependence, the only one that stands out is migration, followed by global warming, but the representation of the latter is even lower than crime. The analysis can be completed with a classification of topics by their localization, as shown in Table 4.
The table shows how the relative predominance of international information is given by the constant presence of information concerning war or terrorism. The two more frequent stories are the Israeli punishment operation against Gaza “Autumn Clouds” (23) and Saddam Hussein condemned to be hanged (20). The information on the interdependent world, the global information is mostly concentrated on issues of global warming and migration. In the case of transnational information the main subject is the merger of multinational energy companies. And in the case of glocal information, by its very nature there is a great thematic diversity, with such news as “professional debtors” (5), “Spanish chefs in California” (4), “Latin GRAMMY Awards” (4), “rape of a girl detected in internet” (3),”White House in France” (2), “the business of religion in the US” (2), “human and cow embryos” (2), “American churches against overweight” (2), “horses isolated by the floods in the Netherlands” (2), “iceberg” (2), “report on sexual practices” (2), “funeral rituals in Hong Kong” (2), “convicted for rape and murder” (1), “counterfeiting of euros” (1), “golf on the moon” (1), “floods in Portugal” (1), “AIDS in Central America” (1), “tornado in Japan” (1) “Floods in Turkey” (1). These are all news without antecedents or consequences, sold by their own image or the weirdness of the subject, and in most cases presented in a friendly manner. 5. Conclusions Information about the world occupies almost a third of the time the of the news programmes in the Spanish public television. The fact that about two thirds of the information have a strictly national approach is no surprising and confirms the predominance of a national culture. Importantly, this is a national culture in which the viewer also has access to a wide representation of what happens outside Spain. The percentage of information about the world can be considered, overall, as appropriate for the public service mission of TVE and consistent with its wide array of correspondents. The classic international information is still the main shaper of the image of the world and represents 13% of broadcasting time of the TV news shows of the public network. But half the information about the world no longer only has as a reference the relations between nations or the political situation within their borders of these states. Information on global interdependence is the second place, whereas the third place is occupied by new glocal information, a characteristic product of the neo-television and fruits of the homogenization of cultural codes. As for the transnational information, it ranks fourth and its presence in the sample of TV news programmes is minimal. The classic international information is dominated by war and international terrorism - phenomena that cannot be overemphasized. In the Spanish case, since September 11 the public opinion perceives international terrorism as a real threat, while the wars represented, the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are perceived as alien. I believe that TVE fulfils its public service mission to report these conflicts, which affect the world we live beyond the particular perception of the audience. In the global information the most prominent theme is the phenomenon of immigration. The predominance of this subject means that globalization is represented in a threatening manner. Moreover, the crucial issues of globalization, such as the environment, global warming, and international cooperation, are much less represented. In this sense, one can say that public television provides a picture of the world that does not allow a full understanding of the processes of globalization. The treatment of glocal information is always friendly and about places presented out of context. War, international terrorism, and immigration involve processes, flows, and interrelationships. Instead, the glocal anecdotes are presented statically. The conclusion might be that a dynamic world is dangerous for us, whereas if the world is static, without exchanges between nations, groups or individuals, the threat disappears and television allows us to travel to those places, for the purposes of fun, surprise or compassionate emotion that rarely becomes real solidarity. Spanish public television is not free from the phenomena of the neo-television. Scholars of globalization and especially those belonging to the critical school, agree that transnational corporations are at the forefront of this globalization. In the case studied that information is minimal. This means that public television addresses very poorly the economic phenomena that constitute globalization, without which broadly represented themes such as immigration cannot be understood. These findings point to a common perversion in the media: not going back to the causes of events. It must be said, however, that from an audiovisual standpoint it is difficult to represent movements that hardly have any visibility, unless they take place in a conflictive manner like protests caused by industrial delocalizations, or, as it has been the case in the sample studied, mergers of transnational corporations, issues treated also very episodically. Hypothesis 1 - Prevalence of information of strictly national nature. The information of national nature is predominant. If the information about the world were below 20% this would indicate that the national approach becomes nationalist or provincial. Hypothesis 2 - Relative decline of classic international information. The classic international information still has a decisive influence in the ways of representing the world, but shows a steady decline in favour of the information of global, glocal, and transnational nature. Hypothesis 3 - Glocal information is booming. Glocal television would be more present in the private than public television networks, but both types would have a steady growth. Hypothesis 4 – Irrelevance of transnational information. Low presence of information about transnational economic corporations and institutions, financial flows, and economic interdependence. 6. Bibliography Beck, U. (2002): “The cosmopolitan society and its enemies”. Theory, Culture & Society 19 (1), pp. 17-44. 7. Notes [1] For a summary see Nossek (2004: 346). [2] The cultural colonization is not confined to southern countries. The high cultural level of the Nordic countries and the dominance of English among their population is, paradoxically, a factor of cultural colonization. On Swedish television the productions in English, without dubbing, dominate over Swedish productions. According to the study of journalist Kent Asp, the reduction of broadcast hours in the Swedish language in the public networks between 1998 and 2006 was of 14% in informative shows and of 35% in fiction and of 26% in showbiz (The Local, 11-10-07, retrieved on 13-10-07 from http://www.thelocal.se/8755/20071011/). |
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