Lina Dencik (Auth.) - Media and Global Civil Society-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012) PDF

Media and Global Civil Society
This page intentionally left blank

Media and Global Civil
Society
Lina Dencik
© Lina Dencik 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-30133-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-33699-9 ISBN 978-0-230-35538-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230355385
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
To my parents, Peter and Kristina
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Tables and Figures viii

Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 ‘Global Civil Society’ and the Media 6
2 The Organisation of News 34
3 ‘Global Civil Society’ and Global News Broadcasters:
The Case of BBC World News 56
4 ‘Global Civil Society’ and Local/National Newspapers:
The Case of Los Angeles Times 93
5 ‘Global Civil Society’ and Alternative Online News:
The Case of OhmyNews International and Groundreportt 117
6 A Liberal Paradox: Media Developments and
‘Global Civil Society’ 173
Notes 192
Bibliography 194
Index 203
vii
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
3.1 Global 24/7 TV news networks 57

3.2 Audience reach of largest global 24/7 TV news networks 57
3.3 Locations where the BBC has a presence 59
4.1 Viewpoints represented in coverage of Iran in Los Angeles
Times 109
4.2 Viewpoints represented in coverage of Iran in Los Angeles
Times 110
4.3 Viewpoints represented in coverage of climate change in
Los Angeles Times 110
4.4 Viewpoints represented in coverage of climate change in
4.5 Viewpoints represented in coverage of the financial crisis in
4.6 Viewpoints represented in coverage of the financial crisis in
5.1 Table of most popular news sites globally 172
6.1 List of interviews 186
Figures
3.1 Broadcasting reach of BBC World News 61

3.2 The language used by BBC World News to define their
audience 62
3.3 How BBC World News define their BBC.com audience 62
3.4 Geographical distribution of lead stories on BBC World
News 69
3.5 Areas referenced in news coverage on BBC World News 69
3.6 Viewpoints referenced on BBC World News 84
5.1 OhmyNews editorial process 121
viii
List of Tables and Figures ix
5.2 Editorial process at OhmyNews International 126

5.3 Geographical break-down of readership of OhmyNews
International 132
5.4 Geographical distribution of regions covered on OhmyNews
International 135
5.5 Viewpoints represented in news content on OhmyNews
International 145
5.6 Groundreport editorial process 153
5.7 Unique visits per month at Groundreport 160
5.8 Geographical regions covered on Groundreport 162
5.9 Top ten most viewed stories on Groundreport 164
Acknowledgements
There are a great number of people who have been instrumental in

the completion of this book. First and foremost, I would like to thank
everyone I interviewed for my research for being so generous with their
time and answers to my questions. Needless to say, this project would
have been impossible without such generosity.
This book developed out of a Ph.D. thesis and I am greatly indebted
to my fantastic Ph.D. supervisor at Goldsmiths College, Professor James
Curran, whose continuous guidance, rigour and encouragement has
been invaluable throughout the process of researching and writing this
project. Thanks also to Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Carl
Levy and Daya Thussu for their constructive suggestions and feedback
on earlier versions of this work. Of course, any weaknesses, misunder-
standings and mistakes are entirely my responsibility. Also thanks to
Felicity Plester at Palgrave Macmillan for her support of the project.
I am privileged to have so many good and funny friends around me
who have all made my time completing this project a great pleasure.
I am truly grateful to them for making me laugh, supporting me and
allowing me to enjoy the process. A few need a special mention spe-
cifically for their advice and comments on my research: Su-Anne Yeo,
Charlotte McEvoy, Basil Chiasson, and especially Joanna Redden and
Peter Wilkin. My deepest thanks also to Dalina Vekinis for helping with
the tables and graphs, and Mads Abildtrup for his consistent encourage-
ment and goodwill.
Finally, I would never have been able to write this book were it not
for the very generous help from my brother and sister-in-law, Leo and
Stephanie, and their family in Los Angeles; the helpful advice from my
brother Jacob throughout my research; and, of course, the overwhelm-
ing generosity and support from my parents, Peter and Kristina, to
whom I dedicate this book.
x
Introduction
This book has grown out of concerns with how changes in media
organisation and news production are impacting on conceptualisations
of democracy and resistance in a global age. Much analysis and hope
in academia currently rest on ideas of deliberation and post-national
democratic practices – the roots of a ‘global civil society’ – that have
taken force as not just analysis of social and political change but as
a normative project. These ideas have gained currency in discussions on
the nature of democratisation and governance in the global system by
overcoming some of the perceived burdens of an out-dated ill-suited
international order made up of nation-states. Rather, ‘progressive’ theo-
rising has been understood as necessarily addressing ‘new’ spaces and
scales of political activity that are not territorially defined or concerned
with political representation as traditionally perceived. The concept of
‘global civil society’ (GCS) has emerged as a relevant way of understand-
ing and conceptualising the activity and influence of non-state actors
in the global system. It speaks to a global ‘space’ of politics, it privileges
deliberation rather than representation as the central feature of politi-
cal practice, and it understands non-state actors as key transformative
agents of resistance. This is a powerful notion in the contemporary
world.
However, with such concepts it becomes crucial to fully understand
and interrogate the context out of which they emerge and to carefully
delineate some of the implicit assumptions that are made by using
GCS as a concept in contemporary discussions. In this book, the con-
cern is with the understanding of and assumptions made regarding
developments, specifically in the media. As will become clear, this plays
a crucial part in the coherence and currency of the concept. The argu-
ment presented in this book is that advocates of GCS presuppose an
1
2 Media and Global Civil Society
understanding of the media, especially the news, as playing a central

role in three different, but overlapping, ways: firstly, to transform
political communities and provide the basis for ‘global citizenship’;
secondly, to provide the resources necessary for public deliberation in a
‘global public sphere’; and thirdly, to facilitate influence on institutions
of power by representing ‘global public opinion’. This book, therefore,
seeks to interrogate this understanding of media developments by look-
ing at crucial ongoing debates within media studies on the globalisation
or ‘globality’ of media, transformations in the mediated public sphere,
and discussions on the impact of the internet. Importantly, it places
these debates in the context of original empirical research of different
kinds of news organisations that all play a key role in the discussion on
GCS: global satellite news networks (drawing on the case of BBC World
News), traditional national/local news outlets (drawing on the case of
Los Angeles Times), as well as ‘alternative’ online only news sites (draw-
ing on the cases of OhmyNews International and Groundreport). t
As a means to scrutinise the understanding of media developments
implicitly invoked by the concept of GCS, this book provides a holistic
analysis of news practices in the current climate. As such it looks at news
outlets across different mediums – television, press and the internet – and
in conjunction with detailed textual analysis it uses data from more than
70 interviews with news workers at all levels of the production process.
Based on this research, this book seeks to identify what actual develop-
ments are occurring in media, especially news, and what they mean not
just for the existence of GCS, but for the concept itself.
Book outline
Chapter 1 outlines aspects of the context out of which ‘global civil soci-
ety’ has emerged, especially within the field of International Relations
(IR), and the way GCS has come to be commonly appropriated not just
within IR but across disciplines, including media studies. Thus, this
concept demands an interdisciplinary approach to understanding it.
The chapter makes the case that advocates of GCS attempt to overcome
what is perceived to be an ill-suited international order by bringing
together three ideas: firstly, that new ways of conceptualising political
legitimacy must appeal to a global ‘space’; secondly, that such a global
‘space’ privileges public deliberation as the key feature of democratic
practice; and thirdly, that its central transformative actors are non-state
actors acting as agents of resistance. This chapter then goes on to argue
that in order to grant GCS currency within debates on global democracy
Introduction 3
the emergence of such conceptualisation, although often implicit, relies

on a specific understanding of how the media operates and the way in
which it is developing. Indeed, it makes the case that the concept of
global civil society promotes an inherently globalised liberal narrative
of the media that understands the media to function as an autonomous
space expanding political community towards global citizenship, facili-
tating global public deliberation, and allowing for popular influence on
decision-making through the representation of global public opinion.
As such, it becomes pivotal to link GCS to ongoing debates within
media studies and to conduct a thorough investigation into how actual
developments in news practices correspond to such an understanding.
Chapter 2 presents some of these ongoing debates in media studies
and the sociology of news that are crucial in the discussion on GCS.
It looks at central arguments regarding the globalised nature of news
media, the relationship between news and public deliberation, and
the idea of popular participation in news, especially with regards to
the internet. It makes the case that these need to be tied into broader
discussions on the nature of democracy and resistance in the contem-
porary world. The case is also made in this chapter for further empiri-
cal research into this relationship using a holistic, multi-dimensional
approach to the study of news production that is able to tie in central
arguments made in these different sets of literature to developments in
actual practices of news production.
Chapter 3, as a response to this need, examines in the first of four case
studies the extent to which it is possible to speak of ‘global news’ and
the news media’s role in expanding the political community, especially
in light of the growth of satellite broadcasting. Specifically concerned
with the terms by which ‘global news’ is defined, the chapter exam-
ines the production process in one of the most celebrated global news
broadcasters: BBC World News. In doing this, it addresses issues of what
constitutes global news and how such news is covered from a ‘global
perspective’, while reflecting critically on assumptions of a ‘global con-
sciousness’ and the terms by which citizenship is argued to be shifting
away from the nation-state towards a global framework in the way that
is implicitly assumed in the literature on GCS.
Chapter 4 expands on this discussion by incorporating a study of
news practices and ‘global news’ within what may be considered a ‘tra-
ditional’ news outlet. It is important to include analysis of developments
within these types of news organisations which often seem to be treated
separate from or ‘outside’ debates on global democracy and resistance as
these have historically been, and continue to be, central news spaces in
discussions on public deliberation. This chapter therefore examines the

question of globalised public deliberation by studying the news practices
at a local/national news outlet, the American newspaper Los Angeles
Times, analysing in particular its coverage and treatment of ‘global
issues’. Crucial in this discussion is the way in which developments
within these types of news spaces ‘fit’ with the ideas of an emerging
‘global public sphere’ and the terms upon which ‘global news’ in these
contexts may participate in and support a concept of GCS.
Chapter 5 draws upon these studies of ‘mainstream’ news organisa-
tions and expands on them by considering the questions regarding
developments in media within the context of the much-hyped debates
on the impact of the internet and the growth of ‘alternative’ citizen-
generated news outlets. Many of the seeds of the debates on GCS
are grounded in a perception of the internet’s potential to provide a
platform for ‘global public opinion’ to be heard, especially in light of
the debate surrounding the emergence and growth of ‘citizen journal-
ism’. This chapter looks at two case studies associated with this debate
and which are especially pertinent in the context of GCS, OhmyNews
International and Groundreport, t and examines what news practices
within these organisations mean for GCS as a critical concept of democ-
racy and resistance. It is particularly concerned with the abstraction
of online news practices from broader structures and discourses that
operate outside, through and within the online space and the extent to
which online news practices may be seen to fragment and personalise
public issues, rather than move ‘global citizens’ towards some notion of
global consensus.
Chapter 6 brings these studies of news practices at different news
organisations together and demonstrates their importance for an assess-
ment of the concept of GCS. This chapter outlines the way the notion
of GCS rests on a problematic understanding of the media, one that
centres on two deeply interrelated themes that concern: firstly, the
transfer of civil society to a global ‘space’ (the question of globality)
y and,
secondly, the way in which relationships and networks which com-
prise global civil society must themselves be understood as instantiated
within broader relations of power (the question of capitalism). Rather
than arguing simply that the developments we are witnessing within
media are directing us towards a ‘growing global consensus’, it must be
acknowledged that developments in media are also further fragmenting
and marginalising public voices in favour of increasingly (illegitimate)
elite decision-making. These concerns jointly come to highlight the dif-
ficulties the concept of ‘global civil society’ has with taking account of its
Introduction 5
own context and the paradoxical position the concept occupies within
liberal democratic theory. In light of this, this chapter will ultimately
raise broader questions regarding the drive within the current context of
social and political analysis towards an expansive, deterritorialised, and
global understanding of politics as the most ‘progressive’ way of concep-
tualising resistance and will highlight, furthermore, the need to hold on
to notions of collective and accountable political activity.
1
‘Global Civil Society’ and
the Media
Global civil society (GCS) has flourished as a concept over the last two
decades. This is evident, not least, by the vast – and varied – amount
of literature that concerns itself with the notion most predominantly
within the discipline of International Relations (IR). Within this field,
GCS has come to occupy a firm position in the analysis of social and
political transformations and the development of democratic theory.
However, as part of this debate, there has been curiously little critical
attention paid to the role the media plays within this concept of GCS
and what this means for how the concept is used. The role of the
media in the literature has predominantly been confined to minimal
and apolitical accounts of technological developments in general that
have facilitated the seemingly ubiquitous process of globalisation.
The critical relationship between GCS and the media has hardly been
scrutinised at all. This is, perhaps, largely to do with the fact that ques-
tions of social and political transformations and questions of the media
have been approached within separate disciplines that have had very
little dialogue with each other. Although both essentially concerned with
the nature of democracy in a global age, IR and media studies are still
operating in parallel discourses. It is a significant omission, however, as
this chapter will argue that a critical examination of GCS reveals a crucial
and contentious understanding of the nature and role of the media that
provides the concept with its currency and coherence. Indeed, it can be
argued that analysing the literature concerned with GCS from a media
perspective may be the most cogent and illuminating approach to under-
standing and assessing this often very vague and ambiguous concept.
As such, in order to explore the key themes of the relationship
between GCS and the media, this chapter will firstly attempt to outline
the core dimensions of the concept of GCS as it is debated in the most
6
‘Global Civil Society’ and the Media 7
dominant literature.1 It is important to understand its genealogy and

the context in which it is conceptually and analytically used, most sig-
nificantly in terms of its understanding of globalisation, its appropria-
tion of traditional political and social theoretical notions such as civil
society and deliberation, and its influences from literature on social
movements and non-state activism.
Secondly, by providing an analysis of how the concept is predomi-
nantly understood and used, this chapter will outline the explicit – and
more often implicit – understanding within the literature of the func-
tion and nature of the media. It will argue that advocates of the concept
of GCS, for the purposes of its own coherence and currency, appropriate
a globalised liberal narrative of media development, understanding the
media to play fundamental roles in terms of identity and citizenship;
public deliberation and the formation of a public sphere; and, thirdly,
in terms of representation of public opinion as a form of resistance.
In light of this analysis, this chapter will incorporate some of the
fundamental critiques that have been levelled against the concept of
GCS and place them within the GCS-media nexus. It will make the case
that in light of the possible issues with the interpretation of the media
which a concept of GCS invokes it is important to provide an analysis of
how this role attributed to the media is actually operationalised in the
current context. In other words, what is the actual role of the media in
expanding identities, public deliberation, and representation in relation
to the way the media is implicitly understood to be developing in the
literature on GCS?
Global civil society – a brief overview
It is important then to provide a brief overview of GCS – how it has

emerged as a concept, its theoretical roots, and how it is used and
understood in the dominant literature – in order to understand its rela-
tion to questions of the media. One of the main difficulties in providing
an analysis of the notion of GCS is its incredibly varied use, which has
made it a concept that can be almost anything to anyone. However, it is
possible to tease out some fundamental assumptions and themes associ-
ated with the phrase across the literature that have made it a powerful
concept in debates on social and political transformations. It will be
argued here that GCS, as it is most widely appropriated in the literature,
is fundamentally a cosmopolitan notion, rooted in a communicative
political project that privileges public deliberation as legitimate demo-
cratic practice and used to describe social realities as well as normative
ideals with regards to the governance and democratisation of the global

system.
Leading GCS theorist John Keane identifies three overlapping
streams of concern that have led to the ‘fashionable status’ of GCS:
the revival of the old language of civil society; the new awareness of
ourselves as members of a fragile and potentially self-destructive world
system; and the widespread perception that the implosion of Soviet-
type communist systems implied a new global order (Keane 2001: 23).
GCS has emerged in the context of the intellectual-political impulse
to place emphasis upon the ‘global’ in the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the intellectual-political impulse to place emphasis
upon ‘civil society’ as a less statist interpretation of the advancement
of democratic values, reinvigorated, especially, in analysis of develop-
ments in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa around this time
(Kenny & Germain 2005: 4). Although Keane is eager to distinguish
between – and to keep separate – different approaches to GCS that are
rooted in either an analytic-descriptive approach, a strategic approach
or a normative approach (Keane 2003: 3–4), the overwhelming major-
ity of the literature approaches GCS in all three ways intermittently.
Indeed, the discourse of GCS has spread because it apparently keeps
the critical tradition intact by encapsulating existing realities without
sacrificing its normative force. As Anheier et al. point out in their first
yearbook of ‘Global Civil Society’, ‘the spread of the term “global civil
society” reflects an underlying social reality’ (Anheier et al. 2001: 4).
At the same time they recognise that GCS is ultimately a normative
concept, but that ‘the normative content is too contested to be able
to form the basis for an operationalisation of the concept’ (Anheier
et al. 2001: 17). It is precisely in this dual way that GCS is understood
and used in the majority of the literature within IR in questions of
the governance and democratisation of the global system. As such,
the notion of an emerging GCS – understood as ‘the sphere of ideas,
values, institutions, organisations, networks, and individuals located
between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond d the
confines of national societies, polities and economies’ (Anheier et al.
2001: 17, italics in original text) – has developed in conjunction with
preoccupations within IR to shift the subject of study away from the
nation-state as the defining feature of political community, and away
from state interests as the defining feature of democratic social and
political transformation. In being faced with political processes taking
place above, below and across the nation-state, and with finding new
loci of activity and power that question traditional notions of political
legitimacy in the form of national representative democracy, IR scholars

have sought to find new forms of democratic practice in the global
system. It will be argued here that the concept of GCS brings together
the ideas that, firstly, such political legitimacy must appeal to a global
‘space’, secondly, that such a global ‘space’ privileges public delibera-
tion as the central feature of democratic practice, and thirdly, that its
central transformative actors are non-state agents acting as forces of
resistance.
As such, the emergence of GCS as a concept reflects the widespread
affirmation that there is a new awareness in society at large of, firstly, a
common global world framework and, secondly, a non-governmental
social sphere. This is a real test for social science, which has hitherto
been stuck in what Beck calls ‘methodological nationalism’, a system
of study centred upon the nation-state. ‘Social science can react to the
challenge of a global civil society’, Beck states, ‘only if it manages to
overcome methodological nationalism and to raise empirically and
theoretically fundamental questions within specialised fields of research
so as to elaborate the foundations of a cosmopolitan social and political
science’ (Beck 2003: 46, italics in original text). That is, as Held further
outlines, a world that is centred on a cosmopolitan ethic where the
ultimate units of moral concern are individual people, not states or
other particular forms of human association (Held 2003: 470). As will
be further discussed below, the concept of GCS has developed and been
appropriated in public discourse and in other disciplines, including
media studies, such that it has arguably been treated more as a politi-
cally neutral category, assessed in almost purely empirical terms that
understand it simply as part of the broader discourse describing the
increased ‘transnationalisation’ of political and social activities at large.
As will be argued in this book, the political dimensions of a notion such
as GCS only become clear with a proper understanding of the condi-
tions and philosophical roots out of which the concept has emerged,
and it is precisely this broader interrogation of the concept that is cru-
cial for its application within empirical fields. As Kaldor et al. state in
the 2004/5 yearbook on Global Civil Society:
What we mean by global civil society is not just civil society that
spills over borders and that offers a transnational forum for debate
and even confrontation; rather, we are concerned about the ways in
which civil society influences the framework of global governance –
overlapping global, national and local institutions. Some theorists
prefer the term ‘transnational’ to ‘global’. But by ‘global’ we mean
more than just ‘beyond borders’: we refer to the ways in which

globalisation has transformed the issues and problems that we face
and the role of civil society in confronting them.
(Kaldor et al. 2005: 2)
Thus, the shift to ‘global’ is significant precisely because it is – unlike

‘transnational’, and also ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘international’ for example –
linked specifically to an understanding of processes of economic, social
and political change characteristic of the current context. Furthermore,
the shift to ‘civil society’ is significant precisely because of the political
content that such language entails as it speaks to the transformative
agency of such a force (Hutchings 2005).
The idea of GCS is based on the construction of a new global ‘space’ for
politics institutionally separate from both the state and the inter-state sys-
tem, expressed through notions such as ‘global consciousness’ (Anheier
et al. 2001) and ‘globality’ that are ‘a political-spatial representation of
the moral cosmopolitanism that was first conceived by Immanuel Kant’
(Shaw 2003: 43). What is more, it is crucially a concept that predominantly
refers to ‘non-state actors in global politics’ (Kaldor 2003: 79) and non-
governmental activity. While some GCS scholars crucially understand this
activity to operate through existing state networks (Shaw) and the market
(Keane), the majority of advocates of GCS understand it to be a space for
politics that is alternativee to both the inter-state system and the global
market (Falk, Linklater, Kaldor, Florini, Carter, Scholte, Young, Anheier).
Indeed, it may be argued that the most widespread understanding of GCS
in the literature is based on a Gramscian conceptualisation of civil society,
which sees it as a sphere of association between economy and state.2 As
Chandhoke states, ‘many theorists seem to be of the view that global civil
society represents a “third sector”, which can not only be distinguished
from but which is an alternative to both the state-centric international
order and the networks of global markets’ (Chandhoke 2002: 36).
It is important to note in this context that such an idea of GCS
appealing to a ‘bounded’ (Amoore and Langley 2005) global space of
non-state actors as an alternative to states and markets is based on a
specific understanding of the way in which globalisation is impacting
on societies and political activities. Held outlines four specific charac-
terisations of changing relations in the current constellation: the locus
of effective political power; the idea of political community; loyalties,
interpretations of rights and duties and the interconnectedness of legal
and authority structures; and the basis of democratic accountability
(Held 2000: 27). This latter characteristic is especially important as it
provides grounds for new ways of conceptualising democratic practice

that incorporate the agency of GCS. What is being emphasised by GCS,
essentially, is the notion that global non-state actors are mobilising
around ‘common issues’ based on a ‘growing global consensus about
the equality of human beings and the responsibility to prevent suffering
wherever it takes place’ (Kaldor 2001: 110). Indeed, Kaldor recognises
that the growth and expansion of GCS is closely associated with a major
shift in cultural and social values from material security to cosmopoli-
tan values: ‘These values facilitated the cross-national spread of social
movements around common issues that escaped conventional party
politics’ (Kaldor et al. 2003: 29–30). As Held and McGrew (2007) out-
line, this entrenchment of cosmopolitan values has been reinforced by
the emphasis on human rights and international law in global politics
which not only challenges the nation-state as sole – or even dominant –
effective, legitimate and accountable agent of power, but also signals
moves towards such a growing global consensus and – in the absence of
a world state – provides the groundwork upon which GCS can mobilise
and influence (cf. Frost 2009). At the same time, GCS also promotes
these universal humanitarian goals: ‘global civil society underpins and
promotes emerging international law’ (Carter 2001: 81).
As such, what globalisation has facilitated, and GCS is a manifesta-
tion of, is a global consciousness that has emerged from the stretching
of social relations in and through new dimensions of activity – techno-
logical, organisational, administrative and legal, among others (Held
2006) – that has shifted political activity towards a sense of common
global issues. Crucially, in the absence of a representative body equiva-
lent of the state within a global context, this political activity is neces-
sarily communicative and centred on deliberation: ‘Global civil society
cannot claim to “represent” the people in the way that formally elected
states can and do. But the issue is less one of representation than of
deliberation’ (Kaldor 2003: 140). Thus, GCS conceptualises a communi-
cative framework centred on common global issues in which dialogue
and deliberation can flourish beyond the confines of national societies:
‘Global civil society is about civic engagement and civic-mindedness in
a transnational, potentially global sphere; it is about private action for
public benefit however defined. It is an arena for people to express dif-
ferent views, values, and interests, and to agree or disagree about them’
(Kaldor et al. 2003: 4). Indeed, what has made GCS such a powerful
idea has precisely been its ability to foreground public deliberation as
democratic practice within a reinvigorated cosmopolitan framework
not centred on national representative democracy. As will be further
explored below, what this has also provided for GCS is the idea that
it – as an agent – can have a politically legitimate role in governing the
global system and can be a force of resistance suitable in the current
‘post-national constellation’: ‘What participation of global civil society
does is to provide an alternative vehicle for deliberation, for introducing
normative concerns, for raising the interests of the individual and not
just the state’ (Kaldor 2003: 141). Thus, although not entirely linear, the
concept of GCS draws on some fundamental assertions that have devel-
oped within the tradition of deliberative democracy and most notably
on Habermas’s idea of ‘communicative reason’. Crucial to note in this
context, the centrality of communicative reason in debates on GCS is
also a necessary feature for its advocates as they attempt to abstract the
concept of civil society from a domestic level defined in relation to a
territorial state to a global level that lacks a corresponding global state.
That is, it is the rational capacity which is universally shared that ena-
bles and makes possible the participation of public deliberation among
non-state associations defined by a commitment to universal values.
Thus, ‘global civil society comes to do the work of both state and nation
as enabling condition of global citizenship. On the one hand, it substi-
tutes for the state by underpinning the active, deliberative engagement
of individuals with political issues for the sake of a greater good. At the
same time, it substitutes for the nation as a source of political solidarity’
(Hutchings 2005: 90). Hence, the centrality of public deliberation allows
for the ‘privileging’ of GCS within the restructuring of the global system
without any institutionalised form of authority, formal political process
or political community at the global level. It is not the aim of this chap-
ter to outline what is meant by the notions of deliberative democracy
and Habermasian communicative reason in great detail – and the many
variations of the tradition. What is important here is rather to outline
some of the basic ideas that have ‘migrated’ into IR discourse in the
context of GCS and the crucial role they play.
A theory of deliberative democracy, first coined by Joseph Bessette,
arises from the liberal understanding of the fundamental problem con-
fronting all democratic theorists, namely to find a morally justifiable
way of making binding collective decisions in the face of continuing
moral conflict (Gutmann & Thompson 2000: 61). In Rawlsian terms,
this means finding a conception of legitimate justice given the fact of
pluralism (Rawls 1993). Indeed, the idea that democracy revolves around
the transformation rather than simply the aggregation of preferences
has come to the fore of democratic theory. As such, preferences are not
‘fixed’, they are actively (trans)formed. This understanding of preference
formation allows for decision-making to be collectively binding through

the dialogical act of deliberation. As Przeworski outlines, ‘“deliberation”
is a form of discussion intended to change the preferences on the bases
of which people decide to act. Deliberation is “political” when it leads
to a decision binding on a community’(Przeworski 1998: 140). Thus,
deliberative democracy is a pluralistic association in which decisions
are made on the basis of a discussion of different preferences within a
public sphere. What is more, this act of deliberation provides the politi-
cal legitimacy required for the democratic cause. In other words, bind-
ing decision-making made through the dialogical act is, or should be,
democratically legitimate based on the process of deliberation itself. This
requires that all who will be affected by the collective decision-making
are able to participate in the public deliberation regarding that decision
(Elster 1998: 8). What is more, it requires the ability for all who will be
affected by the collective decision-making to reason publicly. As such,
deliberative democracy rests on an ideal of public reason (Bohman 1998:
401). Habermas’s development of this ideal in communicative terms
provides a useful framework with which to understand the basic assump-
tions regarding public deliberation that have become manifest within IR
in debates on GCS.3 Habermas presents an account of reason that allows
for democratic will-formation to take place through the use of political
communication within a public sphere. Thus, he views knowledge as
being communicatively mediated, and therefore ‘rationality is assessed
in terms of the capacity of responsible participants in interaction to ori-
ent themselves in relation to validity claims geared to intersubjective
recognition’ (Habermas 1996: 606). Thus, mutual understanding and
consensual agreement is possible through the communicative use of lan-
guage; through ‘the performative attitude of participants in interaction,
who coordinate their plans for action by coming to an understanding
about something in the world’ (Habermas 1996: 592). In other words,
as Ashenden and Owen aptly summarise, ‘we can gloss Habermas’s
project as the attempt to establish the primacy of the communicative
use of language to generate agreement on the strategic use of language
in its “original” mode to the idea of reason’ (Ashenden & Owen 1999: 3).
As such, Habermas binds the possibility for collective decision-making
to the critical-transcendental power of reason, drawing on the Kantian
project of Enlightenment in which the freedom needed to see it realised
‘is the most innocuous form of all – freedom to make public usee of one’s
reason in all matters’ (Kant 1996: 53).
When examining the literature on GCS, this is arguably the corner-
stone assumption of the majority of its advocates. Held’s understanding
of the role of GCS within his broader framework of a ‘cosmopolitan

democracy’ inherits and extends this Kantian-Habermasian tradition
(Held & Patomäki 2006). This is highlighted in his discussion of the
‘principles of cosmopolitanism’ (Held 2005) which are centred around
two fundamental metaprinciples or organising notions of ethical
discourse – one cultural and historical, the other philosophical. These
are, respectively, the metaprinciple of autonomy and the metaprinci-
ple of impartialist reasoning (Held 2003: 471). For Held, the concept
of autonomy connotes the capacity of human beings to reason self-
consciously, to be self-reflective and self-determining. What is more, ‘it
involves the ability to deliberate, judge, choose and act upon different
possible courses of action in private as well as public life, bearing the
democratic good or, in Rousseau’s terms, the “common good” in mind’
(Held 1995: 146). The notion of impartialist reasoning is thought of as
a heuristic device to test candidate principles of moral worth, democ-
racy and justice and their forms of justification (Held 2003: 473) that
facilitates some kind of support for the legitimacy of collective decision-
making in spheres of activity that have ‘consequences’ beyond the
borders of the nation-state. That is, it allows for a distinction between
legitimacy as ‘acceptance’ and legitimacy as ‘rightness’ (Held 2005: 24).
As Held outlines, this ‘test’ draws heavily on Barry’s notion of ‘justice as
impartiality’ in that it entails that people should not look at things from
their own point of view alone but seek to find a basis of agreement that
is acceptable from all points of view (Barry 1989: 8), and it is articulated
in Rawls’s ‘original position’ and Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’
(Held 2003: 472). Held states:
The aim would be to establish a deliberative process whose structure

grounds ‘an expectation of rationally acceptable results’. Such a proc-
ess can be conceived of in terms of diverse public spheres in which
collective views and decisions are arrived at through deliberation,
deliberation which is guided by the test of impartiality, as opposed
to that of simple self-interest, in the formation of political will and
judgement.
(Held 2003: 476)
Although Held stresses the need for a ‘layered’ cosmopolitan perspective

that acknowledges the simultaneous process of both the ‘institutionali-
sation of equal rights and duties’, as well as the ‘institutionalisation of
national and transnational forms of public debate, democratic partici-
pation, and accountability’ (Held 2005: 18) which calls for a complex
political order of ‘democratic associations, cities and nations as well as of

regions and global networks’ (Held 2006: 309), what is of pertinence in
this debate is particularly (grounded in these underlying cosmopolitan
principles) the deliberative prominence he grants to the ‘restructuring
of civil society’ into ‘the first stages of a global civil society’ (Held 2003:
478). This ‘restructuring of civil society’ involves ‘the construction, in
principle, of broad avenues of civil participation in and deliberation over
decision-making at regional and global levels’ (Held 2006: 305). In many
regards, this line of argument has received further impetus from recent
work among political philosophers who are increasingly attempting to
rearticulate notions of rights and justice that cater to this ‘deterritorial-
ised’ interpretation of social and political change. Most notably, recent
contributions from Fraser on ‘global justice’ – although not explicitly
referring to the concept of GCS – similarly articulate the supposed emer-
gence of a global space in which there is a possibility of deliberation (or
at least what she calls ‘good-enough deliberation’) based on the ‘princi-
ples of participatory parity’, echoing Held’s principles of autonomy and
impartialist reasoning and Habermas’s ‘ideal-speech situation’. These
principles of participatory parity must necessarily be stretched or accom-
modating in order to incorporate social arrangements arising from the
‘transnationalizing of the public sphere’ (Fraser 2007, 2008).
Keane, although willing to understand GCS as an open space where
competing values and ideas are battled out – or in Held’s terms where ‘the
resolution of value conflicts becomes a matter of participating in public
deliberation and negotiation’ (Held 1995: 282) – is less convinced that
it is guided by the strong normative framework that is implied by the
Habermas-inspired, consensus-driven understanding of political proc-
esses that dominate a great deal of the literature on GCS. Rather, he
makes the case for maintaining moral pluralism as the underpinning
ethic of GCS based on ‘respect for their moral differences’ (Keane 2003:
201). Indeed, Keane places much emphasis on taking account of the
‘messy-ness’ of any cosmopolitan order – ‘cosmocracy’ – and within
the notion of GCS itself, which he feels has been lost in many accounts
of the concept (Keane 2003). For Keane, GCS is therefore much more
like a ‘biosphere’, an ‘unbounded society’, operating on the basis of
and through ‘turbocapitalism’ and nation-states, ‘an unfinished project
that consists of sometimes thick, sometimes thinly stretched networks,
pyramids and hub-and-spoke clusters of socio-economic institutions and
actors who organise themselves across borders, with the deliberate aim
of drawing the world together in new ways’ (Keane 2003: 8). This, at
times, makes Keane’s understanding of GCS feel so all-inclusive and
abstract that it becomes difficult to extract any meaning from it. What
is more, the reason why this understanding of GCS has not been widely
appropriated in the literature may be because it effectively robs GCS
of politically legitimate influence and leaves Keane without an answer
as to how collectively binding decisions might be made in the face of
moral conflict that may be part of governing the global system. This may
also then explain Keane’s eagerness to base the definition of ‘civility’
on the notion of ‘non-violence’ as an intrinsic feature of GCS (Keane
2003). In effect, this is not so different from the way the deliberative
model has been used in IR discourse on GCS and still relies on an ideal
of public reason underpinning GCS as a space for public deliberation
in search for the ‘global common good’ (Ezzat 2005: 44), whether that
be based on equality (Held), human rights (Kaldor), or non-violence
(Keane). As Chandler argues, ‘the framework of communicative dialogue
is […] the gel that allegedly secures the reproduction of the pluralist
values of the global civil society project and which posits the existence
of a space for morally guided, non-instrumental dialogue outside the
sphere of government and formally institutionalized political processes’
(Chandler 2007: 291). It is also this ‘bond’ that has re-introduced the
notion of the social contract in the context of GCS: much as in liberal
accounts of democratic deliberation that rely on ‘impartialist reasoning’,
relations with and within GCS are contractual in that they appeal to an
agreed legitimate collectively binding decision. As Kaldor remarks, the
notion of a social contract in discussions on GCS ‘aims to emphasize an
agreed institutional outcome’ (Kaldor 2003: 45).
Indeed, as has been alluded to, this foregrounding of communicative
dialogue is central to the granting of political weight to the concept
of GCS. That is, it is crucial for understanding the normative dimen-
sion of GCS as a transformative agent in the global system. Kaldor is
explicit in this by, firstly, understanding GCS ‘based on the belief that a
genuinely free conversation, a rational critical dialogue, will favour the
“civilizing” option’ (Kaldor 2003: 12) and, secondly, that the outcomes
of this dialogue should be binding on the way in which the global
system is governed: ‘[global civil society] could be considered what has
been called a functional equivalent or an “alternative mechanism” for
democratising global governance’ (Kaldor et al. 2005: 2). Indeed, GCS is
seen to play a role in the governance of the global system based on the
process of public deliberation it represents. As Kaldor et al. state: ‘Global
civil society is the mobilisation of global public opinion. Therefore, the
debates and positions within global civil society can affect the framework
of global governance’ (Kaldor et al. 2005: 21). As such, the concept of
GCS draws on the philosophical tradition of deliberative democracy in

that it is understood as a platform in which actors argue, campaign,
or lobby for the arrangements that shape global developments (Kaldor
2003b: 591) and, moreover, it can legitimatelyy influence global decision-
making through such processes. Indeed, drawing on social movement
literature and the vast amount of recent research on civic public activ-
ism, GCS has grown as a concept in questions of global governance by
appropriating similar terms in describing its influence on the political
scene. More specifically, literature on GCS has become the more current
in debates on democratisation through its ability to draw on notions of
norms and values as political forces, popularised in the understanding
of new social movements, and to some extent manifested in IR through
the much broader ‘linguistic turn’ in social science that emerged after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. By this is merely meant that delibera-
tion as a form of legitimate democratic practice and political power has
benefited from the reinvigorated debate on the importance of ideational
forces in political transformations – discourse and norms matter. This
form of power refers to the ability to influence not only policy outcomes,
but to the ability to influence and transform the terms and nature of
debates (Keck & Sikkink 1998: 2). As Risse has pointed out, the power
and role of GCS in global governance is precisely linked to the power
of norms (Risse 2000). It is through this form of power that GCS has
become relevant not just as an articulation of changing social relations
and political practice, but as a concept of resistance. Falk, for example,
understands GCS as a form of ‘humane global governance’ (Falk 2000);
an overall ‘counterweight’ within the global system that is able to influ-
ence decision-making through its moral authority and alternative visions
of a more sustainable, compassionate and democratic world order (Falk
2000: 165). As Florini and Simmons further note, ‘transnational civil
society exercises influence through its ability to make someone, policy
makers or publics, listen and act. The currency of its power is not force,
but credible information and moral authority’ (Florini & Simmons 2000:
11). Emphasising this notion of power, Scholte – another leading GCS
scholar – argues that, ‘civil society has had impacts on discourse in global
governance. Language matters. The way that issues are thought about
and talked about is crucial to shaping action. Civil society is important
in the global polity in one sense because it has moulded governing ideas
and mindsets’ (Scholte 2002: 153). GCS in this way is a platform in which
‘the global community’ (Anheier et al. 2001: iii) is represented and can
monitor the activities within key spheres of power: ‘Rogue corporations
exist, as do rogue states, and both are increasingly under the scrutiny of
global civil society’ (Anheier et al. 2001: iii). What this enthusiasm for
the potential of GCS to influence global decision-making has meant
for the way GCS is discussed in the literature is a heavy focus on social
movements (Shaw 1999: 222; Anderson & Rieff 2005: 29). However, as
Anderson and Rieff observe, GCS seeks to encapsulate more than just
the aggregation of national and transnational social movements, it seeks
to grant itself the advocacy function analogous to civil society at the
domestic scale, providing the voice of the ‘peoples’ (Anderson & Rieff
2005: 29). As such, GCS seeks to be a form of ‘representation’ (different
from that of the nation-state) and to be a form of ‘intermediation’ – to
stand between the people of the world and various transnational institu-
tions (Anderson & Rieff 2005: 30). This is clearly also the way the con-
cept of GCS has spread as a discourse within international institutions,
such as the World Bank and United Nations (see Chandhoke 2002) and
has moved it beyond the status of an analytical concept of transforma-
tion to a concept of ‘resistance’ or ‘monitoring’ in the global system,
describing the activities and significance of social movements and how
‘non-elites’ may influence social change in an age of globalisation. As
GCS has established itself across disciplines as a real and desirable notion
in this way, it has come to be a serious concept to contend with in wider
debates on democracy, resistance, solidarity and morality in an age of
globalisation. Within an international institutional framework, it has
almost become a ‘common-sense’ term for describing non-governmental
political activity. Testament to the strength of the concept is the way
it has also, sometimes rather uncritically, come to be applied within
empirical fields, including research on the operations of the media (cf.
Castells 2009; Volkmer 2003). It is therefore crucial to critically analyse
and outline the relationship between GCS and the media.
The media in global civil society
Although not often referred to in much detail in the literature, the role
of the media is absolutely central to the concept of GCS. Most of the
literature acknowledges that the key development in the emergence of
GCS as a concept to be reckoned with is the ‘revolution’ in technology
of the last couple of decades, most notably in information and commu-
nication technologies (ICTs). As Anheier et al. state: ‘the growth of glo-
bal civil society has been facilitated by the growth of resources available
to civil society. These resources are of two kinds: technology and money’
(Anheier et al. 2001: 6). Leaving aside the very suspect (and revealing)
notion that technology and money operate separately from each other,
the question of how exactly these technological developments have

facilitated the emergence of GCS as an existing reality and a normative
ideal is incredibly underdeveloped in the literature coming out of IR.
The media, both off-line and on-line, forms a central part of what is
rather vaguely referred to as ICTs. It is therefore worth establishing as
best as possible what exactly the role of the media is seen to have in the
literature on GCS, explicitly and implicitly; an endeavour which might
also ultimately reveal the difficulties with a concept of civic activism
that understands itself as separate from state and economy bounded in
an abstract global space.
As has been outlined above, GCS is an expression of ‘a global
consciousness’, ‘a platform for global dialogue and debate’, and a man-
ifestation of ‘the mobilisation of global public opinion’. It has a say
in the governance of the global system because it is an intermediary
between people and centres of power at the global level that is not
confined to an ill-suited international nation-state order. Indeed, talk
of GCS has emerged as ‘a response to rising concerns about the need
for a new social and economic and political deal at the global level’
(Keane 2003: 2). A certain understanding of the role of the media is at
the centre of all these features of GCS, teased out in the above section.
The media and GCS share an intricate and complex relationship. The
case is made here that it is possible to identify three key – and deeply
intertwined – functions of the media as it seems to be understood in the
literature: (trans)forming identities into global citizens; providing the
resources for public deliberation in a global public sphere; and finally,
influencing institutions of power by representing global public opinion.
This understanding of the media is absolutely fundamental to not only
the currency and status GCS has received but to the very coherence of
its own project.
(Trans)forming identities into global citizens

The popular notion that we are witnessing the shaping of a global
consciousness has in many ways set the groundwork from which talk of
civil society on a global scale has emerged. It is arguably a fundamental
prerequisite in the cosmopolitan vision that it is possible to under-
stand the world ‘as a whole’, indeed to imagine the world as a ‘global
polity’. GCS scholars are keen to emphasise how this process has been
facilitated by developments in ICTs. Interestingly, the media is rarely
dealt with as a distinctive operation, more or less absorbed into general
observations of ICTs – and really technology at large – and just loosely
referred to as having gone ‘global’ (Keane 2003; Anheier et al. 2001;
Scholte 2002). As such, the media has the potential to become merely
part and parcel of existing technological advances, simply a by-product
of developments in technology. As will be discussed at a later stage this
assumption itself is problematic, but of concern here is how the absorp-
tion of the media into general understandings of ICTs allows the media
to carry out an almost unnoticed function in the GCS literature in the
creation of new forms of identities that ‘blur’ territorial lines and move
politics and citizenship beyond the nation-state.
It is arguable that the question and disjuncture of national identity
and the globalisation of culture is where GCS literature is most attentive
to the role of the media. In fact, Held begins his development of a cos-
mopolitan order based on the observation that with developments in
media and culture there are ‘grounds for thinking that there is a grow-
ing disjuncture between the idea of the democratic state as an inde-
pendent, accountable center of power bounded by fixed boundaries […]
and interlinked changes in the spheres of media and cultural exchange’
(Held 2000: 22). As such, changes in the spheres of media and cultural
exchange have moved issues beyond the national stage and into a glo-
bal arena. Although Held does not want to advocate the development
of a single global media-led culture, he does want to emphasise the way
new forms of communication media range in and across borders, link-
ing nations and peoples in new ways allowing for the (re)creation of
new forms of identity (Held 2000: 23). Keane is rather more precise in
his account of the same idea:
The globalisation of communications media has had several long-

term effects upon global civil society. Most obviously, global media
linkages have helped to do something much more persuasively than
the maps of Gerardus Mercator ever did: to deepen the visceral feel-
ings among millions of people that our world is ‘one world’, and that
humans share some responsibility for its fate.
(Keane 2003: 162)
The arguments adopted in the literature on GCS appear to follow the

line that technological developments have created what Thompson
refers to as a ‘mediated worldliness’: ‘our sense of the world which lies
beyond the sphere of our personal experience, and our sense of our
place within this world, are increasingly shaped by mediated symbolic
forms’ (Thompson 1995: 34) The argument goes that identities are
(trans)formed by global media not just by making it easier to establish
mutual understanding, but also by altering the spatial and temporal
conditions under which individuals exercise power. Individuals are

able to communicate and interact across spatial and temporal distances
(Thompson 1995: 22). As such, the territorially fixed boundaries of
political communities in the form of the nation-state and the nature
of political identity within it are transforming into a less territorial mat-
ter and more ‘a matter of transactions, exchange and bargaining across
a complex set of transnational networks’ (Held 2000: 23) through the
linking of communication media. Thus, sites of political action can
become linked through rapid communications into complex networks
of political interaction, making developments at the global level acquire
almost instantaneous local consequences and vice versa, creating a site
for ‘global politics’ (Held 2003: 466). What this has meant for the prac-
tice of citizenship more than anything is a transformation of the social
contract with regards to responsibility and obligation. As Keane states:
Hailed by media narratives that probe the wider world in tones of

(ironic) intimacy, the members of global civil society become a bit
less parochial, a bit more cosmopolitan. Global publics are taught
lessons in the art of flexible citizenship: they learn that the bounda-
ries between native and foreigner are blurred and that they become
a touch more footloose. They learn to distance themselves from
themselves; they discover that there are different temporal rhythms,
other places, other problems, other ways to live. They are invited
to question their own dogmas, even to extend ordinary standards
of civility – courtesy, politeness, respect – to others whom they will
never meet.
(Keane 2001: 43)
So not only does global media provide us with the possibility to enjoy a
kind of ‘global citizenship’, it also provides us with a normative frame-
work for how such citizenship ought to be practiced. This, in many
ways, incorporates similar notions as Silverstone’s argument regarding
the media’s role in constructing a ‘global moral order’, much set
against the backdrop of an emerging GCS. He states: ‘The world’s media
are an increasingly significant site for the construction of a moral order,
one which would be, and arguably needs to be, commensurate with
the scope and scale of global interdependence’ (Silverstone 2006: 8).
Silverstone calls this current context in which the media is constitutive
of our understanding of the world and of our relation to the world –
most significantly for him, our relation to ‘the other’ – a ‘mediapolis’.
For Silverstone, this is a descriptive as well as a normative concept for the
centrality of the media in our definition of the political community, and

it largely sets a very similar framework to that within which the concept
of GCS has emerged (Silverstone 2006). That is, the media plays a central
role in the redefinition of ethics in our current global system, specifi-
cally in terms of the shift to ‘global values’ (cf. Singer 2009). Essentially,
the literature on GCS is giving the media an important role through its
capacity to distribute common ‘pools of memories’ to their audiences,
echoing Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the relationship between the
media and the nation-state. Anderson largely popularised this citizen-
ship function of the media in his account of ‘imagined communities’,
recognising media, and news media in particular, as the public construc-
tion of particular images of self, community, and nation (Schudson
2003: 69). What the literature on GCS arguably does, however, is extend
Anderson’s thesis to take on a global form, arguing that the global nature
of media and news engenders a sense of global community, becoming
part of the rethinking and reconstruction of ‘a common social world’
(Schudson 2003: 212). As Kaldor states, ‘the development of new forms
of communication, based on the revolution in information technol-
ogy as well as the spread of television and radio has created quite new
“imagined communities” […] Both symbolic politics and information
politics depend on instant news and images, especially through televi-
sion, which makes possible the consciousness of a global community’
(Kaldor 2003: 104). As such, the notion of global citizenship in GCS
builds on more than just the ability to mediate across distance in shorter
time, but also that media distributes some sense of commonality, or at
least a minimal normative framework, at a global scale. This is brought
to life, according to the literature, especially with ‘global media events’.
For example, as Glasius and Kaldor argue with regards to the significance
of the events of September 11:
This was above all a global media happening, experienced by

millions because the attacks were instantly broadcast, amplified, and
commented upon. It was a global media happening both because of
the reach of contemporary technology and because of the way in
which the debates, protests, and struggles over global issues over the
last decade gave meaning, albeit varied meaning, to September 11.
(Glasius & Kaldor 2002: 11)
It is important here not to overstate the extent to which advocates of

GCS are looking to express the existence or desire for a single global
identity based on common values (cf. Keane 2003), but there is an
overwhelming sense in the literature that the media, and the reality of
global media events, do establish a new appreciation of the individual
and his or her universal moral obligation, not only to achieve self-
fulfillment, but to go beyond that in the search for the ‘global common
good’ (Ezzat 2005: 41).
Providing resources for global public deliberation

However, GCS is about more than having a sense of ‘the world as a single
place’. As has been outlined above, it is a platform in which individuals
are empowered by the ability to engage in dialogue and public delib-
eration. What ‘politicises’ GCS as a concept is its claim to be a public
sphere in which decisions are and can be made through communica-
tive politics. Although it occupies very little analysis within the GCS
literature, such a notion draws heavily on research elsewhere on the
role of the media in providing the material resources for a public sphere,
most famously in the work of Habermas. In the Habermasian account
of the public sphere, it is the media that acts as its constitutive resource.
According to Schudson, the news media for Habermas provides the raw
material for rational public discourse, the ability to have a common set
of norms for public conversation (Schudson 2003: 69). Habermas has
forcefully argued that the public sphere in modern societies must neces-
sarily be conceived in a fairly abstract manner, as a structure of mediated
communication rather than as a group of individuals who in principle
could meet and discuss in a single place (Outhwaite 1996: 19). Although
Silverstone distinguishes his notion of the ‘mediapolis’ from Habermas’
notion of the public sphere with regards to the requirement of rational
discourse, both concepts converge on the matter of the inseparability of
the media and political communication. The fact that any concept of
the public sphere in the modern context understands such a sphere to
be centred on a system of mediated communication is uncontroversial.
Public deliberation in the current constellation, especially any talk of
such deliberation on a global scale, must necessarily rely on resources
beyond face-to-face interaction to have any currency. This is in line with
a great deal of authors within media studies who concern themselves
with the relationship between and fusion of the media and the public
sphere (Olesen 2004; Castells 2008). What we are witnessing, some
would argue, is the ‘mediatisation’ of politics, in which political ideas
and information are mainly, if not entirely, communicated through
the media (Davis 2007; Page 1996). For public sphere theorists, how-
ever, there is critical attention paid to the way that sphere has emerged
with regards to communication systems that means it fails in its ideal
task (Habermas 1989, 2006; Bell 2007; Fraser 2003, 2007), which has
somewhat been lost in the way it has been appropriated in much of the
literature on GCS. It is true, as Fraser states (2007: 7), that the concept
of the public sphere was developed not simply to understand empirical
communication flows but to contribute a normative political theory of
democracy, but this distinction is blurred in the literature on GCS. To use
the concept of GCS as an analytical tool for existing social realities, and
indeed as a relevant normative ideal, requires an assertion that commu-
nication systems are currently facilitating the use of the notion ‘public
sphere(s)’ in a global context. GCS is in many ways an attempt to respond
to Fraser’s demand for recovering public-sphere theory in the ‘current
postnational constellation’ (Fraser 2007). As Kaldor et al. state:
If key decisions are taken at the global level, there have to be mecha-
nisms for increasing the responsiveness of global institutions to the
demands of individual citizens. Procedural democracy at the global
level could not achieve that because the world is too complex to be
represented by a world parliament. Dialogue and deliberation, which
are in principle open to all civil society groups and which take place
at many levels, are the next best option.
(Kaldor et al. 2005: 16)
They take place, it is implied, through developments in ICTs: ‘informa-

tion technology has provided powerful new means of transnational civil
society both to organise itself […] and to get its message out’ (Florini
2003:136). This includes a central role of the media: ‘By and large the
media have been a tool, an expression of a public debate’ (Kaldor 2001:
115). Thus, the media has not only encouraged the mobilisation and
organisation of groups within global civil society through the connected
visibility that communication media facilitates for distant associations;
it has also expressed a public debate between these associations. In
other words, the global media has played a crucial part in allowing
transnational networks and organisations to be brought together across
borders in a global or ‘transnational public sphere’, what Guidry et al.
define as ‘a real as well as conceptual space in which movement organi-
sations interact, contest each other and their objects, and learn from
each other’ (Guidry et al. 2000: 3). Despite hesitations among public
sphere theorists, including Habermas himself (Habermas 2006), for GCS
scholars, the globalisation of the media has meant that the mediatisa-
tion of politics is taking place on a global scale concerning global issues
and involving and affecting a public not defined by the nation-state.
As Keane states: ‘it [the globalisation of media] has contributed to the

growth of a plurality of differently sized public spheres, some of them
global, in which many millions of people witness mediated controver-
sies about who gets what, when, and how’ (Keane 2003: 168). As such,
the (global) media provides a sense of a shared world that stretches the
nature of citizenship beyond the nation-state and creates a common
sphere in which it is possible to exercise some kind of public dialogue
informed by and expressed within this mediated framework. This is
what facilitates the deliberative ambitions of GCS as a critical concept
in the debates on global governance and democratisation.4
Representing global public opinion

Based on this constitutive framework of the mediated public sphere, it
is implied within the literature that GCS is able to influence political
decisions and monitor sites of power, and thus become an agent of
resistance. GCS has a part to play in shaping the discourse on global
and local issues by in some way representing or intermediating between
citizens and institutional centres of governance, by making public
deliberation of ‘global citizens’ matter. Here, again, the media has a key
role to play. GCS is able to play a part in the democratisation of the
global system by influencing the nature and norms of debate. Media’s
role in facilitating such influence is really an extension of the under-
standing of the media in the literature on GCS already outlined. GCS
is embedded in the idea that its normative assertions, legitimacy, and
a moral authority produced by global public debate act as forces with
which to influence decision-making. The media is an expression of
this public debate, as Kaldor reminds us, and has been used for those
purposes within GCS. Publicity is used to monitor and change relations
of power by mobilising support and pressure. As Scholte states, ‘mes-
sages spread through electronic mass media have allowed civil society
associations to attract sympathizers on an unprecedented scale’ (Scholte
2002: 151). The anti-war demonstrations of 2003, for example, were an
extraordinary moment for GCS, and were argued to be an example of
the possibility for GCS to acquire a powerful autonomous voice in the
global system, largely manifested as a global media event (Lupel 2005:
117). Much earlier than this, of course, and what according to some
marked the beginning of a new age in which it might be possible to
speak of an emerging GCS was the Zapatista movement which exerted
internal influence through its ability to mobilise external support via
media messages setting a precedent for recent early analysis of the 2011
uprisings in the Arab world (cf. Ramdani 2011).
What the concept of GCS relies on, therefore, is an understanding of

the media as an autonomous representative voice, a tool which can be
used to not only mobilise but also express global public opinion, and
thereby influence key outcomes. As such, the networks of organisations
and associations that GCS seeks to conceptualise are able to access and
communicate within the media system that is best connected to the
governance system. This ‘borrows’ a great deal from the enthusiasm
surrounding the potential for social movements to influence change.
Leading social movement theorists Keck and Sikkink describe the
activities of network activists – similar to the account of movements and
associations in GCS literature – as principled and strategic actors who
‘frame’ issues in innovative ways in order to bring issues to the public
agenda. Keck and Sikkink clearly recognise the role of the media in this:
‘To reach a broader audience, networks strive to attract press attention.
Sympathetic journalists may become part of the network, but more often
network activists cultivate a reputation for credibility with the press, and
package their information in a timely and dramatic way to draw press
attention’ (Keck & Sikkink 1998: 22). Olesen has expanded on this rela-
tionship further and argues that transnationall campaigns are particularly
dependent on the media due to their geographically scattered nature,
which means they are often less ‘visible’ to people in attentive, active,
and elite publics in different countries. What is more, they are dependent
on the media because they often deal with matters of the ‘conscience’,
do not have the basis of a well-defined group, and so need to mobilise
through information and symbol politics (Olesen 2005: 11). In order
to influence authorities, deliberated causes in the global public sphere
need to generate resonance in the public and the media. ‘Resonance
is the essence of discursive power and the enlargement of the scope of
conflict’ (Olesen 2005: 15). This is the way that norms and the terms
of debate are (trans)formed, which the literature understands to be the
most central function of GCS. As such, GCS gains political significance
by participating and relying on the media to articulate the global public
opinion surrounding global issues to institutions of power. The terms by
which this participation and articulation operate in the media are often
implied in the literature by the emphasis placed on the importance of
‘the spectacle’ or ‘events’, but are also seen to take place through long-
term campaigning and lobbying (cf. Castells 2009). Essentially, the
concept of GCS must rely on an understanding of the media as having a
central role in representing global public opinion and as expressing the
public deliberation within GCS which thereby influence, scrutinise, and
monitor the global system. For Keane, this includes the monitoring of
GCS itself. Public deliberation is a self-reflexive process and the media

contributes to that self-reflexivity ‘by publicising conflicting images of
civility, civilisation and civil society’ (Keane 2003: 172).
In sum, the predominant literature that advocates a concept of GCS
has a very specific understanding of how the media operates in society,
and it necessarily relies upon that understanding to provide the concept
with currency and coherence. As has been argued here, for GCS to be a
powerful concept in debates on global governance and democratisation,
the media must be seen to facilitate a sense of shared worldliness that
transforms the relation of self and/to other into global dimensions; the
media in this context provides the constitutive resources needed to
facilitate a global public sphere of communicative politics; and it brings
the deliberative processes within this sphere to bear in the global sys-
tem by expressing and representing global public opinion to centres of
power. This perceived ability for individuals to identify with, deliberate
on, and influence fundamental issues in the global system has attracted
a cohort of sympathisers, all enthusiastically predicting the ‘coming
of a new democracy’ (Florini 2003), largely based on such possibilities
of the media.
Global civil society and the liberal media narrative
What teasing out the relationship between GCS and the media has
shown is that the concept entails a very specific role for the media,
one that understands it to operate in a certain way. These functions of
the media are also based on some fairly fixed assumptions about the
nature of the (global) media system that facilitates the concept of GCS.
Writings on democracy may not frequently feature reflections on the
media, but what is consistent is a focus on establishing political legiti-
macy and representation without the regular use of force. Deliberative
democracy is a clear example of this. There is, therefore, as Davis puts
it, ‘a secure link between elite decision-making and the masses via mass
communication and public opinion’ (Davis 2007). Hence, writings on
democracy must include an understanding of how the media operates,
or should operate. The role and nature of the media as it is presented in
accounts of GCS is not a neutral and impartial understanding of how
the media works. It is rooted in a very specific, and contested, reading
of media history that has a clear ideological framework. This needs to
be further explored.
It is perhaps precisely because of the lack of dialogue between IR/glo-
balisation theory and media studies that the assumed universality of
the nature of the media as it is presented in GCS literature has arguably

escaped substantial scrutiny and historical reflection. Even within
media studies, history has traditionally occupied an awkward posi-
tion, branded by Curran the ‘neglected grandparent of media studies’
(Curran 1991: 21). Media history has been seen by some to suffer from
an ongoing tension between social theory and history (O’Malley 2002),
which has arguably led to a technological determinacy that dominates
accounts of media development. However, the case must be made for
a serious re-engagement with media history – the historical accounts
of the media as well as the media in historical accounts – as it brings
to the fore not just the ideological assertions of media discourse but also
the intrepid relation between media development and wider trends in
society. Separating politics (and history) from media development, apart
from making false claims to neutrality, is neither possible nor desirable
for critical analysis. Media history, as is the case with all presentations
of history, is a contested site of competing narratives.
The constitutive role of the media as it is understood in GCS literature
presents a clear interpretation of media history that also follows the
most dominant narrative of media development. The media, as it is
understood in GCS, is fundamental to debates on emerging global
citizenship, it is fundamental to the potential for people to deliberate
and debate democratically, and to represent the voice of the people
allowing them to influence authorities and elites. This understanding
of the media has a long history that largely sees the development of the
media as an autonomous force for positive change, a tool of empower-
ment, and a check on elite power. This reading celebrates the media’s
independence from government control, people’s ability to influence
democratic decision-making through free expression, and the possibil-
ity for the media to expand and sustain the political community. This
expressly liberal narrative of the media’s development largely follows
the oldest and most established narrative in media history, certainly
within Britain and America. It is perhaps no coincidence that the lead-
ing advocates of GCS stem from the Anglo-American hemisphere.
This liberal interpretation of media history basically argues that ‘a
succession of media became independent over two centuries, and con-
tributed to the cumulative empowerment of the people. The media
exposed government to public scrutiny. They enlarged the political
community, and facilitated public debate. They spoke up for the people
and increased public influence over government’ (Curran 2002a: 137).
Thus, the increasing independence, politically and d economically, of the
media from the state is in the liberal narrative a triumph for freedom
of information, for popular empowerment, and indeed for democratic

potential. It is, and should be, the role of the media to subject gov-
ernment to scrutiny, to be a mouthpiece of the people and to act as a
‘watchdog’. As has been argued above, this is largely the way the media
has been appropriated in the literature on GCS, although rarely explored
or analysed. It is based on an understanding of how modern societies
should be structured and has gained a common-sense appeal by tying
this function of the media to a notion of modernisation (Hallin &
Mancini 2004). Indeed, the Habermasian concept of the public sphere
has further encouraged this reading of the media by tying publicity to
questions of freedom. What is apparent in the literature on GCS with
regards to the media is a liberal reading of not only the potential but
the current operations of the media, which also to some extent rest
on a technological determinism at large. In other words, technological
developments are apolitical resources for social change, tools that have
acted as facilitators for ‘new’ politics, global interconnectedness, and
regained empowerment of the people. Communication technology is
‘used’ by the global public to further the democratic ideal. The media
is not separated from this enthusiastic reading of technology’s potential,
but is an implicit part of the process. This technological determinism has
also been accompanied by an unrestrained embrace in much of the GCS
literature, perhaps influenced by cultural globalisation theorists, of the
media as largely global, free from constraints of the nation-state, located
above and beyond territorial divisions. Not only is the media global in
the sense of individual media organisations now operating across the
globe and therefore not determined by the context of a single nation-
state, the media is also global in terms of providing global content, offer-
ing a context for common norms that bind the ‘global moral order’.
What notions of GCS seem to assume, then, is that developments
within the media have followed a liberal narrative that celebrates it as a
tool of citizen empowerment and as a marker of freedom. It is this under-
standing of the history of the media that allows it to acquire the role that
it has within the literature and that renders the concept of GCS current
and coherent. The media is understood to be ‘a servant of maturing
democracy’ (Curran 2002a: 137). This is a very attractive and dominant
reading of the media that still informs a great deal of analysis of political
and social transformations. However, despite the liberal narrative’s
common-sense appeal, and its compelling manifestation in accounts of
GCS, it is not an appeal that has gone entirely uncontested, although
critiques may have adopted the guises of other central debates. There are
some key difficulties with the concept of GCS and its advocates’ reading
of the media that bring to light much broader questions regarding the
way GCS is used to conceptualise and explain social change.
Critiques
The concept of GCS, although widely appropriated in debates on civic

activism and democratisation, has been met with some substantial
criticism. For some critics, the varied use of the phrase leaves much to
be desired in the way of a useful analytical tool, either because it has
become an incomprehensibly abstract concept (Olesen 2005) or an actual
endorsement of the privatisation of decision-making central to the neo-
liberal vision of the good society, which some of its advocates claim to
resist (Chandler 2007, 2009; Wilkin 2002). What the literature on GCS
fails to account for, according to its most serious critics, is in fact a com-
prehensive understanding of its own context. This criticism is directed
towards GCS as both a concept of political analysis and a normative
ideal, a distinction the literature itself seems to be confused about. When
scrutinising the concept of GCS the question of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and of
their relationship becomes of central concern. It is argued here that the
understanding of the media in the literature on GCS not only questions
the linearity of this relationship but also highlights wider misconcep-
tions about the nature of power relations, the location of power, and the
dynamics of social change. By examining some of the central concerns
of those critical of GCS and the role granted the media by advocates of
this concept it is clear that the nature of the media as it is understood in
the literature is problematic and, ultimately, may question the strength of
GCS as a concept of political and social activity in the global system.
As Fierlbeck argues, for GCS to be used as an analytical term its advo-
cates must make clear the political role they see it playing (Fierlbeck
1998: 157). As has been outlined above, the predominant understanding
in the literature of this role is to see GCS as operating between market
and state, in a more or less autonomous sphere of citizen empower-
ment. It is on this basis that GCS occupies a place in the governance of
the global system, as an ‘alternative mechanism’ for democratising and
monitoring centres of power. The legitimacy upon which GCS is able
to do this is based on the deliberative model in which GCS is the mani-
festation of a public sphere, one within which organisations and asso-
ciations engage in dialogue and debate that seeks to influence global
decision-making, beyond, across, between, and within, nation-states.
As has been outlined above, the concept of GCS relies on a specific
understanding of the media in terms of shaping a global consciousness,
constituting a public sphere where deliberation can occur globally, and

allowing the voice of GCS associations to reach the sites of global gov-
ernance, largely appropriating a globalised liberal model and historical
narrative of media developments.
Such assumptions show, some would argue, a fairly weak understand-
ing of the power relations within any social order, as well as of the nature
of any abstract global space. At a fundamental level GCS advocates rely
on the ability for individuals to make use of public reason within com-
municative or ‘dialogical’ democratic processes, and reach consensus on
that basis in order to carry out legitimate democratic decision-making.
As such, public reason, to some extent, has a transcendental quality,
allowing for what Habermas calls Herrschaftsfreier Diskurs (domination-
free discourse) (quoted in Friedrichs 2005: 47). Drawing on lessons
from Foucault regarding the nature and operations of power in society,
critics of the Habermasian model argue that the notion of ‘consensus’
or, perhaps even more fundamentally, the notion of ‘public reason’
is – similarly to Foucault’s understanding of ‘truth’ – in fact intrinsically
linked to the concept of power. In the words of Foucault, ‘“[t]ruth” is
linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and
sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend
it – a “regime” of truth’ (Foucault 2002: 132). Mouffe, for example, in
her criticism of the deliberative model upon which GCS rests, states:
Power is constitutive of the social because the social could not exist
without the power relations through which it is given shape. What is
at a given moment considered as the ‘natural’ order – jointly with the
‘common sense’ which accompanies it – is the result of sedimented
practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior
to the practices that bring it into being.
(Mouffe 2005: 18)
This would arguably include any notion of the ‘reasonable’. As such,

Foucault’s emphasis on power shows a concern not with the ideal of
‘true democracy’, but with the historical conditions out of which par-
ticular democratic forms emerge. In other words, the literature on GCS
must engage with the relations of power that constitute the context out
of which the concept is understood to have developed.
Similarly concerned with the conditions for what is considered truth
or knowledge, Fraser’s initial critique of Habermas’ concept of the public
sphere rests on the assumption that it is possible for interlocutors in a
public sphere to bracket status differentials and to deliberate as iff they
were social equals. Indeed, such bracketing, Fraser argues, usually works
to the advantage of the dominant groups in society and to the disad-
vantage of subordinates. (Fraser 2003: 87) Drawing on Marx’s criticism
of liberalism in On the Jewish Question, Fraser argues that the delibera-
tive project assumes that it is possible to create a democratic order on
the basis of socio-economic and socio-sexual structures that generate
systemic inequalities rather than finding it necessary to challenge and
expose such inequalities (Fraser 2003). Indeed, understanding democracy
in the dialogical act plays into to what Marx would arguably consider a
‘thin’ notion of materialism, and provides an incomplete explanation
of social transformations, much the same mistake that Feuerbach made
in his account of religion as outlined in Marx’ Thesis on Feuerbach (Marx
1978). Feuerbach ‘does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a
social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs
in reality to a particular form of society’ (Marx 1978: 145). In other
words, by not providing a substantive analysis of its own context, the
concept of GCS is trapped in an ideational framework – that is, relations
of exchange are confined to idealist phenomena separate from material
forces – and it cannot critically account for the (material) conditions that
constituted and sustained those ideas in the first place. A Marxian reading
of Foucault’s understanding of power relations, and that those relations
operate in, through, and as a product of discourse, targets the concept
of GCS by highlighting not the power effects of ideas but that epistemic
claims have to be analysed in relation to ‘non-discursive domains (insti-
tutions, political events, economic practices and processes)’ (Selby 2007).
As will be further discussed in the final chapter, it is worth asking, there-
fore, whether the nature of democracy as presented in GCS – its diffusion
of decision-making away from a central state and into an abstract space
of individuals, the notion of change in the ideational, and its bracketing
of differences in the discursive – is essentially the political logic of late
capitalism. Indeed, in line with Chandler, it is worth questioning the way
in which normative appeals to global ‘spaces’, epitomised by the theoris-
ing of GCS, may be seen to privilege the individual over any social col-
lectivity and may essentially be undermining the possibility of political
community in post-territorial community (Chandler 2007b). As will be
explored in the final chapter, of specific concern in this book is how this
critique of GCS is highlighted in the role attributed to the media in the
literature, explicitly and implicitly. As Fraser states:
In stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to

develop unequally valued cultural styles. The result is the development
of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of

members of subordinated groups both in everyday contexts and in
official public spheres. Moreover, these pressures are amplified, rather
than mitigated, by the peculiar political economy of the bourgeois
public sphere. In this public sphere the media that constitutes the
material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and
operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually
lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus
political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes
informally.
(Fraser 2003: 87)
What advocates of GCS must face up to is a real and substantial

challenge to the media narrative invoked in the literature. The liberal
narrative provides an appealing understanding of the role of the media
that resonates deeply with the values of liberal democracies, especially
within Britain and the US. It understands media history as a progres-
sive development that has moved us further and further along the
path to realising the democratic ideal. This narrative has been reju-
venated in the last two decades with the celebration of communica-
tion technologies’ facilitation of new social movements, grass-roots
activism, and global solidarity, which for some essentially culminate
in an emerging GCS. However, does this provide a proper analysis and
understanding of developments within media? In truth, the debate on
how and why the media has historically developed goes to the heart of
the discipline of media studies. Indeed, it goes to the heart of historical
reflections in general. It is therefore curious that it has fostered such lit-
tle debate in discussions on GCS. Examining some of the key problems
with liberal media history arguably re-introduces the need to engage
more comprehensively with notions of power and inequality and with
definitions of politics, developing some of the debates outlined above.
What is more, it introduces the need to look afresh at the context in
which media discourses are produced. Indeed, placing questions con-
cerning the organisation of the media at the forefront of the debate may
precisely be the exercise needed to illuminate the complex relation-
ship between discursive forces and (material) change, and essentially,
whether GCS is an appropriate framework for contemplations on global
governance and democratisation.
2
The Organisation of News
What needs to be examined specifically in light of the debate on how

the media has developed is the extent to which the media does in fact
operate according to the understanding of it outlined in the previous
chapter, explicitly and implicitly, in the literature on ‘global civil soci-
ety’ (GCS). As such, it needs to be asked to what extent the media can
be regarded as ‘global’ as it is seen among advocates of GCS, providing
a common ‘global moral order’ to frame the operations of GCS activity.
Furthermore, what needs to be addressed is the way in which the media
provides a ‘global public sphere’ that facilitates the public delibera-
tion that GCS claims to be a manifestation of, and indeed it must be
addressed whether developments in news media, including develop-
ments with the internet, may be seen to represent or express this ‘global
public opinion’ as a key influence on the governance of the global
system. Of course, as has already been alluded to, these understandings
of the media are closely related and overlap, but they do highlight dif-
ferent dimensions of the way in which GCS has emerged as a concept.
The ‘globality’ of news
The extent to which the media can be regarded as global in the way
that it is understood to be in the literature on GCS, incorporates ques-
tions of not just how the global media market is structured, but also the
extent to which production of news operates along a global logic that
is able to comprehensively deal with events that occur beyond nation-
states in a way that can be seen to address a global public. In other
words, it must be ascertained to what extent the international news field
is increasingly producing what can legitimately be called ‘global news’.
Indeed, where ‘globality’ exists in the media, it must be examined what
34
The Organisation of News 35
and whose version of global is being presented in the media, how and
on what grounds, and indeed by and for whom is the global moral order
being shaped. What is at stake here is not whether news media is a global
commodity but whether it sustains a notion of global citizenship. This
debate has been dominated by the global public sphere theorists, on the
one hand, who see the roots of global citizenship in the current inter-
national news field and, on the other, political economists who see the
field as a manifestation of the ideological dominance of the powerful.
Both camps arguably suffer from a lack of empirical investigation (Cottle
& Rai 2008) and, indeed, of a comprehensive understanding of what
constitutes ‘globality’. Rather, there has been an overemphasis on the
globalisation processes of the media in terms of the deregulation and lib-
eralisation of the broadcasting and telecommunications sector, without,
perhaps, a proper debate on how these developments have manifested
themselves in the organisation of news and news practices.
The widespread understanding of media globalisation is that the
emerging media system is increasingly global in governance, ownership
structure, production, distribution, and consumption. As Flew high-
lights, in much of the literature there is the tendency to assume that we
have moved in a relatively seamless fashion over a relatively short time
from a system based upon locally or nationally based media to one of
global media. This argument is typically grounded in an understanding
of the global reach of new technologies in media, the transnational
expansion of media corporations, or – particularly crucial in this con-
text – the increased availability of a common repertoire of media images
and experiences (Flew 2007: 25). In a great deal of the debate on these
developments, this understanding of media globalisation has been cou-
pled with what has arguably been a much broader turn in social science
regarding the way in which ‘new’ social and political processes should
be understood, much in tune with the framework out of which the
concept of GCS emerged. As Curran argues, this ‘revisionist orthodoxy’
understands globalisation to be about a ‘decentred’ and ‘disorganised’
process engulfing all of humankind, and transforming developed and
developing countries alike; it is bringing into being a more intercon-
nected and cosmopolitan world; and it is releasing new cultural and
political energy by creating new spaces for bonding and solidarity,
enabling new voices and marginal groups to be heard, and fostering
multiple identities and greater social diversity (Curran 2002b: 172).
Previously, this orthodoxy was grounded in or incorporated the notion
of the ‘global village’ initially presented by McLuhan (1964), but it has
developed into arguably more nuanced and sophisticated analyses of
media globalisation in recent years by centring on notions of global

citizenship and the global public sphere. As Volkmer argues,
McLuhan’s approach was the first attempt to analyse the profound

impact, not so much of internationalisation, but of the simultaneous
worldwide distribution of cultural techniques on various dispersed
societies, exposed to the same signals and messages from a cultural,
societal and political viewpoint. For this reason, McLuhan’s studies
on the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ as well as his attempt to outline cultural
co-ordinates of a ‘global village’ are still today, almost 40 years after
they were first published, a profound and always intriguing starting
point to our understanding of ‘globalisation’.
(Volkmer 2003: 11)
On this basis, Volkmer goes on to argue that the growth and diversifica-
tion of satellite and network technologies and the launch of globally
operating channels is further ‘de-balancing’ conventional national
public spheres by, on an individual level, creating a new concept of
world citizenship (Volkmer 2003). With regards to news media, in par-
ticular, she makes the case that ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ news contexts
have been replaced by a ‘new worldwide “translocal” political space’ in
which journalism gains a new role as a ‘mediator’ between the global
public sphere and microspheres. For Volkmer, this development has
been epitomised by her earlier study on the global news network CNN
International: ‘CNNI has reshaped the conventional agenda of internal
or “foreign” news and created a platform for worldwide communica-
tion. This journalistic initiative has altered the focus of global news in
an interrelationship of changing political centres and peripheries, and
has given a new meaning to news, journalistic values, the setting of a
global agenda’ (Volkmer 1999: 2). Indeed, she makes the case that a
worldwide available audiovisual, satellite-transmitted ‘communication
platform’ has been created which allows access to an expanding variety
of ‘human’ issues and serves new worldwide types of political organisa-
tion which constitute ‘globally imagined communities’ (Volkmer 1999).
Volkmer goes on to argue that ‘from this global public sphere, consist-
ing of a worldwide available audiovisual, satellite-transmitted “commu-
nication platform”, a global civil societyy emerges which can be regarded
as part of a global “syncretization”’ (Volkmer 1999: 5; italics in original
text). As Keane has pointed out, this is epitomised by the staging of
global media events which ‘invite public controversies of power before
audiences of hundreds of millions of people’ (Keane 2003: 81).
Although McNair maintains some scepticism regarding this linking of

digitisation and democratisation processes, he is similarly enthused by
the way in which the combination of new technologies in the wake of
the end of the Cold War has simultaneously created the infrastructural
foundation for the emergence of a global public sphere and a new glo-
bal ideological realignment necessitating greater ideological flexibility
on the part of news organisations (McNair 2005). What is more, these
processes are encouraged by the emergence of a global news market
which limits the possibility for propaganda by any organisation seeking
to sell journalism to global publics. He states: ‘UK and US-based news
organisations dominate this information market-place, as they always
have, but in the political environment of the twenty-first century satel-
lite TV and radio broadcasting accommodates an unprecedentedly [sic] c
diverse range of editorial perspective, simply because organisations,
whether based in Atlanta, Qatar or Dubai, must operate in a marketplace
of many providers and demanding audiences’ (McNair 2005: 176). As
such, the globalisation of the media market and of news organisations
and practices has facilitated not only a heightened global consciousness
around a common pool of global issues but also the increased empow-
erment of the individual to obtain the diverse information necessary
to participate in and make rational choices about these binding global
issues.
This understanding of media globalisation has been met by strong
critique from the political economy tradition which, not necessarily
disputing the fact of globalised media as such, has made the case that
these processes are leading not to a form of global citizenship in any way
related to the notion of a global public sphere, but to the creation of a
few global media oligarchies based in the West, part of the practice of a
new form of imperialism (cf. McChesney 2001; Herman & McChesney
1997). This argument foregrounds the strong tendency towards owner-
ship concentration in the global media market, which allows a few geo-
graphically mobile corporations operating globally to obtain increased
power over an increasingly large part of the world, over and above
nationally based institutions including government. What this leads to,
according to the radical critique of global media, is the reinforcement
of relations of economic and cultural dependency, a new international
division of (cultural) labour (Flew 2007: 74). Moving beyond decid-
edly macro-structural concerns which dominate much of the political
economy literature on global media, some crucial literature has shown
how the dissemination of news discourses coming from this global
media marketplace form a part of this broader argument. What the
globalisation of news media allows for is ‘the replication throughout the

periphery of the class structure of the core countries’ (Richard Maxwell,
quoted in Zhao & Hackett 2005: 7). That is, the way in which global
news ‘flows’ mirrors ‘the contours of international economic exchanges’
(Alleyne 1997: 32), meaning that Western-based media forms, content,
and structures have spread to the global South forming part of a broad
‘infrastructure of socialisation’ in ‘cultural imperialism’ (Zhao & Hackett
2005: 7). The nature of news being entrenched in this context is what
Thussu describes as ‘global infotainment’ defined as ‘the globalisation
of a US-style ratings-driven television journalism which privileges priva-
tized soft news – about celebrities, crime, corruption and violence – and
presents it as a form of spectacle, at the expense of news about political,
civic and public affairs’ (Thussu 2007: 8). These news practices form part
of the broader deepening of ‘Americana’ which through both globalised
as well as localised versions of infotainment are leading to the global
legitimisation of the ideological imperatives of a free-market capitalism
(Thussu 2007). As Thussu has pointed out, this is not to say that the glo-
bal flow of media products is solely unidirectional from the media-rich
North to the media-poor South, which has arguably been an oversimpli-
fied understanding of how the radical critique has presented media glo-
balisation. Indeed, new transnational networks have emerged, including
from the periphery to the metropolitan centres of global media (Thussu
2007b). Although the export of media products is still dominated by
Europe and North America, having more than 80 per cent of the share
of global exports of newspapers, periodicals and recorded media, the
circulation of cultural goods from places like China, Japan, South Korea,
Brazil and India have become increasingly important (Thussu 2007b).
In the context of mainstream news, this has especially been highlighted
in the explosion of research on Middle Eastern-based Al--Jazeera as a
marker of the ‘re-balancing’ of the global news environment (cf. Sakr
2001; Zayani 2005; El-Nawawy & Iskander 2003). What the issue of ‘glo-
bal infotainment’ highlights, however, is the terms by which we may
understand notions of ‘globality’ and global citizenship, which differs
drastically from the interpretations presented in the accounts of the glo-
bal public sphere and indeed global civil society. Predominantly, empiri-
cal critiques of the extent of media globalisation have relied mainly on
studies of audience consumption, especially with regard to news, that
foreground the continued centrality of local and national sources in
how most people around the world consume their news (Hafez 2007;
Curran 2002b; Magder 2003; Stanton 2007). Some of these critiques also
tend to highlight the importance of the different local contexts in which
(global) news is received that will impact profoundly on how such news
is interpreted and question any common global moral order (Flew 2007).
This is no doubt central to the debate on how we may understand the
media’s role in providing a binding global consciousness that pre-empts
a bounded global ‘space’ as presented in the concept of GCS. Of interest
here, however, is the specific way in which news practices in themselves,
within the current context, challenge or support the idea of ‘globality’ as
argued by advocates of GCS. This has arguably come under less scrutiny.
There has been some focus on these questions within the news cover-
age on ‘suffering’ that have argued that news coverage on suffering can
adhere to a kind of cosmopolitan understanding of the world, depending
on how such topics are covered. Chouliaraki, for example, argues that
possibilities for shifts towards more ‘cosmopolitan agency’ can occur in
some forms of news discourses that appeal to public action on distant
suffering without reciprocity or guarantees (Chouliaraki 2008). Although
this is an interesting shift away from the perhaps limited emphasis on
Western imperialism in discussions on global media, it arguably lacks a
broader critical investigation into the terms on which news discourses
are initially formed. That is, how practices within both global and local
news networks embedded in broader structures come to define what
constitutes global news and how such news should be represented.
With regards to global news networks that hold so central a position
in discussions of global citizenship, the limited research on practices
within such organisations highlights key issues about how the ‘glo-
bality’ of news may be understood. Campbell (2004), for example,
points out that with much more airtime to fill, constantly provid-
ing material for the screen, being expected to comment on events as
they happen, and a global audience to attract and serve, questions of
perspective and agenda in global broadcast news are actually far more
pertinent than other types of outlets, including global news agencies
which otherwise traditionally have a very big part to play in shap-
ing global news (cf. Horvit 2004). What is more, he makes the case
that global news networks such as CNN practice a nationally defined
perspective and agenda in this regard:
CNN remains a fundamentally US company, in terms of organisa-

tion, production practices, content, and crucially audience. Although
access to global television has expanded massively in the decade or
so since the Gulf War, the dominant audience for global TV news
remains a North American and Western European audience. Besides,
regardless of its internal efforts to address issues of perspective its
dramatic journalistic successes have seen television news networks

around the world attempt to reproduce the styles and formats of
news inherent to CNN.
(Campbell 2004: 243)
Similarly, Hafez (2007) has made a forceful argument about the ‘myth
of media globalisation’ both in terms of the extent of the interdepend-
ence of media markets as well as the way in which topics are treated and
covered in different contexts. International reporting in media systems
across the world, he argues, ‘is produced for a domestic audience, not for
the regions in question themselves. This state of affairs has changed lit-
tle, even in the age of satellite television’ (Hafez 2007: 39). In his study of
media coverage of three major summits between Gorbachev and Reagan
in the late 1980s that could, in principle, lend themselves to the transna-
tionalisation of media institutions, Hallin pointed out just how nationally
centred journalists are, both in their political views and in their profes-
sional culture (Hallin 1994). Similarly, Stanton argues that Western news
media localise global news for the purpose of allowing citizens to perceive
they are part of the action attached to global institutions. However, he
argues that this ‘is not a realistic assessment of the situation. News is a
commodity traded between elites’ (Stanton 2007). Hafez makes the point
that even with the development of satellite television networks such as
CNN operating across many countries, this ‘is now merely a decentralised
variant of an American television programme, whose country of origin
remains easily recognisable in its agenda and framing. CNN tends to be a
mixture of characteristics of the American system and the target system
of the specific window; it is thus at best a multinational but not a global
programme’ (Hafez 2007: 13). Considering some of these arguments,
Magder also argues that we may live in an age of globalisation, but we
do not yet live in the age of global news per se, either in the sense that
audiences world over pay attention to the same international stories on
a daily basis, or even in the sense that audiences access more global news
than in the past (Magder 2003: 34). This last point is a crucial, and often
overlooked, issue in the question of ‘globality’ in news, and it highlights
the importance of pursuing these questions, not just in the context of
global news broadcasters but also in the context of how domestic news
outlets ‘fit’ within this debate.
As such, there are strong arguments within global media literature
which deeply challenge the idea that developments in media, especially
news, have produced a context in which we may conceptualise political
activity within a global ‘space’. These arguments need to be incorporated
into the debate concerning GCS. This literature needs to be supported

by more thorough understandings of the way in which practices within
news production feature in this debate, understandings that go beyond
just structural and consumption-based discussions about the extent of
media being global and globalised. What is more, questions of ‘globality’
in media need to tie into broader long-standing debates about the nature
of power relations in the production of media discourses that also become
pivotal – perhaps even more so – when these discourses are understood in
a global context. Here, it is important to incorporate the central tradition
within the sociology of news that has sought to address the relationship
between the media and the public sphere. This relationship becomes
more, not less, pertinent in light of the concept of GCS.
Deliberation and participation in news
As has been discussed in Chapter 1, the concept of GCS invokes the

idea that the media acts as a resource and facilitator for global pub-
lic deliberation, as an autonomous and representative ‘expression of
public debate’ (Kaldor 2001) which enables non-elites to exert influ-
ence and to participate in key centres of power. Although constitut-
ing little debate within the literature in IR, the idea of the media as
autonomous and representative has been vigorously debated in a
separate body of literature that has sought to address the relationship
between media and society and the processes involved in explaining
how media discourses – especially news – are produced. In debates on
the media and society – especially with regard to the notion of a public
sphere – what is essentially at stake is the extent to which the media
is ‘free’ to act as a genuine space of and for public deliberation. There
is a widespread sense in the literature on news organisation as well as
in the basic assumptions of journalistic training that news producers
are able to provide the resources for public deliberation and act as an
autonomous space by adhering to a critical sense of objectivity and neu-
trality. Schudson (2003), for example, maintains that despite a certain
element of control and restriction from external forces, news profes-
sionals essentially operate with a genuine sense of their own autonomy
which they are able to employ in the news production process. As such,
what guides news production are the staples of journalistic professional
ideology, namely objectivity and balance. Gans’s famous work on news
production also appeals to the force of these values and the power of
journalists to employ them in how we understand news. Of course, it is
important to remember that this was written before the digital age, but
the insights he presents are still important in debates today. He argues

that the production of news is more or less a tug of war between sources,
journalists, and audiences, which is ultimately resolved by power. This
power, more often than not, lies with the professionals (Gans 1979).
A large body of literature, however, challenges this view. This litera-
ture arguably suffers in its approach to the critique of news production
as a resource for public deliberation by singling out individual sources
of power, rather than understanding the news production process in
more holistic terms. Political economists have long tried to highlight
the way in which media is conditioned by and in turn reconditions
wider power structures. This has, for some, led to a direct concern with
ownership questions as perhaps the most obvious way of exemplify-
ing this relationship (Herman & Chomsky 2002; McChesney 2004;
Meier & Trappel 2007). What this literature sets out to argue is that
the notion that journalists are operating as free agents within the news
production process is a fundamental misconception. Rather, in order to
understand how news is organised, we need to have a deeper apprecia-
tion for the influence of how it is structured, especially with regards to
ownership. The question of who and what are owned in the sphere of
news media is important not just in terms of immediate, direct influ-
ence from the owner in news content (although this is very important
in some literature as is discussed below) but in the wider sense in which
the news media market is organised. As such, trends such as media own-
ership concentration and media convergence are highly significant to
the political economy tradition, because such ownership questions play
a significant part in the debate on the power relations of news produc-
tion. Meier, for example, makes the case that media ownership – and the
current dominant trends within media systems across the globe, most
notably ownership concentration – is important in our understanding
of news production because it homogenises journalistic norms, work
methods, and content through editorial cooperation, and, furthermore,
cross-subsidy and cross-promotion within corporations as a result of
ownership concentration leads to uncritical reporting as well as to parti-
san business journalism (Meier 2007: 88). This argument fundamentally
challenges the notion that journalists are autonomous agents within
the news production process and that the media in its current form is
able to act as a representative space for the public.
Rather, some media scholars argue that there is a definite influence
‘from above’ in the production of news (Goodman 1977; Curran &
Seaton 2003; Alterman 2003; Tuchman 1978; McManus 1994). Murdock
argues that this influence and element of control by owners/managers
take on two forms: ‘allocative’ and ‘operational’. ‘Allocative control

consists of decisions connected to overall policy-formulation; decisions
which include making senior appointments, allocating resources,
dictation of editorial lines and product investment lines, and control
over the distribution of profits. Operational control, in effect, consists
of making effective use of allocated resources and pursuing policy
decisions that have already been dictated’ (Goldsmiths Media Group
2000: 33). As such, the owner has a significant part to play in the proc-
ess of news production by ultimately being in control of resources,
policies, and, crucially, sometimes the appointment of senior staff. As
Curran and Seaton argue, this will have an influence on the news pro-
duction process and will curtail editorial freedom by creating a certain
‘ethos’ within the organisation of how and in what direction the news
product should develop (Curran & Seaton 2003: 85). What is more, the
commercialisation of news media is also tied to ownership influence. In
other words, the media owner determines the extent to which the news
production process is guided by a concern with corporate interests and
profit over and above any (other) values in the news production proc-
ess. Tom Johnson, former publisher of the LA Times and later president
of CNN, remarks in Alterman’s study of news production:
It is not reporters or editors, but the owners of the media who decide
the quality of the news … produced by or televised by their news
department. It is they who most often select, hire, fire, and promote
the editors and publishers, top general managers, news directors, and
managing editors – the journalists – who run the newsrooms […]
Owners determine newsroom budgets, and the tiny amount of time
and space allotted to news versus advertising. They set the standard
of quality by the quality of the people they choose and the news
policy they embrace. Owners decide how much profit should be
produced from their media properties. Owners decide what quality
levels they are willing to support by how well or how poorly they
pay their journalists.
(quoted in Alterman 2003: 27)
This understanding of the role of the owner in the news production

process is echoed in key works within the literature. McManus’s study
of news, for example, clearly concludes:
I would argue that the primary role is played by major investors and
owners. Of course commercial news departments must pay attention
to consumer tastes. And to the degree that they are supported by

advertisers, media firms must provide them competitive vehicles for
their messages if they are to stay in business themselves. And news
departments must maintain access to news sources. The degree of
control exercised by these outside forces, however, rarely matches
the influence investors/owners wield through top management.
Of the four trading partners – consumers, advertisers, sources, and
investors – only the last is also the boss.
(McManus 1994: 32)
Similarly, Tuchman draws inspiration from the famous A. J. Liebling

quote: ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’
(quoted in Tuchman 1978: 164). Although an owner may rarely inter-
fere, they still have the last word (Tuchman 1978: 164).
Therefore, the question of ownership in the production of news
should be of central concern in the debate on mediated public delib-
eration. Political economists present two central concerns regarding
control and influence in the media. Firstly, although the number of
media outputs and channels may have increased along with globalisa-
tion processes, media ownership patterns have predominantly reflected
a trend of centralisation, granting more outputs in the hands of fewer
people. Secondly, the rise of the corporation in the global media mar-
ket has made it an industry driven by profits, granting media, includ-
ing news media, an almost entirely commercial status. News media
has generally come to be regarded a financial millstone rather than a
service; the public at large has gone from being citizens, to being con-
sumers. Therefore, media output has become commercialised, catered
to sell rather than inform. What is more, subject to intensified market
forces, the production process has experienced a strain on resources as
a result of greater competition for audiences and advertising revenues.
As such, news media has become commodified, recycled, and has
adopted populist, entertainment-oriented news values (Davis 2007).
News media has increased its coverage of human interest stories that
have a much more easily comprehensible narrative and can cater to a
wide range of consumers; public affairs coverage has been reduced, and
complex underlying issues are ignored in favour of fast, ‘soundbite’ type
news (Curran & Seaton 2003). What is more, the radical tradition sug-
gests that these processes of commercialisation and growing corporate
control benefit existing social relations of power by pronouncing an
implicit political bias in media content: ‘Consumerism, class inequality
and individualism tend to be taken as natural and even benevolent,
whereas political activity, civic values and anti-market activities are

marginalised’ (McChesney & Schiller 2003: 14).
It should be noted, however, that the arguments that ownership is
becoming increasingly concentrated and increasingly driven by profit-
maximisation are deeply contested within the literature. Largely due to
the development of ICTs, the most celebrated argument has it that the
media market has fragmented to the extent that a host of new players
have been allowed to enter the market, and media outlets have there-
fore significantly increased (Compaine 2000; Demers 2002, 2003; Picard
2002). The diversification and pluralism of media content therefore pro-
tects against the sort of influence and control from the media owner with
which the school of political economy concerns itself, and therefore sup-
ports the GCS conception of the media as an ‘expression of public debate’.
Picard states: ‘changes in regulation and technology have created oppor-
tunity for many new firms to provide the communications systems and
content. And hundreds of new firms have entered markets to do so. Even
with that change, however, the big companies and players still dominate
media industries, although not to the degree they once did’ (Picard 2002:
41). Although Picard disputes the level of concern with media ownership
concentration that political economists call for, he does, unlike others,
share the concern of corporate media ownership’s influence on the com-
mercialisation of the news production process. For Pickard, this is indeed
central to understanding media content, and the strength of the concern
for profit-maximisation is undervalued in debates on the autonomy of
the media. Instead, as argued by Demers and Compaine, the dominant
discourse in these debates maintains that questions of media ownership
matter very little (Curran 2000: 3). Rather, news content is driven by
sources (Demers 2002) or consumers (Compaine 2000).
The notion that the news production process is democratised through
the empowerment of the consumer to exercise choice forms a central
part of the liberal understanding of the role of the media in society.
News media sells on the basis of trust, and if it loses this sense of credi-
bility within society citizens will, with the power of consumption, reject
the product, thus enabling a form of self-regulation to uphold journalis-
tic autonomy. With the increased ability of consumers of news to dem-
onstrate their desires and wants through technological innovation, the
power of citizens to shape the news production process has increasingly
become a significant factor. However, as outlined above with regards
to the effects of commercialised news media, the enthusiasm for con-
sumer power in news production is met with caution. Hamilton’s purely
economic study of the media, for example, makes the case that allowing
consumers’ desires to drive news coverage conflicts with ideals of what

the news ought to be (Hamilton 2004: 7). Similarly, Franklin makes the
widely echoed argument that what consumer-focused news production
has prompted is ‘a revision of editorial priorities in which the need to
entertain audiences and readers has superseded the need to inform them’
(Franklin 1999: 4). What arguments such as that presented by Compaine
fundamentally misapprehend is the manner in which so-called consumer
power is tied in with other sources of influence, such as corporate
concerns for profit and the manifestation of an organisational ethos
that caters to such concerns exercised by the owner.
The point is that the current global political economy has significantly
shifted the debate regarding journalist autonomy versus external control,
and what is at stake here is the subtlety of social conditions and everyday
practices that play a part in the extent of journalist autonomy. As jour-
nalist Nick Davies argues, the rise of the corporate media owners who,
in a push for profits, look to cut costs while staying competitive in terms
of volume of output has furthered the dependence on easily accessible
and established sources increasing the power of political and economic
elites (Davies 2008). What it has in effect meant for the production of
news is that a much larger role is played by source-suppliers such as
news wires and PR agencies (Davis 2002). The importance of this aspect
of the news production process plays out in several forms. Radicals have
long argued that this dependence on sources not only undermines jour-
nalist autonomy, but more than that, it allows for certain sources that
hold greater ability to get their information into the production process
of news – either through their de facto standing in society or through
the use of certain resources – to dominate the perspectives of news
discourses. As Sigal argues, journalists are tied to sources by their mere
‘social location’: ‘They occupy fixed places, geographically and socially,
that bound their search for sources of news’ (Sigal 1986: 16). The very
structure of the news organisation impacts on the kind of sources
they will and will not come into frequent contact with, for example,
by the simple categorisation of news topics and beats. What is more,
these definitions of news are achieved by certain complex processes of
‘institutional definition’ in which certain arenas of social life are con-
sistently worthy of journalistic attention (Golding & Elliott 1979: 151).
A great deal of literature on news sources understands these processes
to be guided by claims to authoritativeness and credibility that fit the
professional values of journalistic practice (Sigal 1986; Hall et. al. 1978;
Manning 2001). In other words, by entertaining notions of ‘impartial-
ity’, ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’ journalists are driven to understand news
and newsworthiness in terms defined by sources that are already seen as

credible and authoritative in society – what Hall et al. (1978) famously
described as ‘primary definers’. As such, the very professionalisation of
the journalistic practice that supports its legitimacy claim to the public
and sustains the liberal understanding of the media as an autonomous
space – exercising ‘neutrality’ and ‘balance’ – is actually dictating the
news production process in favour of certain actors and sections of soci-
ety over others. These ‘accredited’ sources (Hall et al. 1978) are argued
to be, more often than not, the most powerful in society whose power
is then (re)confirmed or further nurtured by their built-in advantage
in the competition to define news issues. The problems with this argu-
ment, as highlighted by Schlesinger (1990), and further developed by
Manning (2001) and Davis (2002), are rooted in its perhaps too linear
or deterministic understanding of the source–journalist relationship. For
one, ‘primary definers’ may not speak with one voice, may not have
equal access or the same level of access over time, and may not prevent
less powerful groups from challenging definitions and discourses in the
news. Nonetheless, when taken in conjunction with broader structural
developments, most notably the commercialisation of news media, there
is a strong argument for considering how these also impact upon the
nature and sorts of relationships that are formed between news produc-
ers and other actors in society. As Manning alludes to in his research on
sources, the joint pressure to produce news in a faster cycle together with
the pressure to produce news that pertains to the values of professional
ideology encourages an increased reliance on official, well-established
sources and news wires for news stories (Manning 2001).
Furthermore, in conjunction with the broader trends of the media mar-
ket, radical media scholars have drawn attention to other sites of influence
in the news production process that challenge the notion of media and
journalist autonomy. In Gans’s account of news production in 1979, busi-
ness department officials may like to influence editorial decisions in order
to increase audience size and attract advertisers; although he argues that
they can only make proposals. As such, agents such as advertisers play only
a very small part in his analysis of news (Gans 1979: 214). This reading
of news production upholds the deeply entrenched and very widespread
understanding of the ‘firewall’ between business and news. In the radical
narrative of media development, advertising plays a much more significant
role. Beyond its place in the news production process, a convincing argu-
ment from the radical tradition has shown that advertising determines
the structure of media industries simply by advertisers choosing where
to spend their money (Bettig & Hall 2003: 90). As such, from the outset
advertising plays a key part in determining what sort of news, and from
what sort of news outlets, is distributed. Curran and Seaton (2003), for
example, argue that this influence of advertising plays a large part in
explaining the decline of the radical press in twentieth-century Britain,
partly by favouring large national papers squeezing out minority papers,
and partly by favouring advertising-rich audiences pushing out a press
serving the interests of the working class. Indeed, before it was an industry,
advertising was an ideology: ‘advertising is not only an economic institu-
tion operating for the benefit of a few major corporations and their owners;
it is also an ideological institution that supports and negates certain ways
of thinking … the overarching purpose of advertising as an institution is to
promote capitalism itself’ (Bettig & Hall 2003: 79). What that means is that
the demands of advertising manifest themselves not only in terms of audi-
ence size but also in terms of demographics, and indeed specific interests.
Therefore, even before moving to understand the relationship between
advertising and news discourse, within the process of news production
itself, it is important to understand how advertising as a central funding
resource for news media shapes the very patterns of the media market and
reinforces its logic. This, then, manifests itself as a major influence in the
news production process and news content. As Bettig and Hall argue,
The biggest void in news content is not caused by the direct or indirect
influence of any individual advertiser on any particular newspaper or
media company. The real hole in the news is a by-product of advertis-
ing as an institution. The primary effect of the idelogy of advertising
on the practice of news reporting is the coverage (or cover-up) of the
capitalist class as a class. Most mainstream newspapers have ‘business’
sections, but few devote space to labor and fewer still even acknow-
ledge the existence of capitalism.
(Bettig & Hall 2003: 100)
These long-standing debates within the sociology of news on the ability

of the media to act as and for public deliberation and the power rela-
tions that operate within the news production process have a promi-
nent place in discussions on GCS, but they are rarely directly placed
within such a context.
The representation of global public opinion

on the internet
Finally, of increasing debate within the literature on news production

is the impact of new technologies on how journalists do their work,
and whether the internet can perform the functions which are failing
the mainstream media in the current media landscape. There is no
doubt that the force with which the concept of GCS has manifested
itself within discourses on democracy can only be understood in light
of debates on the potential of the internet to further the functions that
the media as a whole is assumed to have in the literature: it can make
media more global, more deliberative, and ultimately more representa-
tive, thereby legitimising GCS as a critical concept. A great deal of the
literature on the internet has been concerned with primarily that –
the potential of the internet to ‘enhance’ forms of democracy – and the
vast majority of the empirical research on the internet has been framed
in accordance with the extent to which realities live up to or fall short
of this potential. As such, the manner in which debates on the internet
have developed over the past two decades has largely entrenched the
liberal understanding of the relationship between media and democ-
racy that the concept of GCS relies on by continuously positing and
centring on this ‘gap’ between reality and ideal of the ‘global public
sphere’. Therefore, the debate has arguably come to fully accept these
standards – and definitions – of democracy.
As such, although the literature in this regard is growing rapidly and
extensively, and the enthusiastic early claims of ‘e-democracy’ or ‘dig-
ital democracy’ (Hacker & Van Dijk 2000; see also discussion of this in
Chadwick 2006) are increasingly being matched with empirical research
either supporting or disregarding these claims, a lot of it is centred on
the internet’s potential for reshaping democracy influenced by the nor-
mative values presented in the works of direct democracy and public
sphere advocates. Negroponte (1995) and Rash (1997) were among the
first to argue that the internet offered the potential for a renewal of
direct democracy, whereas Dahlberg’s earlier work is concerned with
the internet as a public sphere. He has identified the conditions for the
emergence of a public sphere on the internet as being: autonomy from
state and economic power; reason rather than assertion; reflexivity;
ideal role taking; sincerity; and discursive inclusion and equality. That
is, firstly, discourse must be based on the concerns of citizens as the
public rather than driven by powerful corporate media or political
elites. Secondly, deliberation involves engaging in reciprocal critique of
normative positions that are provided with supporting reasons rather
than being dogmatically asserted. Thirdly, participants must critically
reflect on their cultural values, assumptions, and interests as well as
the larger social context and the effects these have on their own views.
Fourthly, participants must attempt to understand their argument
from the other’s perspective and commit to an ongoing dialogue with
difference in which interlocutors respectfully listen to each other.

Fifthly, each participant must make a sincere effort to make known all
information – including true intentions, interest, needs, and desires – as
relevant to the particular problem under consideration. And finally, as
far as possible, every person affected by the issues under consideration
is equally entitled to participate in deliberation (Dahlberg 2001). These
rephrase and elaborate upon Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ by
placing them in a context of the internet as a ‘communications medium
uniquely suited to providing multiple arenas for public debate that are
relatively spontaneous, flexible, and above all, self-governed. Citizens
that have progressively shrunk into their respective private spheres as
the historical public spheres collapsed are, in the Habermasian inter-
pretation, once again able to emerge as a public force’ (Chadwick 2006:
89). The internet is seen to be able to strengthen deliberative democracy
by supporting equality of access to information and an unrestricted
means of access; promoting interaction; encouraging the exchange of
services and information; allowing citizens to participate in the process
of decision-making; and by allowing news information to operate rela-
tively independently from traditional media rules (Gimmler 2001).
Furthermore, the literature on this debate will often, although not
always directly, understand that the internet is significantly contribut-
ing to the already increasing globalisation of the media by removing
the exchange of information and services from a national context. This
is absolutely crucial to the discussion on the relationship between the
internet and democracy in light of the concept of GCS. As Chadwick
argues, ‘while a computer connected to the Net grants you potential (if
not actual) access to all parts of a global network, owning a television
does not […] What makes the Internet entirely different is its potentially
global user base. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the world’s
inhabitants lack access, it is the largest global communication medium,
by a long way’ (Chadwick 2006: 11). Indeed, the potential this has for
democracy has been translated into formal political networks, such as
in a recent speech by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, that
seems to echo some of the arguments invoked in the literature on GCS
regarding ICTs:
I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communi-

cate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now
have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never
meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the
modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to
organize and take collective action together to deal with the prob-
lem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this
makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what
I would call the creation of a truly global society.
(Gordon Brown, speech at TEDGlobal, July 2009)
As such, the internet has to a considerable extent been presented as a

technology that enhances elements of globality as well as possibilities
for deliberation and representation in the media.
There are a great deal of different ways in which the internet is seen
to nurture these developments whether that be by analysing how the
internet furthers the mobilisation of social and political movements
(Fenton 2008; Cammaerts & Van Audenhove 2005) or greater engage-
ment and citizen participation in political processes (Dahlgren 2005,
2009; Dahlberg 2007; Norris 2001; Polat 2005) or increased knowl-
edge and/or improved deliberation between citizens (Dahlgren 2005;
Eveland et al. 2004). These are all crucial elements in the assessment of
GCS and, although deeply intertwined, are actually very different argu-
ments. Perhaps partly due to the infancy of the field, the debate on the
internet and democracy tends to suffer from a muddling of quite differ-
ent questions into one broad debate. As such, the internet tends to be
discussed as a single entity with a singular, linear relationship to demo-
cratic practice – regardless of whether the focus of study is on e-mailing,
discussion forums, government sites, advocacy sites, blogs or other
online practices – and simultaneously democracy tends to be equated
with more or less any other term that suits the particular empirical site
under study, whether that be ‘participation’, ‘deliberation’, ‘dialogue’,
‘communication’, ‘equality’, ‘solidarity’, ‘engagement’, ‘representation’,
to name some of the most prominent in the literature. The internet has
a role to play in all these different dimensions of democracy, depending
on what aspect of the internet is looked at, but it is crucial to remember
that these dimensions come from very different traditions within politi-
cal theory. Although some elements may overlap, they do not neces-
sarily share the same definition of what democracy means. To begin a
more sophisticated stage of this debate, therefore, it is arguably needed
that scholars define primarily what sort of democracy is being assessed
and indeed what level of analysis of the internet is under study.
What is of central concern in this book is specifically the question of
news practices. This aspect of the internet is being looked at in light of
the concept of GCS as a form of cosmopolitan deliberative democracy
which understands the media to play a central role in transforming us
into global citizens who are able to publicly deliberate with each other,
unconstrained by national contexts and thereby influencing relevant
institutions of power by making our opinion heard as a supplement
to the increasingly inappropriate representative national state. Thus,
it is important to understand how the internet is seen to facilitate the
expression of ‘global public opinion’, specifically in the way in which it
is seen to produce news. The area of online news has arguably received
less scholarly attention than many other aspects of the internet that are
seen to impact more directly on our understanding of democracy, such
as its use in institutional processes or direct communication and mobi-
lisation between citizens, social movements and political parties, as
outlined above. However, online news practices are increasingly coming
to occupy a central position within debates on the political economy
of media. What is of central concern to the radical tradition is whether
new technologies provide established social elites with greater influ-
ence and power in the news production process. Key here is the way in
which the online news market has come to mirror the structure of the
offline global media market (McChesney 2001). That is, the extent to
which news produced online continues to remain predominantly in the
hands of a very few, and predominantly Western (especially American)
elites. Although this is often discussed in the context of digital divides
or the ‘information gap’ (Nguyen 2008) – which sometimes risks reduc-
ing the debate to the issues of time and money, despite the fact that
crucial empirical research has shown that it is as much a domestic
divide within wealthy societies as it is a global divide between rich and
poor nations (Norris 2001) – the question of the structural patterns of
online news activity also throws light on the replication of concentra-
tion and convergence trends offline, as discussed above. As Paterson
(2005) argues, when it comes to online news, readers tend to gravitate
towards a handful of usual suspects: Yahoo!, MSN, AOL Time Warner,
Google, Disney and so on. What is more, there is a central concern
among political economists of the media that the business model of
online news, and its relationship to developments in the global political
economy, severely undermines the fostering of diverse sources of news
information. In the words of Freedman,
[t]he internet has the potential to expand the diversity of news

sources, to improve the quality and the breadth of news coverage,
and to deepen the interaction between news providers and their
audiences. Yet, given today’s harsh economic circumstances, the
internet has instead contributed to a possibility that the news of the
future is going to be sustained by a declining number of specialist

news organisations, a growing band of generalist news and infor-
mation businesses, and a handful of parasitical aggregators supple-
mented by an army of contributors working for free. Market logic, in
this scenario, is set to prevail over news logic.
(Freedman 2010: 50)
This latter aspect of news sources referring to voluntary contributors

generating content is arguably the aspect of online news that has received
the most scholarly attention in the debate on changing news practices
on the internet, perhaps because it is the development most obviously
central to the broader debate on the internet and democracy. Despite
the fact that the most widespread form of news media production online
is the mainstream news site, it is the development of citizen-generated
news content within online news that most exemplifies the internet as
having facilitated a ‘fourth’ kind of journalism, next to print, radio and
television (Deuze 2003). The rise of ‘citizen journalism’, as it is often
referred to, or ‘alternative’ news outlets is characterised by not being
associated with mass media corporations, and crucially, not exclusively
run and produced by news professionals. As Bardoel and Deuze state,
‘the exclusive hold of journalists on the gatekeeping function to private
households comes to an end’ (Bardoel & Deuze 2001: 97). A great deal
of this research is concerned with the rise of the individual blog as a
form of journalistic practice (Lowrey 2006), especially in ‘crisis report-
ing’ such as the 2003 Iraq War (Wall 2005). However, another aspect of
this ‘do-it-yourself journalism’ (Chadwick 2006) is the more organised
and collective practice of news sites being sustained by a diverse range
of users, such as Indymedia – perhaps the most researched site of this
kind. Chadwick (2006) argues that Indymedia occupies a broader sig-
nificant position within news production, because it represents a direct
and viable challenge to the mainstream media’s portrayal of important
international events, and it constitutes a new mode of news production
and distribution that cannot be replicated by traditional news firms.
This understanding of the site(s) has been echoed across a broad range
of literature concerning itself with a rise of this new kind of (citizen)
journalism (Allan 2006; Platon & Deuze 2003). However, a lot of stud-
ies of the site, as well as other similar sites often referenced in the same
debate – such as Wikinews, OhmyNews and OpenDemocracy – have
taken a more critical stance where this species of online news is con-
cerned by cautioning against overenthusiastic readings of its potential
to both challenge mainstream news and its viability as a suitable form
of news production and distribution in a global age (Pickard 2006; Salter

2006; Gruen 2009; Curran & Witschge 2010; Couldry 2007). These
studies highlight crucial questions regarding the place and definition of
quality in the news production process, as well as questions of culture
and resources among the participants in the production of alternative
online news sites. Pickard’s study on Indymedia, although keen to
advocate its radical democratic potential, highlights some of the strug-
gles with the alleviation of the network to a global level and the power
asymmetries that define its practices (Pickard 2006). Gruen’s study on
OhmyNews in Korea, on the other hand, investigates the importance of
certain national conditions and a certain historical context for the suc-
cess of online user-generated news sites that make these forms of news
spaces flourish more in some countries rather than others (Gruen 2009;
Curran 2010). These are all central issues that need to be placed in the
broader context of a ‘global public opinion’ seen to emerge partly based
on these developments in online news and ultimately seen to sustain a
concept of GCS.
Conclusion
GCS relies on the media in an anthropological sense, in shifting identi-

ties, norms and values to a global stage. It also relies on the media in
the traditional liberal sense by constituting a global public sphere and
empowering citizens to influence global decision-making. The media
acts as a mouthpiece for the people and as a representative space of pub-
lic debate. According to this narrative, the media has historically, then,
been a tool for popular empowerment, and developments in ICTs have
allowed for a ‘new’ politics to take us closer to the democratic ideal.
However, such a reading of media history has been highly contested
within the sociology of news. Radical readings of the media have drawn
attention to the misconceptions in the liberal narrative with regards to
the terms by which the media can be said to be ‘global’, the media’s rela-
tion to (other) social forces of power, and the misapprehension of the
notion of an autonomous media. Rather than being a tool of popular
empowerment, the media has historically been a tool for social control.
Developments in the media, and indeed in technology in general, are
not apolitical and neutral, but are rooted in a political economy. All the
key functions of the media that provide the foundation for a concept
of GCS must therefore be scrutinised in the current context. In a time
when the media plays an increasingly important role in the dynamics of
the global system, appropriating a thorough understanding of how the
organisation of news actually operates has to be absolutely key in any

formulation of how social and political activity in a global age may be
theorised, and indeed ultimately idealised. Thus, the key question that
lands on the shoulders of advocates of GCS is essentially whether the
developments we are witnessing within media are directing us towards
‘the mobilisation of global public opinion’ (Kaldor et al. 2005: 21) or
whether we are instead facing a situation where developments of the
media are further fragmenting and marginalising public voices in favour
of increasingly (private) elite decision-making. What is more, it must
be questioned whether such (mis)apprehension of developments in
media to some extent exposes GCS as a concept of ‘resistance’ that not
only follows rather than challenges existing power structures, but also
as a concept that in its appeal to a global ‘bounded’ space centred on
communicative politics is in fact driven by the individualised (lack of)
political engagement that follows the neoliberal logic of late capitalism
its advocates claim to challenge.
A note on methodology
In its concern with the implications of developments in news practices
for ‘global civil society’ (GCS), the case studies presented in this book
endeavour to rely on methodologies that are able to provide the most
comprehensive account of how news discourses are produced, but also
to do this with an approach that is consistent with the central theo-
retical concerns of the book: namely a concern with the nature and
relationship between discourse, power and political economy and what
this means for debates on democracy. They seek to address the question
of not just how discursive forces are constituted but, more importantly,
how they are related to wider structures and relations of power. This
project thus has its roots in critical social science and it therefore uses
a combination of historical and institutional analysis, semi-structured
interviews and textual analysis in each case study. These case studies
have been chosen not just for their representativeness, authenticity and
credibility as news organizations, but also more specifically in order
to extrapolate and illuminate some of the key issues of concern in the
context of this book.1
3
‘Global Civil Society’ and Global
News Broadcasters: The Case of
BBC World News
Part of the development of a global space of politics in which citizens

can influence change is assumed to rely on an increasingly global
media, not just in terms of an interconnected and cross-border own-
ership structure, but in the very nature of the media, significantly
also in terms of the news. Satellite news broadcasters have come to
occupy an important part of this debate, partly because of technologi-
cal developments that make it easier to gather news from around the
world, but also, crucially, because of the growth of these broadcasters
and their expanding reach (see Tables 3.1 and 3.2). Since the launch of
CNN International, the idea of setting up news broadcasters that could
potentially have a global reach has grown across regions and has been
well-documented, most recently in an explosion of research on the Arab
global broadcaster Al-Jazeera.
- One of the largest global news broadcast-
ers in terms of reach, however, is BBC World News, which has received
much less scholarly attention than both CNN and Al-Jazeera.
- A news
broadcaster such as BBC World News, however, is fundamental to the
notion of global citizenship in the GCS nexus. Unlike CNN, which,
initially at least, understood itself to be an American broadcaster in a
global media market, or Al-Jazeera
- which defines itself in terms of pro-
viding an Arabic perspective on global news, BBC World News adheres
to being a truly global broadcaster, both in reach and in practice. It
broadcasts significantly more and longer global news stories than its
domestic counterparts during its 24-hour news dedicated output, and
crucially, it claims to do this from a global perspective. It therefore
comes closest to providing the informational resources that allow us to
speak of a ‘common bond’, a ‘global consciousness’ or indeed a ‘global
moral order’ at the basis of the kind of global citizenship that forms part
of the GCS concept.
56
‘Global Civil Society’ and Global News Broadcasters 57
Table 3.1 Global 24/7 TV news networks

Network Where based Launch year
CNN International US 1985
Sky News UK 1989
BBC World Television UK 1991
EuroNews France 1993
Al-Jazeera Qatar 1996
Globo News Brazil 1996
Fox News US 1998
Star News India 1998
Channel News Asia Singapore 1999
CCTV-9 China 2000
Star News Asia Hong Kong 2000
Phoenix Infonews Hong Kong 2001
NDTV 24 × 7 India 2003
DD News India 2003
Telesur Venezuela 2005
Russia TV Russia 2005
France 24 France 2006
Al--Jazeera English Qatar 2006
Source: Thussu (2007: 70).
Table 3.2 Audience reach of largest global 24/7 TV news networks
Network Where based No. of households (millions)

BBC World News UK 285
CNN International (English US 244.5
language services)
Sky News UK 145
Al--Jazeera English Qatar 100
Source: Company websites and press, figures for 2009.
In this chapter, these ideas are placed under scrutiny by questioning

how ‘global news’ should actually be understood. The question becomes
not only one of uncovering the terms upon which agenda-setting and
story selection is made when speaking to a ‘global public interest’ – and
how geo-political interests and national bias infiltrate such terms – but
also how essential liberal, and indeed journalistic culture and professional
values come to be transferred – and translated – to a global dimension.
Furthermore, it must be analysed how practices are shaped within the
news production process of global news by not only economic and
strategic considerations, but also by a continuous nation-state defined
worldview that rests on dominant political rhetoric. Thus, this chapter

will highlight the complexities of news production and ‘globality’ as
understood in the literature on GCS, even within so-called global news
outlets.
BBC World News – a brief history
Essentially a public service broadcaster, through its commercial arm BBC

launched BBC World Service Television in 1991 across Asia and the Middle
East. It launched in its present form in 1995, broadcasting in Europe,
Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and a year later in Latin America. BBC
World changed name to BBC World News in April 2008 and today as part
of the BBC Global News Division it broadcasts from a 24-hour newsroom
based in London as well as Washington where it broadcasts BBC World
News America for two hours every day. It is resourced by advertising,
subscriptions and from distribution revenues, which is rising as a source
of revenue. Although BBC World News is funded commercially, it relies
for newsgathering almost entirely on the resources available through
licence-fee funded BBC News and government aided BBC World Service.
This newsgathering service was in 2004 estimated to be made up of about
41 bureaux across the world and 600 staff, most of which are journalists.
However, the presence of BBC goes beyond these 41 bureaux through its
extension of language services and other affiliations (see Table 3.3). Apart
from having separate staff on the business side of the organisation, BBC
World News has some separate staff (roughly 100) working exclusively for
them in the London and Washington newsrooms – mainly management,
senior editors and producers – and BBC World News also funds some
separate correspondents. However, predominantly correspondents will
work across both domestic and global outputs. As is explored below, this
structuring plays a crucial part in understanding the news production
process for global news broadcasts on BBC World News.
In effect, therefore, BBC World News is run through funding from
advertisement, distribution and subscriptions and it may not dip into any
non-commercial monetary funds for its sustainability. Its operations are
an extension of BBC News, the publicly funded organisation that dates
back to 1922, and are entirely steeped in the institutional culture of the
BBC. The employees within BBC World News are predominantly trained
and employed within this long-standing organisational framework. BBC
World News is yet to make a profit from its operations, at the moment it
barely breaks even, and as such continues to rely heavily on its domestic
counterpart.
Table 3.3 Locations where the BBC has a presence (bold font indicates bureaux)
Europe (west) Europe Asia Asia Americas Africa Mideast/
(east + (subcon) (pacific) N.Africa
FSU)
Brussels Moscow Delhi Singapore Washington Johannesburg Jerusalem
(hub) (hub) (hub) (hub) (hub) (hub) (hub)
Paris Tashkent Colombo Hong Kong New York Nairobi Gaza City
Rome Belgrade Islamabad Beijing The UN Dakar Cairo
Berlin Sarajevo Kabul Shanghai Los Angeles Lagos Amman
Athens Warsaw Kathmandu Tokyo Mexico City Lusaka Baghdad
Istanbul Budapest Dhaka Seoul Buenos Aires Addis Ababa Tehran
Copenhagen Prague Bombay Bangkok Sao Paulo Asmara Beirut
Madrid Astana Calcutta Jakarta Havana Kigali Dubai
Vienna Tblisi Sydney Miami Kinshasa Rabat
Geneva/Bern Manila Ottawa Luanda
Lisbon Kuala- Vancouver Mombasa
The Hague Lumpur Bogota
Nicosia Taipei Lima
Auckland Santiago
Caracas
Source: Company website and information at BBC World
W News (from 2009).
59
Nonetheless, currently BBC World News is one of the biggest players

in global news broadcasting and has a comprehensive stake in the glo-
bal media market in terms of reach (285 million homes – see also Figure
3.1 for how this reach is structured) which is one of the largest reaches
of any global broadcaster and has, according to some, the largest audi-
ence of any global news channel (78 million viewers every week). This
audience is according to research carried out for the BBC predominantly
made up of affluent travelling Europeans (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3), but
it has a potentially global demographic make-up. It is important to
note, however, that currently almost half of its total audience reach
remains within Europe. BBC World News also forms a fundamental part
of debates on news and global citizenship due to its crucial standing
as the most trusted news channel in pan-European surveys, especially in
the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. Within the BBC itself, in a cli-
mate of rolling news and where domestic outlets are perceived as giving
less attention to foreign news coverage, BBC World News is also becom-
ing an increasingly important outlet for the organisation and is increas-
ingly also seen as an important tool in foreign expertise and in getting
news access. Although it has rolling news when this is considered to ‘be
required’ (senior manager), perhaps in slight contrast to CNN and Sky
News, for example, BBC World News output is predominantly made up
of half-hour structured news programmes every hour combined with
half-hour feature programmes or documentaries and advertising.
Defining global news at BBC World News
Because the news production process at BBC World News is structured

around scripted half-hour news programmes every hour, the news pro-
duction process is comparable to that at a regular terrestrial scheduled
broadcaster in the sense that every half-hour programme has a set agenda
of news it seeks to follow. As such, it is crucial to understand the complex
and multifaceted process of deciding what constitutes the news agenda
for a global news broadcaster. This process needs to be understood both
on a ‘macro-level’ and on a ‘micro-level’; in other words, both in terms of
the overall BBC World News agenda and how it understands the broader
terms of global news issues, as well as the practices of day-to-day decisions
on what makes up the news agenda on any given day. These practices are
steeped in complex institutional and journalistic cultures that favour
certain worldviews over others, and are shaped by increasingly pertinent
economic and political pressures that speak to pre-set locations of geo-
political significance as determined by dominant political discourse and
Canada
Europe
3.9 Million
105.6 Million
Asia Pacific
14.8 Million
North America
3.4 Million
Middle East South Asia
24.6 Million 17.7 Million
Africa
North America Galaxy 13 2.0 Million
Central/South PAS 9
America & Latin & Australasia
the Caribbean 2.1 Million
Central America
Africa PAS 10 5.6 Million
South Asia PAS 10
Middle East Nilesat/Arabsat BADR3
Asia Pacific & PAS 2 & PAS 8

Australasia
Europe Eutelsat Hotbird 6/Astra I KR
Figure 3.1 Broadcasting reach of BBC World News

Source: BBC World News, figures for 2009.
61
• BBC World News attracts influential adult

decision makers, more likely to be in their
30’s than their 50’s.
Avid news followers and active news

influencers
Well educated and internationally focused
Mobile, cosmopolitan, frequent flyers and

early adopters.
Attitudinally progressive – interested in

lifelong learning – un-dogmatic.
They look beyond their immediate

environment, defining their interest more
broadly.
Figure 3.2 The language used by BBC World News to define their audience
Source: BBC World News.
Affluent, professional, educated and international

• Avg Age: 45
• Male: 71%, Female: 29%
• University/ Post Graduate Degree: 44%
• Avg Personal Income: €54,491
• Twice as likely as average to have taken 11+ trips abroad in past year
• 76% more likely than average to be a BDM [business decision maker]
• 55% more likely than average to be a private sector C Suite
Figure 3.3 How BBC World News define their BBC.com audience
Source: BBC World News.
activity. It is therefore important to analyse the way in which the broader

questions of how news is defined within the news organisation and what
factors influence such definitions in conjunction with everyday practi-
calities of what stories to cover together come to highlight the power
relations of defining news at a global news broadcaster.
National and institutional prisms

Immediately, the fact that the BBC World News newsroom is based in
London is a crucial, although underplayed, factor in understanding
the ‘news culture’ within which the global news agenda is set and the
importance of institutional dependence in the shaping of this global
news agenda. The geographical base of the broadcaster has subtle, but
significant impact on the way in which news workers understand the
news selection process, despite some correspondents and indeed most
of management discounting it as a factor. Because BBC World News
is an extension of and shares an integral relationship with BBC as a
British organisation, the domestic political culture is from the out-
set an essential component in how staff understand their own work
and role. By this is meant not only that BBC World News adheres to
British media regulation and policies by being answerable to Ofcom,
the British broadcasting regulator – although highly significant in the
global translation of professional journalistic values as further explored
below – but also and perhaps more fundamentally the notion that BBC
World News staff are very susceptible to public discourse within the
United Kingdom, not least regarding the politics of the BBC itself as
a public service broadcaster. As such, the debates and criticisms levied
against the BBC in a domestic framework also impacts on the news
production process for its global output. News workers’ response to
questions regarding their role as agenda-setters and news-gatherers in
interviews therefore also felt defensive and hesitant as research was car-
ried out in the aftermath of a lengthy on-going period of scrutiny of the
BBC within the UK1. As one very senior manager within the organisa-
tion remarked upon confirming the credentials of this research: ‘there
are a lot of people wanting to hoax us’ (senior manager). The BBC has
within Britain had to sustain a considerable amount of unprecedented
questioning of not only its particular operations, but also its overall
purpose in an increasingly fragmented media market. Although the fear
prevailing within the organisation during the period of research may be
momentary, what is significant in this context is to note the extent to
which news workers within global news broadcasters are responsive and
considerate of domestic public discourse and political developments
regarding the media. Regardless of what the terminology may signify,
global broadcasters do not operate in some way ‘above’ or ‘beyond’
national contexts, but are in many ways nationally rooted and respond
to and consider the domestic political culture that prevails in the con-
text of which they are based.
Such contemplations come to play a part in how news workers under-
stand their own practice and the confidence and considerations with
which they engage in agenda setting and coverage in the news produc-
tion process. An example of this may be domestic discourse regarding
the (in)accessibility of news output, for instance, and the perceived

need to make news programmes more entertaining and appealing, or
it may be about a renewed emphasis on avoiding content that can
cause offense. Although such considerations within the BBC are mainly
confined to domestic output, the organisational debate that stems from
such public discourse also comes to play a part in how global news out-
put is defined. Indeed, the way the BBC’s institutional culture shifts and
evolves, as a whole, is fundamental to how employees in all sections
of that institution come to understand their own practices. Although
BBC World News within the BBC may have its own agenda that its
news production process adheres to, it is still part of and susceptible to
the BBC as a brand. It therefore shares the domestic reputation of the
organisation in its global practices. Indeed, in many ways, sharing this
reputation is part of what it considers to be its ‘commercial value’:
The editorial staff, if you work in the newsroom, you think just the
same as somebody who works for the license fee part of the BBC. And
that’s important for us […] And I also happen to believe that those edi-
torial values have very strong commercial values. The reason people
come to the BBC as opposed to other channels, and there’s an awful
lot of research which tends to prove this, is because they trust us, they
rate us, they think we are a high quality channel. Commercially, all
those brand values are what bring advertisers to us.
(Senior manager)
That is, the brand that the BBC has come to represent through its
domestic development is a fundamental part of the appeal BBC World
News is able to enjoy globally, both with advertisers and audience.
This is important in understanding how global news is defined as it
may be argued that BBC World News is in this sense first hand a BBC
broadcaster before it is a global broadcaster. It is part and parcel, and
extensively shaped by developments within its domestic ‘older brother’.
There is an organisational ‘ethos’ that plays a significant part in what
kind of news broadcaster the BBC is across its outlets, and this is played
out not just in terms of managerial decisions at BBC Worldwide which
are made with consideration of broader debates within the BBC, but
also through the comprehensive institutional training that most of its
staff has gone through. This means that without any necessarily direct
influences from the top hierarchical levels in the organisation, BBC
news workers are aware of how news is understood and treated within
the organisation. The extent of the impact of this institutional culture
in the news production process was summed up quite well by one news
worker speaking about their sense of autonomy in their work:
They would never say you must do it this way, but there is an on-
going debate, and if you are outside the mainstream consensus on
some things you would feel it pretty much. So the BBC does speak
with one collective voice, but it’s not like it’s forced in any way.
(Correspondent)
As such, the impact of the organisational ‘ethos’ may endure over time
but adopt strategies relevant to changing circumstances and is only
really felt by news workers in moments where there is a potential con-
flict with the practices that this ethos encourages. That is, the way in
which the BBC as an institution with a particular organisational culture
helps define what constitutes as global news is a complex, often unob-
servable process, but it is significant in understanding how news work-
ers are able to collectively, albeit contentiously, define a news agenda
for a supposed global public interest.
Furthermore, the fact that the main newsroom, and its news editors and
producers, operates out of London is also a significant part of understand-
ing the news production process in other ways, specifically in terms of
what news comes to be defined as important and indeed how it comes to
be covered. Although as part of the vision senior management is keen to
present, being in London is not in itself a big issue, ‘we don’t sell ourselves
in terms of being in London, we don’t make a big issue out of it’ (senior
manager), as one news editor based in the London newsroom noted, ‘This
is my world. This is where I get my information from’ (editor). When story
producers call up foreign correspondents to cover stories, these stories are
approached from a base in London, which is significant not just because
they necessarily have a British outlook, but story-selection is done fol-
lowing a value-system that confines to a specific, if not British, certainly
Western logic that prevails in the London media landscape. In other
words, by being news consumers themselves of predominantly UK news
outlets and particular criteria that define global news, news editors and
producers based in the BBC World News newsroom engage in practices
that are set within a specific cultural context. This means that deciding
what is important to a global audience is carried out within a considerably
narrow parameter of news consumption that is to some extent pre-decided
by the dominant news outlets that newsroom staff consumes. As one cor-
respondent remarked: ‘There is stuff we don’t cover that we should and I
think we don’t cover it sometimes because people that sit in London may
not have a sense for its importance and it is hard to persuade them when
money is tight’ (correspondent). This also means that people in more
‘remote’ areas in relation to the dominant organisation of news in London
are less likely to be asked to do stories, and news stories come more the
other way around, with foreign correspondents calling up the London
newsroom with possible stories. For correspondents placed in places like
Washington, Europe and the Middle East, ‘which people in London pay
attention to’ (correspondent) the decisions on stories come more often
than not from staff based in the London newsroom. They are therefore
also more likely to make the news agenda.
Furthermore, the notion of what constitutes an event, or a story, and
by the same token, what does not constitute an event or story, is based
on already ingrained criteria that have developed within a certain value-
system. The fact that global broadcasters are engaging in practices that
are pertaining to be shaped by a global public interest, the understand-
ing of this interest, global or otherwise, is rooted in an understanding of
news and newsworthiness that has developed within a specific political,
institutional and journalistic culture and these values continue to be
re-produced in a global context. This is also reinforced by the notion
that journalists also ‘play to their own strengths’ (correspondent) when
they consider potential stories. That is, they follow their own agenda
in terms of what they are interested in, what they are good at, and most
crucially perhaps, what they immediately understand. As such, the way
that ‘global news’ stories are covered will, to some extent, follow a pre-
determined framework that journalists within the culture of the BBC
can immediately make sense of.
What is more, although BBC World News may commission individual
features for its output, predominantly it can only set its agenda accord-
ing to what is produced through the newsgathering service which is
primarily organised around the perceived needs of BBC’s domestic
organisation. This structure of newsgathering thus reinforces the insti-
tutional dependence that BBC’s global news outlet has on its domestic
counter-part, and indeed the specific journalistic culture within which
that organisation of newsgathering operates. As one senior correspond-
ent said:
One of the oddities of the current situation is that we as an organisa-

tion are very much driven by our domestic core news. And increas-
ingly I think that will change. But at the moment, World News is a
kind of poor relation.
(Correspondent)
The newsgathering service is organised around the interests of two

straight funding channels; the license-fee payer and UK government
aid for World Service Radio. With the development of language serv-
ices as part of World Service Radio funded by government grant and
aid this organisation of newsgathering has become significantly more
‘nuanced’ (news editor) than being a straight domestically oriented
service. Nonetheless, despite its nuances BBC World News does not, as
of yet, directly fund any part of the newsgathering service. BBC World
News has a contractual agreement with the head of BBC News to get
the material it needs and wants for its output, and provides funds in
order to get this material, but, according to management staff, it is not
a consideration in the structuring and organisation of newsgathering
beyond its own dedicated office in America. The BBC newsgathering
service is made up of 41 bureaux and roughly 600 staff (see Table 3.3).
Outside Britain, the biggest of these bureaux is Washington, followed
by Jerusalem, Brussels, Delhi, Moscow, Beijing and Johannesburg. The
organisation of how bureaux are localised is a complex and an ‘evolu-
tionary, not a revolutionary, process’ (senior manager). A large part is his-
toric and follows patterns of long-term geo-political significance. There
is also, crucially, a historic link that ties in with British interests – such
as colonial legacy – which plays into the structuring of newsgathering,
as well as more recent considerations of British interests such as places
of conflict that may involve Britain, directly or indirectly. As a senior
manager clarified:
We would say Afghanistan and Pakistan is a key area for us and is

going to be so for the coming years, so we have put more resources
into that area over the last months, and quite a bit of infrastructure
has gone on, there’s been a big spend, so you are committed then
to at least sort of a five year period. We don’t do that on the basis
of today’s story. We do that on the basis of where the story is going
over the course of longer time. It’s about the fact that we have British
troops there, that there’s a war going on there, that this is a post-9/11
world, it’s very important in the so-called war on terror. So that’s
what we base our resources on.
(Senior manager)
This reasoning highlights a number of key issues for understanding

the organisation of news and for understanding how global news
comes to be defined. Geo-political significance and so-called British
interests are central factors in the definition of global news and this
reasoning is inevitably reflected in the output on BBC World News

(see Figures 3.4 and 3.5 below). As one news worker reiterated: ‘if you
look at where we are strong, where the BBC is strong, where does the
BBC have the most resources, they tend to be the places that domestic
audiences have been more interested in’ (news editor). What is more,
these geo-political factors in the global news agenda are defined in
a context that is also determined by wider rhetoric regarding the
nature of conflict and violence, which are regarded as immediately
newsworthy. There are two issues to consider in this context. Firstly,
international – or global – reporting, and the rationale that guides the
organisation of international reporting, continues to be overwhelm-
ingly centred around places of war and conflict above and beyond
many other issues. That is, what comes to be considered newsworthy
in a global context speaks overwhelmingly to preset notions that war
and conflict is the essence of international reporting. This notion is
emphasised throughout the organisation and is deeply felt among edi-
torial staff as well. As one experienced news worker noted with regards
to news stories from the Middle East, ‘it’s quite hard to get the Middle
East on air if there is no blood involved’ (editor). Secondly, those
places of war and conflict that are primarily worthy of global media
attention are decided to a considerable extent by perceived national
interests and, crucially, by dominant political discourse by prevailing
institutions of power. In other words, the organisation of news does
not necessarily challenge already existing dominant political rheto-
ric regarding what areas and issues should be of global concern, but
rather, necessarily often follows and reiterates such dominant political
rhetoric within the process of agenda-setting in global news broadcast-
ing. What is more, the notion that an investment in newsgathering in
certain strategic areas demands a certain newsgathering commitment
to those areas points to another significant factor in understanding
how global news is defined. Places or issues deemed newsworthy
often enjoy a fair amount of staying power in the hierarchy of news
agendas, partly because newsgathering is organised around key areas
of interest in this way. News from these areas of interests that have
demanded a lot of resources therefore need to continuously sustain
the news agenda in order for the investment to make sense. As such,
ultimately – and crucially – the location of a bureau is about its news
‘value’ (senior manager):
BBC has been going for 75 years now and all the time news has been
we’ve had foreign correspondents, so there’s a certain amount of
inheritance that goes with where you are. But obviously we look at
it on a regular basis and ask do we still want to be there, what are we
getting out of it, and there’s a finite pot of money, so you have to
spend it quite carefully, you can’t be everywhere you want to be.
(Senior manager)
International
Africa 4%
4%
Middle East
6%
Europe
20%
South Asia
8%
Asia Pacific
9% North America
20%
Latin America
14%
UK
15%
Figure 3.4 Geographical distribution of lead stories on BBC World News during
January 2010 – June 2010. Sample size: 100 programmes
Africa Australasia
6% 1%
International
6%
Europe
20%
Latin America
6%
Middle East
9% UK
18%
South Asia
9%
Asia Pacific North America

10% 15%
Figure 3.5 Areas referenced in news coverage on BBC World News based on 100
news programmes watched during the period January 2010 – June 2010
Therefore, despite BBC World News’ adherence to a ‘global perspective’,

the very structuring of the newsgathering service it overwhelmingly
relies on to sustain its output is based on considerations of news value
with predominantly British interests in mind along with other key news
considerations, such as dominant political discourse regarding conflict
and war. Setting an agenda around that may therefore also mean that
what defines global news at BBC World News is partly what might be
not only British public interest more than any other public interest, but,
crucially, also what dominant political rhetoric – from dominant politi-
cal powers – categorises as strategically significant.
This question of perspective in the coverage of global news at BBC
World News is further complicated by the way news production ‘trav-
els’ across the BBC as a whole. Most of the BBC World News stories are
produced by correspondents who work across BBC outlets, and stories
are often primarily considered for domestic use when they are being
covered. As one experienced correspondent argued,
[b]ecause World is commercial and paid for commercially and then

there is the licence fee which is the motor behind the BBC that keeps
the whole operation on the ground, there is a real financial argument
why you should not spend all your time doing stuff for BBC World.
(Correspondent)
The audience in mind for the majority of BBC News staff, therefore, is
predominantly a British audience, a point reiterated by most of the cor-
respondents interviewed. This is an organisational question regarding
the set-up of BBC newsgathering, as well as a purely economic ques-
tion. ‘If there is a story and the domestics are interested, then they have
bigger budgets’ (correspondent). This domestic focus may also explain
why, when asked, BBC foreign correspondents tend to read UK newspa-
pers as their main source of news, sometimes predominantly over local
newspapers of their bureau location. It may therefore be argued that
their sense of newsworthiness and the way news is covered continues
to be substantially informed by the UK press and newsworthy events
within the British media landscape.
Professional and journalist prisms
The concern with domestic audiences entrenched by the institutional

and structural organisation of the news production process further high-
lights the issue of how news workers translate professional practices in
domestic journalistic cultures onto global canvases. That is to say, BBC

World News as a global broadcaster comes to define what constitutes
global news on the basis of a specific understanding of legitimacy and
credibility of news-making translated from a domestic political culture.
For example, the credibility granted to certain decision makers over others
(e.g. governments), and to certain pre-fixed locations of perceived geo-
political significance has grown out of a specific institutional and journal-
istic history. These professional practices are entrenched and strengthened
within the context of BBC World News as it has a concern ‘with spread’
(senior manager) and a need to fill a 24/7 rolling news cycle. Therefore,
it may be argued that story selection and news coverage is prone to be
shaped by the most immediate and accessible sources of potential news,
which continues to be structured around the most ‘credible’ voices within
specific powerful nation-states and not by some supra-national, global
forces which operate above – or below – national governments.
When asked about the difference in covering a story for a domestic
outlet versus a global outlet, the far majority of correspondents do not
consider there to be a major difference between the two. Any changes
to a news report for BBC World News as opposed to BBC domestic are
largely cosmetic changes such as adding ‘British’ in front of a reference
to the Prime Minister. It does not demand a different approach in broader
terms. Part of the reasoning for this is firstly, the idea that Britain is ‘a cos-
mopolitan society’ (correspondent) where news has always needed to be
covered with an international perspective, regardless of the domesticity of
its outlet: ‘We have a diverse population anywhere. So those judgements
about what’s foreign and what’s not foreign; all news is foreign’ (corre-
spondent). As such, journalistic tradition of foreign news coverage at the
BBC is in some ways pre-catered for a global audience, without a different
set of criteria or approach. Secondly, because foreign news coverage for
a domestic British audience by its very nature of being foreign news has
to be accessible and catered for an audience not familiar with the local
context in question, pre-made assumptions of knowledge are inevitably
made rid of. As such, the coverage can be easily transferred to audiences
in other national contexts ‘because we are already taking an issue which
is somebody’s domestic story […] and simplifying it for a British audience’
(correspondent). In more general terms, there is a certain status in foreign
news reporting not to cater to domestic interests, but to keep an interna-
tional perspective regardless of outlet:
My job is to analyse and interpret and present […] for the BBC audi-
ences which its very fundamental audience is in Britain but it’s not
just in Britain, we’re an international broadcaster. So I tend to think

that you should start from the premise that you are reporting for peo-
ple who aren’t British, who are from another country. I don’t think
a British angle is important.
(Editor)
However, this is problematic in practice. Firstly, it is easier to get a

story broadcast in the first place if indeed it does have a British angle,
as it will therefore be picked up by domestics rather than having to
be commissioned separately by BBC World News. It is therefore an
important consideration in the initial approach of a story. As one news
worker stated, ‘if domestic TV news isn’t interested in doing it, that’s
the department that’s got all the money, so it’s hard to go and cover a
story in a proper way for TV if I can’t get the domestic side interested.
Not impossible, but it’s quite hard’ (correspondent). In budgetary terms,
BBC World News is working on a miniscule scale in comparison to
its domestic counterpart, despite the difference in reach: ‘BBC World
doesn’t have the money that various domestic programmes can direct
towards a story they want to cover so often BBC World is riding on
whatever the editors of domestic programmes want’ (correspondent).
Because of the financial structuring of BBC World News this plays an
important role not only in terms of whether the story will be covered
in the first place, but also in terms of the quality of the news piece.
Indeed, news workers do see a distinct difference in the quality of news
throughout the day on BBC World News depending on the subject being
covered and the extent of a British interest: ‘It does look like there are
different standards’ (correspondent). If a story has been transferred from
a domestic bulletin, resources for that story are substantially increased
(although decreasing) in stark contrast to coverage commissioned by
BBC World News uniquely for own broadcasting where budgets are
incredibly tight. Such inequality of production standard plays into the
further reiteration of the existing hierarchy in news content of what is
considered important and newsworthy.
Moreover, the straight transferral of news coverage from domestic
to global news outlets is problematic because unlike coverage on BBC
domestic, coverage for BBC World News is simultaneously a foreign and
a domestic story. That is, coverage should, in principle, be simplified
for an audience not familiar with the local context of the story at the
same time as being sophisticated enough to suit the audience whose
immediate context the story concerns. Indeed, the knowledge that
news coverage of a story may be watched by the people who are being
reported on in the story may in some ways increase the consideration

of news workers for local sensitivities and judgement and demand more
reflexivity in news coverage:
In the old days you could go somewhere, you could film your report,
send it back to the UK, knowing that the people you talked to will
probably never see it. That might tempt you to be a bit more judge-
mental, subjective or whatever you call it. But that’s not a good thing.
I think it’s very useful always to imagine that the people that you’ve
filmed are going to be viewing or seeing or reading your report.
(correspondent)
The reach of news coverage through global outlets such as BBC World
News is certainly a development that news workers are concerned with
and it brings into question debates regarding not only subjectivity, but
also language and the act of ‘naming’. Following this, BBC World News
should, in principle, be more considerate of its descriptions of actors
than, perhaps, its domestic counterpart. A common example used to
illustrate this is the use of the word ‘terrorist’, which has a blanket ban
within the BBC, but this is perhaps taken the most seriously for its glo-
bal outlet. As one news worker remarked, ‘There is the same editorial
policy, it’s just not as adhered to on domestics’ (correspondent). The
question of naming actors highlights broader concerns regarding the
ability for news workers to adhere to both a domestic and a foreign
context in the same news story. It highlights the way in which cover-
age of global news is a political manifestation of a set of power relations
in which the notion that the British audience is the primary focus
of a story as it is transferred to BBC World News is quite significant,
despite news workers not finding the British audience focus impor-
tant. It prioritises a certain set of discursive categories of how global
media events should be ordered and understood. That is, it assumes a
certain kind of knowledge, not just with regards to being aware of the
background or context of a particular news story, but in more abstract
terms with regards to how social orders are categorised that is to some
extent culturally shaped. This again speaks to crucial questions of how
legitimacy and credibility are practiced and re-enforced within the news
production process. Indeed, it implies that stories will tend to rely on
subject matter and viewpoints that are considered most ‘acceptable’
and ‘credible’ in most outlets so as to not need further or a different set
of viewpoints. It arguably also requires a certain amount of familiarity
with the subject matter for the story to ‘make sense’. So, for example,
as one news worker highlighted, a story about Somalia may have to be

initially framed in terms that seem familiar to Western audiences in that
context, such as drought or conflict, in order for more challenging or
unfamiliar nuances of the story to be incorporated, which the audience
will need to make sense of. Or, indeed, the story may not make the news
agenda in the first place if it lacks this initial sense of familiarity for
news consumers, including BBC World News staff, in the UK.
These considerations of familiar contexts in the framing of news
stories plays a fundamental part in the way professional values may be
practiced in the presentation of global news. News workers will often
explain the straight transfer of coverage from domestic to global outlets
as having an ‘international perspective’ (correspondent) or ‘global per-
spective’ (senior manager) on news and of adhering to deeply ingrained
values of ‘impartiality and fairness’ (senior manager). As one news
worker put it, ‘if you are gonna be fair and balanced you are gonna be
fair and balanced. I don’t think you’d be more fair and balanced whether
you are dealing with World or the News channel’ (correspondent). As
such, journalistic practices adhere to an understanding of these values
being transferrable across news outlets. The notion, however, that the
definition of impartiality – or fairness, balance, and objectivity which
are other similar phrases used by journalists – is without a cultural and
certain power relational context is problematic. Defining what it means
to be impartial in the treatment of news demands a certain outlook on
the world. What is more, the value of impartiality does not exist in a
practical vacuum, but is shaped and practiced within the context of the
news production process. This is not just with regards to where you start
from on the political spectrum so that people on the right deem some
news coverage too liberal and people on the left deem the same coverage
too pro-establishment. These debates certainly have their place in any
discussion of impartiality in the media, especially if discussed within a
global framework. However, what is at stake here is a more fundamental
question of categories of knowledge embedded within particular under-
standings of impartiality belonging to a particular journalistic culture.
That is, practices within the BBC adhere to a very specific understanding
of impartiality that arguably belongs to a certain political system and an
institutional framework where such an employment of ‘impartial report-
ing’ makes sense. That is, viewpoints are arguably taken from an already-
established pool of actors that should not necessarily include what may
be considered those of ‘radical’ or ‘unreasonable’ views and placed within
a framework of balance that may already be articulated. In a political cul-
ture where there are established opposing organisations of viewpoints
already accredited within society, such as political parties for example,

such an understanding of impartiality may seem uncomplicated. This
is reiterated by the fact that BBC World News must adhere to Ofcom
regulation on questions of balance and fairness. However, impartiality
in this sense can only operate to replicate already established powerful
discourses that frame debates. What is more, understanding impartiality
in these binary terms not only actively narrows the terms of the debate,
it also seeks to simplify and reduce issues to clear-cut opposing sides.
To an audience located in a liberal democracy where political debates
are often framed in such terms, employing impartiality in this way
reproduces the logic of the prevalent political system. Therefore, when
transferred to a global canvas, such an understanding of impartiality
imposes a certain political and cultural framework to the terms of debate
of global issues. It is not only a question of the extent to which this prac-
tice of impartiality excludes voices in global news broadcasting that are
not able to frame issues in terms of one opposing side against the other,
it is also a question of the extent to which such practice of impartiality
necessarily draws from already existing knowledge. That is, the extent
to which such practice of impartiality in the coverage of global news is
inherently conservative and therefore incapable of fundamentally chal-
lenging ingrained communicative contexts (see, e.g., coverage of the
G20 London Summit below).
Economic and market prisms
These conservative practices that come to entrench the existing social

order through national, institutional and professional prisms operate in
an increasingly complex media market that further shapes and re-enforces
the way in which global news is produced. Immediately, being a com-
mercial channel, BBC World News has a different relationship with its
audience than its publicly funded counterparts, whether that be BBC
domestic or the World Service. This relationship is a necessary, although
sensitive and difficult, consideration in agenda setting and coverage for
news programmes. There is an immediate audience impact on the news
agenda in terms of time-of-day and where there is likely to be a big audi-
ence. One senior staff clarified how this impacts current developments in
the overall BBC World News agenda:
I think what we’ve always tried to do is match a sort of an assessment

of what is significant globally […] We try and match that to what is
the level of interest in the bits of the world where we know that
people are more likely to be watching us. And that’s not a science,
you are just trying to make a judgement […] So if you get to early
afternoon UK time, in my mind I’m thinking our best audience now
is in the Asia-Pacific and so we are trying to do stories that will be of
interest to them. Later in the day we have traditionally a strong link
with India and the sub-continent, and Europe is also a strong area
for us and then we are increasingly targeting the United States. It’s
an opportunity for us to get news to people who are not always being
well served by international news in their domestic markets. That’s
how we are thinking in terms of who we are trying to reach.
(Senior manager)
Such considerations form part of not just the overall agenda, but have a
significant impact on the everyday editorial decisions within the news-
room and are conscious considerations among news workers regarding
what news stories make it into each half-hour news programme. This
specific targeting of certain audiences is arguably not only a strategy
to try and gather a bigger audience in global terms, but may also be
a commercial judgement regarding advertiser interests in certain rich
demographics that make up the BBC World News audience. Although
such considerations are downplayed by management, they are impor-
tant to consider in light of the picture of the audience BBC World News
presents to potential advertisers (see Figure 3.3 above). Global news
broadcasters, predominantly broadcasting in English, have an immedi-
ate attraction to advertisers in these terms by appealing to social elites
in non-English speaking countries, and indeed market themselves to
advertisers along those lines. As with other commercial broadcasters,
BBC World News needs to respond to both advertisers and audience, and
most importantly of all perhaps, their intimate relationship. Although
this relationship is most strongly considered in the commissioning
and editorial direction of their non-news programmes, that is factual
programmes and documentaries, where advertisers directly sponsor
programmes and therefore also have ‘a huge amount of influence on
the style, tone and content of programmes’ (independent producer), a
global news broadcaster must consider itself in relation to its financial
competitors across the output. Doing substantial audience research in
order to highlight the attractiveness of audiences to advertisers is part of
this aspect of global news broadcasting. A BBC World News press release
from February 2009, for example, drew attention to a recent survey
showing that ‘the channel is now watched by nearly 12 million upscale
Europeans every month, and continues to build strength in Central
Europe where, in the past six months, it has also grown in daily, weekly
and monthly reach. BBC World News is now watched by 30 per cent
upscale Central Europeans every month’ (BBC 2009), highlighting the
importance of a rich demographic in audience.
This is not to say that agenda-setting is shaped around the desire to
attract an advertiser-friendly audience, but it is important to recognise
that global news broadcasters, predominantly commercially funded,
base their success not only on reaching a large global audience, but on
reaching a certain kind of audience that provides them with an advan-
tage in a competitive, fragmented, market. News practices must adhere
to such pressures. This also speaks to the notion that a global news
broadcaster such as BBC World News has a larger proportion of business
news than its domestic counterpart. As one senior editor noted:
We know that our audience is interested in business. There is a busi-

ness slant. We get watched a lot by people who are in business and
travel a lot and watch in hotels. When we ask why do you watch BBC
World, it’s usually quite high up in their list of reasons it helps me
in my career. We probably do more business news as a result of that
than we would otherwise.
(Senior editor)
Of course, many of its audience members are involved in business and it

would therefore be in BBC’s interest to include global news that relates
to business in the running order, but it is also significantly in the com-
mercial interest of BBC World News to sustain, nurture and enhance
this section of its audience. The implication, therefore, that business
and financial activities lend themselves better to the definition of ‘glo-
bal news’ than, say, healthcare, needs a broad critical assessment (see
analysis of the G20 London summit below). It also speaks to the much-
debated shift in news production from audience as citizens to audience
as consumers. That is, commercial interests are met by understanding
the ‘wants’ of a resource-rich audience as well as nourishing the overall
consumption agenda by advocating business news as primary issues
in the ‘global public interest’, which means not only moving it up
the news agenda, but also feeding a lot of resources into covering that
news. As one correspondent noted, ‘we can tell when we get a particu-
larly consumer friendly story […] That’s the kind of thing you really
notice they go to town on’ (correspondent). Commercial interests in
this way arguably also play a part in that crucial definition of areas of
geo-political significance in the global public interest. Africa and Latin
America continue to occupy comparatively little of the ‘global news

agenda’ and the structuring of newsgathering outlined above partly
speaks to that (although BBC’s context of Britain’s colonial legacy does
mean that certain news stories in Africa get picked up more than other
global broadcasters perhaps, such as coverage of Zimbabwe for example)
as does the debate regarding advertisement and its audience dictation in
a competitive broadcasting market.
Increasing economic pressures also produces an inflection within the
overall bias towards powerful social and political elites of nation-states
in the production of global news by further entrenching the depend-
ency of global news broadcasters on dominant wire services, which
look to cater for as many news outlets as possible, domestic, regional
or global. Although editors are unsure how much of its output comes
from wires, it was clear from observations in the newsroom of BBC
World News that due to the 24-hour nature of the news cycle and need
for continuous output on the channel, wires are very frequently used to
add to the news agenda. This is especially the case with wires providing
pictures, which can sometimes in themselves become global news for a
broadcaster if they are visually interesting, such as natural disasters, or
quirky images, such as rising popularity in tango-dancing. Indeed, the
visual element of a news story may be an increasingly important fac-
tor in the story-selection process as perceptions of how ‘audiences can
be engaged’ (senior manager) develop. In order for stories to make the
news agenda there needs to be pictures available, or the possibility of
such pictures to become available, and these pictures preferably need to
have an engaging visual element. This is important and often not fully
considered in understanding global news particularly. As global news-
gathering is done in an environment that can sometimes be ‘hostile’ to
pictures, either in terms of simply not being visually very interesting,
or crucially, in terms of security risks or governmental restrictions on
filming, the stories that get covered and the stories that do not are nec-
essarily shaped by these factors. Indeed, despite notions that the world
is increasingly open and accessible to global media, restrictions set by
governments around the world continue to be an incredibly important
part of agenda-setting, as does the ability for news workers to gather
pictures in dangerous environments. As one news worker stated, ‘there
are some stories that we will still never be able to do’ (correspondent).
It is not just a matter of covering these stories without the necessary pic-
tures, a lot of the time such stories simply do not make the news agenda
when the pictures are not there. As such, global news media does not
operate ‘above’ national contexts, but the practices of news workers are,
crucially, tied to specific political systems that play a significant part in

determining the news that comes to form part of global deliberations.
Importantly, the restrictions on getting pictures are also shaped by
resource allocation and straight-forward practical questions of which
bureaux have readily available staff to actually film coverage and
which do not. In this way also, the organisation of newsgathering tends
to reinforce its own pre-fixed agenda of significance by producing more
stories from well-resourced geographical areas on the very basis of them
being well resourced.
Furthermore, as a visual medium, television lends itself better to cer-
tain stories over others and caters to certain notions of what an audience
expects from television, and this becomes an important part of under-
standing the story selection process for a global news broadcaster operat-
ing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Generally, correspondents
are aware before they pursue a story whether ‘it will work for television’
(correspondent) and this will impact on whether they find it a story
worth doing. As the BBC is looking to provide news in as many mediums
as possible and is changing the role of its journalists to produce stories
that can go across all outlets, it makes sense for news workers to mainly
pursue stories that can easily transfer across television, radio and the
internet. Although journalists will always try and make a story work for
television by doing two-way link-ups, or walking and talking, or doing
‘rants’, there is also a sense in which stories for television have to be
relatively simple and short. As one correspondent clarified,
Everything we do for TV has to be more broad-brush. It’s no good

even for a two and a half minute feature, which they call a feature,
even in that you can’t be too detailed and it’s difficult to reflect on
all the nuances of a story. You have to basically pare stuff down to its
basic component and then try and tell the story as fairly and evenly
as you can that way.
(correspondent)
That also means that a story may only get onto the news agenda in
the first place if it is considered to cater itself to this pared down form,
and to be able to be told without extensive reflection and covering
several nuances. Furthermore, the visual element is not only important
in considering what stories make it onto the news agenda; it may also
determine how long a story will be on the news agenda for. An impor-
tant policy development made in the General Assembly of the United
Nations, for example, may get a mention once on a news programme,
if at all, whereas pictures from demonstrations in Iran may run for

days provided that new pictures continue to come in, regardless of
global geo-political significance or indeed consideration for some form
of ‘global public interest’. By the same token, demonstrations in Iran
may equally drop off the news agenda if unsustained by an in-flux of
new interesting pictures. For this reason also, a great number of news
workers involved with BBC World News prefer its radio counter-part,
BBC World Service, for global news coverage. As a senior editor said:
On any particular day, when you look at the news agenda with a
proper international focus you’ll probably find that the BBC World
Service has a lot more interesting stories because radio is a lot cheaper.
If you look at the stories we cover and [the stories] they cover, theirs
will be a lot richer and more diverse. Because they don’t need the
picture, they don’t need someone standing there in Sierra Leone.
(Senior editor)
For BBC World News it continues to be crucial to have stories with pictures
of staff on the ground, and this is increasingly important in a media
climate in which ‘live’ and immediate currency are central selling-points
for global news broadcasters: ‘We [internal BBC] fight each other con-
stantly about getting access to correspondents live’ (news editor). In broad
terms, news stories increasingly have to have some form of immediacy,
or in the words of one correspondent, they need to be more ‘today-ish’
(correspondent), and should preferably be the first of their kind. Breaking
news has therefore also moved up the hierarchy of newsworthiness, and
is increasingly an attractive part of the news agenda: ‘Audiences are look-
ing to us to have the energy of breaking news’ (news editor). Being first
has, in fact, according to one news editor become so important that it
may undermine the credibility and validity of the story:
There’s this notion of emerging truths and that became what we are
now happy to live with. We accept that we don’t have the whole
picture absolutely clear and certain yet, but we know something is
going on and we know our audience want to hear it. So I will now
do breaking news more quickly than I used to. That’s a perception of
what the audience wants and what the commercial pressure is.
(News editor)
As such, it may be said that there is a sense in which getting a story fast
on to the news agenda and in the running order is more important than
the quality and getting confirmation of that story (despite objections of

such pressure among senior management). This is particularly impor-
tant in a news climate where so-called citizen journalism is receiving
increasing attention both in academic terms and by news workers,
nowhere more so than in global news broadcasters who often have to
rely on citizen-produced footage in news stories where they lack their
own. The competition to be first may jeopardise the process of verify-
ing such news material. It may also mean that there is ‘less explana-
tory news’ (correspondent) that makes it onto the global news agenda,
even though explosive news may be supplemented with some, albeit
relatively limited, ‘WDIM’ aspect, a ‘what does it all mean’ analysis
(correspondent). There is actually a curious contradiction here. At the
same time as the BBC World News agenda encourages more ‘today-ish’
news and ‘explosive news’, the BBC also wants its news workers to cater
its stories to be re-run on all its outlets forcing the immediacy of a story
to be considerably minimised. What it essentially means is that the BBC
World News broadcasting agenda is made up of a curious mix of explo-
sive or live news on the one hand and ‘time-less’ quirky features on the
other. What is important in this context, however, is the way in which
structural pressures mean that the kinds of news stories considered as
part of the global news agenda not only need to have a stimulating
visual element to them, they are also more likely to make it onto the
news agenda if there is an ability to do immediate television news cov-
erage from the location of the event or if it is a quirky story that fits the
format of a non-specific two-minute feature, although the former prior-
ity clearly dominates. For example, one correspondent’s thoughts on
BBC World News’ Middle East coverage (interestingly speaking before
the uprisings in the Middle Eastern region in early 2011) highlight how
journalistic practices steeped in these factors – increasingly pertinent in
the context of developments within the global media market – of geo-
political location, audience considerations and ‘visuality’ in conjunc-
tion influence what stories come to be considered global news:
I think there is a risk that we over-cover the Israel-Palestinian conflict

because we are all in Jerusalem, because it’s geographically small,
because the pictures are there, and the kind of significant, but almost
glacial things that are happening in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to do
with fundamentalism and regime change may be building slowly
which by their very nature are not explosive news until they happen
[don’t get covered].
(Correspondent)
In a climate in which there is a heightened financial concern, these

factors shaping how we come to define global news become ever-more
significant. Increasingly tighter budgets and scarce resources mean that
correspondents will make do with what has already been produced;
especially if they have to cater to both the editorial demand for imme-
diacy as well as transferability of coverage as outlined above. Rarely will
resources, temporal or monetary, allow for different packages depending
on the audience the coverage is trying to cater to, or indeed in most
cases, even additional viewpoints or interviews. Also, as has already
been noted, news correspondents are in most cases expected to cater to
not just one medium, but across all three mediums in which the BBC
seeks to deliver news: television, radio and the internet. This ambition
to cater the news production process to as many outlets as possible
across multiple mediums has partly also developed because technology
has made it feasible. That is, it is now technologically possible for a jour-
nalist to do work that previously would be the camera-operator’s job.
Furthermore, the internet allows for news-feeds to be of varying quality
that would not be suitable for television for example. Predominantly,
however, it is a vision of BBC management to reach as large an audience
as possible in a climate ‘where audiences are consuming their media and
their news in many more places’ (senior manager). Fundamentally, this
means that at the same time as news correspondents are expected to, in
some ways, sustain more outlets than ever before, catering to different
audiences, they are not necessarily producing more news stories. In the
words of one correspondent, ‘there is a feeling that in newsgathering
and in much of the BBC that value for buck has to be improved and you
cannot just do one media anymore’ (correspondent). As such, there is
a need to still sustain 24-hour rolling news and to remain competitive
as a global news broadcaster at the same time as the BBC is resourc-
ing a multi-media news organisation. Unable to therefore provide the
resources to do a large number of news stories, BBC management have
advocated ‘fewer, bigger, better stories […] and [then] make sure those
stories get plastered across all the BBC outlets’ (correspondent). As a
senior staff member clarified, this is also part of branding BBC World
News in this perceived media climate:
In a world where markets will be incredibly crowded, there will be

a lot of competition around, it’s important to pick the things that
are right for what you do. And I don’t think it’s going to be a selling
point particularly if you do everything everywhere, I think it’s going
to be, we do these stories and we do them this way and that’s what
makes us different from our competitors […] That does mean picking
fewer stories and the ones that matter to you and doing them well
and doing them better.
(Senior manager)
As such, global news broadcasters are, in the current media landscape,

under increasing pressure to in some way stand out in a way that
can become a unique selling point. However, as mentioned above,
the question of what stories therefore fall off the news agenda is
problematic. Thus, the fragmentation of the media market is not only
important in the question of audience fragmentation, it is also crucial
in understanding the actual process of news production. The response
to audience fragmentation by the BBC to make news available on more
outlets also means that ‘the pot is spread more thinly’ (senior manager)
for the actual news production process. Coverage, therefore, may have
to be as transferable as possible at its root in order to sustain the expan-
sion across media platforms. As a senior manager outlined,
[Correspondents] do what they can. They have to obviously. When

you’ve got limited people on the ground, deliver what is possible.
That might be the same story done in different versions for all differ-
ent media. Or it might be different pieces for different programmes.
But in general it’s the former. That you tend to make the best use of
the material that you’ve got across all three media.
(Senior manager)
The BBC World News worldview
As such, the definition of global news at BBC World News is shaped by

a specific institutional and journalistic culture that presents a worldview
based on a set of geo-political concerns through the prism of national, social
and political elites, strengthened and re-enforced by political and economic
pressures. Definitions of ‘impartiality’, ‘balance’ and indeed ‘global’ that
provide news coverage with credibility and legitimacy are shaped by this
context. Thus, it is not just a question of the nationalityy of predominant
viewpoints represented in a story (see Figures 3.4 and 3.5), but also, crucially
in the debate of ‘global civil society’, the kind
d of predominant sources ref-
erenced and viewpoints represented in a story (see Figure 3.6), that is, ones
that can be deemed authoritative within a specific political culture.
Figure 3.4 illustrates how the lead stories on BBC World News were
distributed during the period from January 2010 until June 2010 based
84
1400
UK Europe North America Australasia Middle East

1200
Number of viewpoints represented
Asia Pacific Africa Latin America International
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Executive/ Ordinary Interest Business/ Professionals Academia Media Celebrities/ Other
Legislative/ citizens Groups Financial Sports
Judiciary personalities/
Criminals
Actor
Figure 3.6 Viewpoints referenced on BBC World News based on 100 news programmes during the period January 2010 – June
2010
on a sample of 100 programmes shown at different times of the day

(these different times of day are important as the coverage caters to
certain audiences depending on time-zones as outlined above). The
stories were categorised according to the country that represented the
dominant actor in the headline of the story. This shows that in 55 per
cent of its news programmes BBC World News would lead with a story
concerning North America or Europe. In as many as 15 per cent of
its programmes, this lead story would concern the United Kingdom.
Outlining the geographical distribution of lead stories is important as
headline stories implicate a sense of importance in the hierarchy of the
overall news bulletin. The actors referenced within the entire news pro-
grammes are illustrated by Figures 3.5 and 3.6. These programmes were
predominantly all 30 minutes long (a few programmes were shorter
during weekends, and a few were longer depending on the time of day
they were being broadcast). Figure 3.5 shows the breakdown of the
geographical areas of viewpoints and Figure 3.6 illustrates what groups
of actors within these geographical areas were referenced as sources or
whose viewpoint was represented within this news coverage.
As can be seen from these figures, the viewpoints represented on BBC
World News come from Europe more than any other region with well
over a third of all the viewpoints referenced during the broadcasting com-
ing from that part of the world (38%). Interestingly also, viewpoints from
actors within the United Kingdom make up almost a fifth of the total view-
points represented (18%). As was indicated by looking at the geographical
distribution of lead stories, the viewpoints within BBC World News’ cov-
erage stem overwhelmingly from either Europe or North America, which
combined make up over half the total number of actors referenced (53%).
The distribution of the rest of the viewpoints are spread more or less evenly
across the other regions, with viewpoints coming from the Middle East
and South Asia both making up nine per cent of the coverage, Asia Pacific
making up ten per cent and Latin America, Africa and Australasia making
up the least of the viewpoints represented. six per cent of the viewpoints
represented come from international actors. If the data had involved
sport and business news, the figure for North America and Europe would
arguably have been considerably higher. It is interesting to note also that
although 14 per cent of lead stories concerned Latin America, these mainly
referred to natural disasters (especially the earthquake in Haiti, immedi-
ately followed by one in Chile) and in the actual coverage of stories, Latin
American actors make up only a marginal part (6%).
When looking at the practices of news organisation at BBC World News,
this geographical distribution of news coverage is not very surprising.
The practices of agenda-setting and the practices of how to cover global

news are catered around a certain cultural, political, and economical pre-
fix that means that news regarding Europe and the United States, espe-
cially, and the Middle East/South Asia (South Asia including Afghanistan
and Pakistan) to a lesser extent, is considered more newsworthy in what
constitutes global media events. These are essentially areas that are
strategically significant in dominant (Western) political discourse. What
is more, as Figure 3.6 demonstrates, the global news agenda is almost
exclusively centred around the viewpoints of political elites and state
authorities. In fact, state actors are referenced and used as sources in the
news coverage of BBC World News almost as many times (1401) as all
the other groups of actors put together (1558), making up 47 per cent of
the total viewpoints represented. The second most-referenced group of
actors in news coverage are ordinary citizens (referenced 435 times),
often used simply as ‘vox-pops’ providing reactions to events or as a sin-
gle group paraphrased in the coverage without any extensive or specific
statements. The third most-referenced group is ‘interest groups’, whose
viewpoints make up 14 per cent of the coverage (referenced 422 times).
Importantly, also, out of the political elites/state actors referenced, over
half are from Europe or North America (referenced 739 times). This is
not to say that state actors in any way provide harmonious viewpoints or
sustain a consensus. Indeed, there are many conflicting viewpoints
represented within this group of actors. However, what it does imply
is that despite BBC World News management vision of having a news
agenda that highlights ‘global connections’ (senior manager), this table
highlights the extent to which global news issues are defined in terms
of inter-statee relations, state-actors continuing to be almost exclusive
definers of global news discourse and the terms of global news debates,
arguably even more so than at domestic local news outlets (see the fol-
lowing chapter) based within the North-Western global hemisphere. The
practices of news production at global news broadcasters – the concern
with spread, accessibility and certain understandings of credibility that
are rooted in a specific political culture – are tied to news coverage that
considerably favours the representation of certain powerful social actors
over others.
Coverage of the G20 London Summit
Furthermore, the reliance on government sources impacts on the way

that global issues are ‘framed’ and presented in certain communicative
contexts. For example, the coverage of the G20 summit in London in
April in 2009 is a pertinent example of how global issues are categorised

and ordered in the news production process. The question is not
whether global issues exist, but whether journalistic practices are able
to accommodate such issues in a ‘nation-transcending communicative
context’ (Grimm 1997: 252). That is to say, to what extent are journalis-
tic practices rooted in a particular framework which relies on not just an
international (rather than global) order still structured around a promi-
nent nation-state and its interests, but also relies on an order in a wider,
more abstract sense, based on already existing established hierarchies
and relations of power that it continues to reiterate.
The London G20 summit ticks the absolute core values of newswor-
thiness for BBC World News as explored through the practices outlined
above: an issue with ‘global connections’ (senior manager) involving key
political elites and a (legitimate) possible British angle. The event was
therefore also comprehensively covered on BBC World News and even
justified a separate BBC correspondent reporting live from the event
specifically for BBC World News. Without going into a detailed discourse
analysis of the coverage, it is possible to tease out some fundamental
categories according to which the event was covered that highlight
problems of ‘globality’ in mediated news discourse even if produced by
a news broadcaster pertaining to a so-called global perspective. Looking
at coverage of the event, both bulletins as well as live rolling news (what
Chouliaraki calls ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ news, cf. Chouliaraki
2008), it is immediately possible to identify two distinct narratives
linked to the event that were covered almost in complete isolation of
each other, namely activities ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the Excel Centre in
London where the G20 meeting was held. Indeed, the activities ‘inside’
and ‘outside’ the summit were covered by two different correspondents.
The coverage of ‘outside’ activities was framed around two well-
established social categories: police versus protestors. The prominent
hook of the story was a concern with security highlighted by the fact
that the correspondent reporting on ‘outside’ activities was defined as
being on the ‘security beat’ by the studio presenter. This was the case
in both ordinary and extraordinary news coverage. As such, ‘balance’
in the coverage was achieved by presenting the viewpoints of these two
categories of actors with regards to the security measures taken by police
in order to ‘control’ (correspondent) the protestors. Direct reporting of
viewpoints, that is, using statements directly from the source, from these
groups of actors was confined predominantly to testimonies on this
matter. With regards to the motives behind the demonstrations, these
were summarised in the news bulletins as ‘opposition to the summit’
and, in one report, summed up ‘as a sign of what’s demanded from the
G20 leaders: a solution to the financial crisis and measures to ensure it
doesn’t happen again’ Motives were also implied by naming protestors
as ‘anti-globalisationalists’, ‘anti-capitalists’, ‘anarchists’ and ‘anti-war
protestors’. In one news package, protestors were defined as being there
‘for all kinds of causes’, giving the examples ‘capitalism’, ‘climate change’
and ‘war’. However, in all cases and in both practices of ordinary and
extraordinary reporting, these categories were placed within a broader
concern with security, highlighting the ‘level of anger’ and the amount
of violence and clashes with London police. In the news bulletin on the
1st of April a live link-up with a correspondent standing in the crowds
near the Bank of England, had the two-way dialogue between presenter
and correspondent concerning the riot police penning in protestors,
clashes between protestors and police, windows being smashed at the
Royal Bank of Scotland, frustration with police tactics, and the number
of arrests and injuries. As such, by framing the story on ‘outside’ activi-
ties around questions of security, developing it into a story on police
tactics, the event became primarily one concerning crowd control by
British police. Thus, this became a largely domestic story concerning
British public interest above anything else. It is therefore also notable
how much less coverage was given to ‘outside’ activities on BBC World
News compared to BBC’s domestic news outlets, and, indeed, in the
news bulletin on BBC World News on the 2nd of April, coverage of ‘out-
side’ activities at the summit had completely fallen off the agenda.
This amount of coverage is contrasted with the extensive air-time on
BBC World News given to activities ‘inside’ the summit, that is, to the
activities of the political leaders that had gathered for the meeting in
London’s Excel Centre. Live coverage was given to press conferences by
‘key’ political leaders, Britain and the United States, as well as France
and Germany. The dominant story initially within this coverage was the
possible clash between French/German interests and British/American
interests. On the news bulletin on the 1st of April, the story was domi-
nated by the activities of President Obama of the United States. The
first package of the news bulletin highlighted his arrival and his meet-
ings with other world leaders, focusing on the possible significance of
Russia, China and India at the summit: ‘With Europe divided and new
powers such as China, Russia and India coming to the top table, both
men [US President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown]
know that Western capitalism has failed millions and must now reform
and prove itself again’ (correspondent). The rest of the coverage on
the news bulletin focused directly on national interests and inter-state
relations, discussing first the French position, US-China relations and

US-Russia relations. On the 2nd of April, the day of the actual summit,
there was a correspondent placed ‘inside’ the Excel Centre doing occa-
sional interviews with various ‘experts’ present at the summit. Based on
the sample analysed here, these ‘experts’ were mainly economists and
financial executives based in the US and Britain. The rest of the rolling
coverage on the day of the summit was largely made up of a rotation of
packages and two-way link-ups with correspondents placed in different
‘key’ geographical locations presenting the interests and concerns of the
national government of their location. As such, correspondents reported
from Britain, Russia, France/Germany, China, India and North America
on the activities of political authorities within each nation-state, often
framing activities in terms of comparing political interests between one
state and another (interestingly also, reports on China and India used
Chinese and Indian people in London as their points of reference). The
practice of covering this global event as rolling news, therefore, was
predominantly ordered and categorised around the nation-state and the
activities of the political elites within them.
In the evening news bulletin, the story had moved to a focus on
the actual agreements that had been made during the summit. In this
coverage, notions associated with ideas of ‘globality’ were arguably
featured more, both in terms of using images of the globe and also in
the use of the word ‘global’ in the script. British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown’s statement at the end of the summit, for example, was described
as: ‘When the summit ended Gordon Brown spoke, not as Prime
Minister, but as Chancellor of the World Exchequer, rather as if he was
delivering a sort of global budget.’ As a whole, references to financial
activities included far more ‘global’ terms than any other activity, most
frequently in terms of ‘global recession’, ‘global business’, ‘global trade’
and ‘global financial system’. In relation to the financial system, one
correspondent remarked that world leaders were trying to find ‘a global
solution to a global problem’. In analysing this solution, however, news
practices reverted to a nation by nation (or perhaps region by region)
breakdown of who would get what. Indeed, this part of the coverage
was introduced with: ‘Every leader wants this summit to be seen as a
victory for them.’ The only exception to this was in reference to the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). Furthermore, the analysis pre-
sented the day after the summit (3rd of April) moved the story to a focus
on the positioning of each nation-state in ‘the global pecking order’
(news presenter) of power with correspondents from various different
geographical locations presenting the relative ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of
each nation-state’s ability to protect their interests at the event, much in

the same manner as the coverage of ‘inside’ activities had initially been
framed at the beginning of the event.
What the example of the London G20 summit highlights, therefore, is
not only the limited extent to which news practices allow for a nation-
transcending communicative context in the coverage of global events,
but also the way in which ‘the global’ is defined in terms of the power
relations of the existing social order within news discourses. In the news
discourses surrounding financial activities there was a clear element of
‘global’ present by the language and imagery used to contextualise the
event. None of this language or imagery transferred to the activities
of those ‘outside’ the summit, which predominantly became domesti-
cated into a story about security and police tactics within Britain. This
was reinforced by the way in which activities ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the
London Excel Centre were covered as separate events in what were
familiar categories of the political (‘inside’) and of violence (‘outside’).
Furthermore, despite the global imagery used to describe the financial
activities leading up to the summit, the way in which these ‘global’
activities were analysed overwhelmingly adhered to a discursive frame-
work of inter-state relations, based on a dominant notion of state
sovereignty and (national) interests of political leaders. As such, it may
be argued that the news practices of global news continue to favour a
definition of what makes global news centred on the activities of (key)
political and social elites – with prominence given to financial activity
in the very definition of ‘global’ – based on an inter-state worldview.
The communicative context of the global news media, therefore, does
not transcend the nation and nor does it identify ‘globality’ beyond the
confines of narrow (political and economic) elite activity.
Conclusion
As such, what this chapter has highlighted is the extent to which any
notion of the news media’s role in creating a shift in consciousness that
sustains any concept of global citizenship needs a critical assessment.
The literature on GCS is based on the foundational assumption that
the transformation of activity below, across and above nation-states,
is shifting our notion of political community away from territorial
states towards a shared global consciousness, making us increasingly
global citizens. Indeed, it is this transformation in identity and moral
understanding that provides the framework to critically speak of an
emerging GCS as a form of deliberative democracy in a global context.
Although it is often implicit in the literature, key to the creation of

this consciousness and in the nurturing of a global citizenship is the
increasing globalisation of news media. By this is not only meant
that ownership structures and technologies are becoming increasingly
globalised, but more significantly, that there is a sense in which our
understanding of and information about the world speaks to a global
framework. As such, notions of global media events and, indeed, global
news broadcasters are central features of this emerging global citizen-
ship. However, as the analysis of BBC World News as a global news
broadcaster demonstrates, what comes to be defined as global news and
global media events, and how such news is covered is a deeply intricate
process steeped in a set of cultural, political and economic power rela-
tions that shape journalistic practices.
The way in which newsgathering is structured and organised at BBC
World News is a question of not only certain entrenched assumptions
about what constitutes public interest, in both British and global terms,
shaped by institutional and journalistic culture in the prevalent political
system, but also crucially a question of resources, historical legacy and
dominant rhetoric regarding geo-political significance. These forces of
practice are heightened and entrenched in developments of the global
media market. What comes to be considered global news and worthy
of debate in the ‘global public sphere’ is shaped by specific journalistic
practices that are essentially manifestations of a certain set of relations
of power. News workers at global news broadcasters work with a specific
understanding of what is newsworthy and how such news should be
covered. Catering to a domestic British audience first and foremost, BBC
World News is a global news broadcaster that has to depend on certain
pre-fixed criteria for what makes up its global news agenda. What is more,
the way in which this news is covered is primarily catered towards a cer-
tain political system that may indeed become even more significant in a
global context. The categorisation of knowledge, the naming of groups,
and the credibility of sources, speaks to an understanding of news that
adheres to a social order as dictated by the most dominant institutions
of power. As such, what constitutes global news and the terms in which
such news should be defined continues to be determined by (Western)
political and economic elites. The terms of any ‘global moral order’ that
binds us in the concept of global citizenship partly based on a global
news media needs to therefore account for the power relations that
shape that global news media. Indeed, it becomes essential for advocates
of GCS to consider the conditions in which the shift in political com-
munities may be taking place and the role of the media within that.
If in fact there is a shift in our notion of political community away from

the nation-state as issues take on an increasingly global character, then
it becomes essential to question how and on what terms these issues
come to be defined in news discourses. The concern is not whether
these issues exist, but that the issues that come to define the terms of
this global citizenship and global public deliberation are shaped by jour-
nalistic practices embedded in cultural and institutional structures and
fundamental developments in the global political economy. As such,
asking GCS advocates whosee global moral order is binding us as global
citizens and facilitating a global public sphere is not just a question
of imperialism, it is a fundamental question regarding the very power
structures that come to define our world. Ignoring such questions makes
the notion of ‘global’ a caveat for existing (illegitimate) institutions of
power to claim further legitimacy. Indeed, what this chapter has shown
is that the political community sustained by the organisation of news
is not ‘global’ in the sense it is presented in the literature on GCS. The
citizenship and deliberation formulated by the organisation of news is,
rather, predominantly defined in terms of the nation-state, and almost
exclusively debated on terms expressed by political and economic elite
activity within those nation-states.
4
‘Global Civil Society’ and Local/
National Newspapers: The Case
of Los Angeles Times
Much of the debates surrounding ‘global civil society’ (GCS) have been
implicitly based on developments within media that speak to a more
global understanding of political community, deliberation and represen-
tation. An obvious part of this has been developments of news outlets
that specifically aim to speak to a ‘nation-transcending communicative
context’ such as BBC World News that was analysed in the previous
chapter as well as online global news sites such as those analysed in the
next chapter. However, a debate on the changing terms of democracy
in light of media developments must also consider the changes happen-
ing in existing, more traditional spaces of the mediated public sphere
that form an important part of this context. That is, it must consider
how outlets still defined in predominantly national or territorial terms
of some form are operating in globalising conditions that facilitate an
emerging GCS. As such, it is also important to understand the way in
which news practices are changing within more traditional loci of pub-
lic deliberation in the overall media ecology as these developments are
taking place, especially with regards to so-called global issues that find
their expression within GCS. In this chapter, therefore, the news pro-
duction process is under scrutiny within a local/national news outlet,
the US newspaper Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times has undergone significant structural and cultural
changes that epitomise wider debates on the place of domestic news
organisations working within traditional mediums in a global age.
What is of central concern in this study is not just to understand the
power relations of news production, but how these power relations
are shifting in the current global political economy and the impact
this has on the way in which we may understand the ‘globalising’ of
public discourse. Therefore, what is being emphasised in this study are
93
the areas of news production where these shifts are taking on crucial
importance in the debate on GCS. What is central to the debate on the
relationship between GCS and the organisation of news in this context
is the extent to which domestic news outlets are able to provide the
resources necessary for a notion of global public deliberation that speaks
to us as ‘global citizens’ or whether developments in the global political
economy are, in fact, moving these traditional structures of the public
sphere towards much more consolidated, local and insular, commercial-
ised and elite-driven public deliberation, shaped and regulated by the
power relations of the existing (domestic) social order.
Background of Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times highlights the intricacies of the debate on news

practices and GCS in the manner it has developed within the context
of the media in the United States, and indeed globally. Before exploring
the process of news production at Los Angeles Times it is worth consider-
ing a few of the arguments regarding the newspaper industry at large in
the current global system – and the United States in particular – in order
to understand the context within which news production at Los Angeles
Times operates. The rapid changes within the newspaper industry sig-
nificantly date this research at a fundamental moment of change that
is instrumental to how we should understand and conceptualise the
organisation of news. Widespread concern about declining circulation
and readership of print newspapers has led some media commentators
to declare the death of the newspaper. Some argue that the newspaper
industry as a whole is now in a state of crisis – and has been for the past
few years – as the public increasingly turn to other mediums for news
consumption. In 2005, Meyer made the case that if extrapolating the
recent linear decline in everyday readership in America it would reach
zero in 2043 (Meyer 2005). However, as Meyer has later pointed out, this
would assume that the newspaper product remains static and unable to
respond to current challenges (Meyer 2009). Historically a challenged
medium with the development of radio, television and the internet, the
newspaper has a long and complex history as a central news resource
in modern societies. It is, however, commonly argued that this last
development of web technology poses the greatest challenge for news-
papers yet. ‘It is now clear that [the Internet] is as disruptive to today’s
newspapers as Gutenberg’s invention of movable type was to the town
criers, the journalists of the 15th century’ (Meyer 2009). The American
newspaper industry has suffered from the development of the internet
‘Global Civil Society’ and Local/National Newspapers 95
not just in terms of declining readership, but arguably more significantly

in terms of declining advertising. The development of American online
sites such as Craigslist has pulled classified advertising away from news-
papers, probably the most crucial form of advertising for the funding of
print newspapers. The newspaper industry in America, and increasingly
across the developed world, is therefore at a real point of transforma-
tion, and the process of news production at Los Angeles Times should be
understood in that context. Crucially, however, newspapers still hold a
firm position in our understanding of the mediated public sphere and
are therefore worth studying despite their fragile state in the current
media landscape. Newspapers continue to be a dominant source of news,
not necessarily just through direct public consumption, but significantly –
although often underestimated – through their use by other mediums.
As Meyer recognises, in America they still hold a unique place in an age
of multi-channelled distribution of information: ‘The problem is not
distributing the information. The problem is maintaining a strong and
trusted agency to originate it. Newspapers have that position of trust in
the minds of the public’ (Meyer 2009). As will be explored in the next
chapter, there are still severe doubts regarding the internet’s ability to
inherit this function adequately, and as such, news production within
an established mainstream news organisation such as Los Angeles Times
is a significant part of the role news media has in GCS. In whatever form
they might take, as they respond to the challenges they face in the global
media system, newspapers still have a key part to play in any analysis of
the organisation of news. What is more, they highlight central concerns
regarding the relationship between local and global news production,
illustrating how different spaces of news across the three different medi-
ums under study here are intertwined.
A brief history
Los Angeles Times holds a long and rich historical position as a leading
newspaper in the United States, and one that is seen to a large degree to
have been at the forefront of cultural developments in Los Angeles and
across the country. The paper itself stretches back to the late nineteenth
century when it was first published under the name Los Angeles Daily
Times. It was quickly bought by Harrison Gray Otis who went on to
form Times-Mirror Company. Upon Otis’s death in 1917 Times-Mirror
Company came under the reign of his son-in-law Harry Chandler, the
first of a line of Chandler family members that came to run the com-
pany, the newspaper and much cultural activity in the city. Under the
ownership of Times-Mirror Company Los Angeles Times rapidly grew
and became the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the US. When
Otis Chandler became publisher from 1960 to 1980, the paper changed
character and sought to compete as a respected national paper as well,
modelling itself in tone on New York Times and The Washington Post. The
newspaper established itself as a West coast version of these other serious
and highly accoladed newspapers and was at one point the third largest
newspaper in the country. The growth of Los Angeles Times continued up
until the 1990s where in line with the industry at large circulation began
to decline. In 2000, Times-Mirror Company was bought and merged
with the big Chicago-based multi-media organisation Tribune Company
ending one of the final examples of a family-controlled metropolitan
daily newspaper in the US (however, the Chandler family remained
one of the largest and most dominant shareholders in the publicly
traded Tribune Company). The merger with Tribune Company proved
financially successful in the initial few years as the company established
itself as a hugely significant multi-media news organisation with domi-
nant players in several of the top markets in the country. However, in
response to the ailing newspaper industry, there was a push to sell the
company and it was finally bought by private businessman Sam Zell who
took the company private in December 2007. At the time of research,
the newspaper was the second largest metropolitan daily newspaper
and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the United States
with a circulation of just over 700,000 and one of the most trafficked
news websites in the country. It is therefore both a local and national
newspaper. Tribune Company is a large billion-dollar multi-media
organisation owning media outlets in the publishing, online and broad-
casting markets. However, during the time of research Tribune Company
filed for bankruptcy and the future of the multi-media organisation is
very much in jeopardy. In addition to with Los Angeles Times, Tribune
Company, as of 2009, holds seven daily metropolitan newspapers – the
largest being Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribunee – more than 50 web-
sites, and 23 television and radio stations, making it one of the largest
journalistic organisations in the world. It provides news media to seven
out of the top ten markets in the United States.
News production at Los Angeles Times
Commercial prisms
The study of Los Angeles Times is a study of news practices in an increas-
ingly commercialised climate that has become a central part of the
debate surrounding the so-called globalisation of media. The structural
changes that the news organisation has undergone as well as its response
to developments in the global media market highlight central issues
regarding the way in which the local, national and global is mediatised
in news coverage. The financial difficulties of the organisation epitomise
broader trends within the newspaper industry, but have been heightened
at Los Angeles Times due to the further economic conditions particular
to the state of California around the time of the change in financial
structure of the newspaper (state bankruptcy and the collapse of the
real-estate market) that have meant an unprecedented yearly decline of
20–5 per cent in advertising revenue (senior manager). The ownership
change at Los Angeles Times is significant in this context in the way that
it has transformed the overarching direction of the organisation towards
a more market-oriented understanding of the news production proc-
ess. As such, market pressures and structural constraints have become
internalised and rationalised within the practices of the organisation in
a way that has prioritised journalism as a business rather than a public
service. In the words of one news worker, ‘there’s less room for the ups
and downs of the operation, and there is less appreciation for the non-
commercial aspects of what we do’ (reporter). The priorities, vision and
creation of a business-minded ‘consciousness’ within the news organi-
sation in line with the interests of the new owner as well as the senior
management put in place are manifested at all levels of the news produc-
tion process. The radical cuts made within the organisation, reducing
the number of staff at Los Angeles Times to less than half of what it was
at its height to just under 700 people (at the time of research; further
cuts have been made subsequently) have had a significant impact on the
way in which news workers understand their practices within a locally
defined traditional news outlet competing in a significantly changing
global market place. Crucially, there is a shift in the role that Los Angeles
Times is understood to have as a news outlet:
There’s been a change in the mind-set among journalists since

I started […] When I started as a journalist 20 years ago, it was a
noble profession. We were public service and that’s why we’ve got
the first amendment and the protection that we do because we
perform a service to democracy […] we have been reminded that
we are a business first and that’s been very hard.
(Editor)
As the same editor pointed out: ‘it’s hard not to think of this place as a
business when your colleagues are being laid off’ (editor). The idea that
news production is seen to be a business is nothing new, but the extent

to which it is coming to dominate the process is significant, especially
within the context of a news organisation such as Los Angeles Times. It has
shifted the understanding of news production to be much more closely
affiliated to the reader wants of the Californian community and its main
advertisers as well as being guided by the most cost-efficient practices in
the news-gathering process, which has clear consequences for how we
may understand any changing terms of (global) public deliberation.
Advertising is becoming entrenched in news practices by taking on
increased significance in a highly commercialised environment within
Los Angeles Times as a financially struggling newspaper. There is a sense
in which it has to appeal to largely national or local advertisers, such
as expanding on entertainment news to appeal to the entertainment
industry of the city. Indeed, the fact that the production of Los Angeles
Times’ ‘Sunday Magazine’ has been entirely appropriated by the adver-
tisement personnel is testament to this. Crucial in this context is the
way in which this heightened concern with attracting advertiser reve-
nue may shape considerations of the nature of news discourses. That is,
the extent to which notions of advertiser-unfriendly discourses may or
may not become a part of the practices of news. As a former shareholder
noted, ‘today a publisher or an editor would probably spike a story if
it was really critical of a big advertiser’. Such a concern is highlighted
in the case of Los Angeles Times with its rapid change in policy on
where and in what manner advertisements are allowed to appear in the
newspaper. During the period of interviewing (8 months), the policy
changed from prohibiting advertisements on the front page to not only
allowing advertisements to run at the bottom of the front page, but to
allow them to run in the style of news columns (Los( Angeles Times front
page 9 April 2009). Although such practices were met with resistance
from news staff, the change in policy highlights the commercial pres-
sures of traditional domestic news outlets attempting to compete in a
global fragmented media market.
What is more, the impact of reader wants on the news production
process has become pertinent at a time when there is a perception that
the internet is making it easier to monitor what readers are interested
in. That is, senior editors at Los Angeles Times are able to track where
there is most reader interest by following reader traffic on the Los
Angeles Times website:
Online has made us much more aware than what we have ever been
before of what people want to read. The debate is the concern that
news will devolve to the lowest common denominator. I don’t think

it’s a bad thing at all and we get a web report every day, what’s hot on
the web when we sit down to plan the paper. People are really aware
of what’s popular online.
(Senior editor)
Indeed, editorial meetings and news-selection processes are informed

by listings of most-read news stories online and other reader research
which becomes central in a new perception of the reader in traditional
media from ‘silent’ and ‘passive’ to ‘vocal’ and ‘active’ (in a consumerist
framework). The online site, especially, has become a platform for read-
ers as news consumers to drive news coverage, marked by an emphasis
on the website on sports, celebrity and crime. This is partly rationalised
by an understanding of online readers as primarily younger, using the
web for quick, ‘fun’ news as opposed to the older, more ‘analytical’
newspaper readers. However, the concern that the newspaper reader-
ship ‘will literally die out on us’ (shareholder) questions the extent to
which the online readership activity may begin to directly determine
offline news production: ‘it’s [following online activity] beginning to
bleed into the rest of the newsroom. We can instantly see where the web
traffic is going. So there is a natural inclination to try and follow that
traffic’ (editor). In this context, editors are seen to sometimes demand
stories that pertain to this understanding of the modern-day reader,
appealing to more human interest and easily accessed news coverage,
despite its lack of social and political relevance to the readership base
in the eyes of the reporter. This is also encouraged by the perceived
‘position’ of the newspaper in the overall cycle of how people receive
their news. As one shareholder noted, ‘Human interest stories work
because they are less topical, and if you have some hard news story on
your front page it doesn’t work when it’s 36 hours old. It doesn’t mat-
ter with a human-interest story. It’s still interesting’ (shareholder). This
becomes especially pertinent in questions regarding news from outside
local context seeking ‘post-national’ or ‘nation-transcending’ appeal
that therefore is understood to ‘travel’ well, such as the extensive cov-
erage given to David Beckham moving football club or to the death of
the son of the then British opposition leader, David Cameron, which
previously ‘wouldn’t have seen the light of day’ (correspondent). This
is crucial in understanding the terms within which local news outlets
may respond to an understanding of public deliberation supposedly
becoming globalised. The commercial aspect of news arguably domi-
nates in determining the way in which notions of global and local are
integrated in news practices. That is, local news outlets may participate
in a globalised public sphere, but when they do so they will primarily
do so in commercial terms that prioritise what they understand to be
business-guided news discourses.
What is more, this is further highlighted by the way in which the
business side of the organisation has manifested itself in a perceived
pressure by news workers to produce frequent ‘quick’ and cheap news
stories, rather than stories that take longer and more complex practices
to produce:
If you have five by-lines for the whole year you are probably not
earning your keep. Our average staffer has probably 80 by-lines a
year. And most people have a 100 or more. But if you only have
20 but they are fantastic stories. Business people like Sam Zell [the
owner] aren’t as tolerant of that anymore, because they don’t really
care. Of the quality. How do you measure quality?
(Editor)
As such, there has been a shift to emphasise quantity of production,

that is number of news items produced, over quality of production, that
is, how ‘good’ the news item is: ‘Our editors have made clear that they
are very much looking at production, they are watching closely. Given
that, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take a lot of time on one
story, because it only counts as one story’ (correspondent). Largely
informed by technological developments perceived to shape the glo-
bal media market towards faster and cheaper news cycles across news
outlets, Los Angeles Times has pushed for immediacy and frequency of
coverage that fits the speed, format and structure of the ‘24-hour multi-
channel news cycle’ (senior editor). The rate of changes at Los Angeles
Times at the most senior levels (since the ownership change, there has
been a change in head of publishing, publisher, lead editor, and most
of the senior leadership team) has largely been underpinned by argu-
ments regarding the adequacy of senior staff to respond to not only
market logic and business concerns, but also, significantly, technologi-
cal developments. More than anything, this has translated into ‘a faster
cycle, shorter stories, less in-depth’ (editor) that is able to integrate the
technological advances going on with the web and other mediums
into the news production process as well as respond to an increasingly
fragmented media market. This requires a different kind of journalist
than what may fit the traditional understanding of the role. It certainly
requires a journalist that gathers resources for a story faster, is able to
produce it easily to a number of different mediums, and understands

what resources are necessary to satisfy a multitude of media outlets. This
shift is clear and endorsed among management:
It was clear that the online was going to be so much of the future
we needed people that were willing to think in equal parts about all
the different, about doing things online and you know just if you
are stuck in a print model you really can’t do the online well at all,
because your old daily rhythm and how you think about the news
and your news cycle is very different. And so breaking out of that
mindset, getting people thinking in a multi-channel way is a major
major cultural and organisational change that is still going on.
(Senior manager)
Thus, there has been a deliberate change within the news organisation
in the approach of news gathering that seeks to prioritise the online
aspect of news dissemination, meaning that reporters may seek to get
stories on their blogs first, as quickly as possible, and then decide which
of these stories should be in the paper. Among experienced news work-
ers there is a real concern that this ‘cultural and organisational change’
leads to the loss of news that demands either a lot of resources or a
lot of time to develop. Those are the stories that require investigation,
that require analysis, and crucially, that may be considered ‘risky’. What
it arguably encourages is,
[p]eople not wanting to risk being out of the paper for very long, that
they see that there isn’t as much space in the paper and there isn’t
as much encouragement to be off on a project which might take 3–4
weeks to develop. Because if they did that and came back with some-
thing that was classified as a b-grade story it would definitely be held
against them. So they would rather be in the paper consistently.
(Editor)
As such, focus may be confined to immediate and clear-cut stories that

are based on well-established, easily accessed sources at the expense
of issues that may or may not be newsworthy, potentially informed
by marginal voices in society and that demand time and resources to
explore: ‘Risk-taking is a bit of a luxury and when you don’t have that
much wriggle-room, when you can’t have someone just detached for
a month to look at something, you tend not to take that risk’ (cor-
respondent). This is especially pertinent in coverage of so-called global
issues where stories of public interest may be difficult and lengthy to

produce. As one editor noted in the coverage of Iraq at the time:
What’s at jeopardy here are longer investigations, it costs a fortune to

cover the news, to keep people in Iraq. I mean look at Iraq and how
many news organisations have people on the ground there. It’s not
very many. And that’s a problem for the American people. It’s the
kind of long-form investigative journalism that will take a blow.
(Editor)
Thus, the commercial concerns of the news-gathering process come

to dominate in determining what kind of news informs any notion of
public interest ‘beyond borders’ and limit any long-form, investigative or
potentially risky news stories from forming part of the local participation
in any global public sphere. In the context of Los Angeles Times as part
of a much bigger multi-media organisation, this is further entrenched by
the trend of ownership concentration in media markets that facilitates a
cross-content consolidation process across multiple news outlets in dif-
ferent local contexts, especiallyy with regards to global news.
Consolidating prisms
As part of the drive towards competitive advantage in the news media
market, Los Angeles Times is transforming the way it understands itself
as a news outlet forming part of a larger multi-media organisation. As
has been alluded to above, there is a sense in which management is
actively pursuing a shift towards a more ‘multi-channel’ understanding
of the news organisation, delivering news in multiple platforms simul-
taneously. However, more significantly, perhaps, these developments
incorporate a broader pursuit of consolidation of the news production
process within Tribune Company. This trend has been widely debated
within the field of media studies and beyond as it raises issues regard-
ing diversity and pluralism within the media landscape. What the case
of Los Angeles Times highlights about the current global media system
is the extent to which this trend of consolidation and convergence is
being entrenched at every level of the news production process.
Consolidation has been an ambition on the part of Tribune Company
for most of its history and where newspapers and television are in the
same market there has been a push ‘to try to have them work together
where it made sense, to share content to cross-promote and to cross-sell’
(senior manager). This vision has progressed further with the change
of ownership, exemplified by a commitment to train news workers in
producing news across different mediums, summed up by one senior

editor as ‘the most comprehensive training programme of any paper
in the country to teach you how to be conversant in the five different
mediums that we need to be able to communicate with people in these
days – newspaper, website, television, radio and mobile’ (senior editor).
As such, practices of journalism are increasingly being shaped to fit a
generalised format of news media production, applicable across outlets
and mediums. However, the ambition to consolidate news outlets across
mediums in the way implied by such a training programme has been
less significant in actual terms than other forms of consolidation. Of
course, content is still shared across Tribune news outlets in whatever
medium in question, but the envisioned convergence that would see
the same staff working across all mediums has, as yet, not been success-
ful. Where convergence in this sense is most prominent, as has already
been alluded to, is between print and web outlets, where the barriers
between staff are actively being broken down. What is a highly visible
and significant company consolidation, however, is not necessarily
cross-medium consolidation, but rather intra-medium consolidation. In
other words, merging newspaper bureaux where there is seen to be an
‘overlap’ (senior editor) into single ‘Tribune bureaux’ (correspondent)
producing content across multiple newspapers. As argued by a senior
manager,
The value in these papers is the local aspect of newspapers. But

can you collaborate on national and international stories? Yes. Can
you use LA Times international stories in the Chicago Tribune? Yes.
Should LA Times use Chicago Tribune’s stories about a Midwest
Company that’s a business story? Why not? So anytime you can
share content, why not do it?
(Senior manager)
As such, the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau has merged with The
Chicago Tribune Washington bureau, the other large newspaper under
the ownership of Tribune Company, and this Tribune bureau is then
responsible for producing national content for all newspapers under
the Tribune name (8 newspapers in total at the time of research). Some
accounts say that the national bureau has subsequently been reduced by
more than half its staff. During the time of research, this development
was being repeated in foreign bureaux. Although this process is in its
early stage and news workers still feel they write predominantly for ‘their
own’ paper (‘I am still employed by the LA Times’ (correspondent)),
the notion that a complete merging of the news production process

will only be a matter of time seems prevalent. For national and glo-
bal news stories, especially, coverage in Los Angeles Times increasingly
comes equally from Los Angeles Times staff and Chicago Tribune staff. Los
Angeles Times, however, maintain their own national editor and their
own national desk that work with the merged Washington bureau;
unlike the smaller, more regional papers owned by Tribune Company,
that have their national stories picked and produced by Chicago Tribune
staff. However, it is unlikely that this will be the case for foreign bureaux
where the merging is going to be more complete. What these sorts
of processes lead to is first and foremost a severe reduction in news
reporters reporting on foreign and national news, while still aiming to
produce the same quantity of news stories. This arguably impacts on
the depth of coverage and diversity of viewpoints: ‘You’re getting to the
point where there are fewer and fewer voices about what’s happening
in public affairs […] You are not getting as good a coverage, you are not
getting the diversity of voices’ (senior editor).
What is more, it may eventually lead to an increase in coverage that
can easily be swapped among the Tribune papers, and foreign and
national news will be guided by an ambition to ‘produce copy that can
run untouched in all papers’ (correspondent). In other words, news
organisations operating in domestic markets are responding to the
developments in the global media market by reducing the number of
staff covering ‘transferable news’, that is, news that is not seen to sup-
port the particular niche of the media outlet. It is also pushing for news
that lacks the diversity of voices by the mere reduction in reporters
working together on the issues and indeed the need for news coverage
to suit a number of different contexts:
I’m writing for the LA Times, but with the knowledge there’s much
more sharing among the papers now. This has come down from
Tribune that they’re trying to maximize their investment. If there is
a national story they would prefer if one paper covers it and the rest
goes out on the wire.
(Correspondent)
News production processes in the areas that are seen to have an

‘overlap’, that is, national and foreign, may thus begin to imitate wire
services or news agencies in their quest to suit as broad a consumption
base as possible, and even more so with the need to simultaneously file
stories for the web at a much faster speed than previously. Moreover,
news practices will shift away from a concern with global issues that
lack an immediate local focus and leave such coverage to a few well-
established news outlets that consider themselves uniquely global in
scope (e.g. such as BBC World News).
Local prisms
What the commercial considerations of news production at Los Angeles
Times are moving towards, therefore, is not only a consolidation proc-
ess that sees the same content being shared across a number of different
news outlets, but also, crucially, an overall localisation of news. As a
handful of organisations have come to dominate the transnational and
national news media markets the response across the industry has been
‘a scramble for niche’ (senior manager). Rather than producing news
that pertains to an integrated news production process, news organisa-
tions are employing resources to be able to dominate much smaller frag-
ments of the market. The case of Los Angeles Times is interesting in this
context as it is clear to witness a shift from producing news that would
‘rival the New York Times’ (senior manager) in both global and national
terms, to producing news that will serve the perceived interests of an
immediate local audience: ‘you needed to re-focus [on] being really
really good at things people couldn’t get anywhere else; mainly cover-
age of the Los Angeles metropolitan area’ (senior manager). As such,
moves have been made to close several foreign bureaux and move staff
‘home’ to ‘cover and expand local news’ (senior editor). It is clear that
news workers, although understanding the ‘logic’, feel that this under-
standing of the paper ‘as essentially a local paper’ (correspondent) has
been deliberately pushed through by a management largely concerned
with the overall performance of Tribune Company as a multi-media
organisation. These pressures have existed for a long time, but the
heightened business consciousness within the newspaper has made
it less able to resist. The localisation of news is significant on several
levels. In order to hold on to an advantage with not only advertisers,
but with investors and readers, while being tied to an insecure mar-
ket, news organisations are pressured to shift resources to specific and
characteristic news coverage that not only makes them different, but is
crucially also cheaper to produce. In such a landscape, cheap local news
will win over expensive more competitive foreign news every time, and
foreign news bureaux have been closed at a phenomenal speed across
the industry. According to a Pew survey of American newspapers from
2008, 64 per cent of newsroom executives said the space devoted to
foreign news in their newspaper had dropped over the past three years,
while 54 per cent said they had decreased the space devoted to national
news. 46 per cent said they had also decreased the reporting resources
for foreign news and 41 per cent said resources for national news are
less than three years ago. Only 51 per cent of editors surveyed found
international news essential to their newspaper. On the other hand, 97
per cent of editors rated local news ‘very essential’ to their news prod-
uct – by far the highest percentage of any news category. This has been
matched by an increase in space devoted to community and neighbour-
hood news according to 62 per cent of those taking part in the survey
(Pew 2008). What is more, the directional shift is manifesting itself as
the basis on which news stories are selected, the way stories are pursued,
and the way issues in the news are covered: ‘we have to be leaner and
meaner and really pick our shots, try to be more local, at least always
have the angle why do we care in California about this story; the more
granular the better’ (editor). As such, this shift impacts in terms of not
only an increased amount of local news, but also in terms of the way
foreign or ‘global’ news is treated. As such, what constitutes global news
and where global news should primarily be gathered from is defined
by the perceived interests of readers in California: ‘the reason we have
cut back so much in Europe and not in Mexico and Asia is that a very
top priority is that these are places our readers have a real link to’ (cor-
respondent). Indeed, the newspaper has reduced its number from seven
correspondents in Europe in 1990 to just one correspondent covering
the whole region. What is more, the way in which global issues may be
covered needs to take an increasingly local perspective into considera-
tion if these issues are to be resourced as original news unique to Los
Angeles Times. For example, coverage of the Middle East might feature
news stories on the entertainment industry in the region as a way to
appeal to a Californian demographic. As one reporter stated: ‘What
they have made clear to me for the first time ever, is that if I can find
a California element then I should highlight that and make sure it gets
highlighted in the story […] and that’s been a lesson’ (correspondent).
For some news producers, internalising this demand within the news
production process makes such localised news angles ‘just clever writ-
ing’ (correspondent) rather than a perceived challenge to journalist
autonomy. However, for a significant number of reporters interviewed,
the local emphasis is a shift that from a professional perspective must
be challenged. From the interviews it is clear that newsroom staff have
attempted to resist the localisation of news by presenting Los Angeles
to the Chicago-based senior management team as too diverse a city
to demand only local news and as such catering to the readership of
Los Angeles Times demands a broader focus. This resistance has arguably
had limited success (see e.g. the viewpoint analysis of the coverage of
climate change below). Instead, the concrete reduction in staff members
reporting on national and global news has dominated the vision of the
newspaper.
The localisation and ‘insularisation’ of news as a response to devel-
opments in the global media market is a theme that needs careful
consideration in the debate on news practices and GCS. What it may
arguably result in is not only the further fragmentation of knowledge
and information, but also the monopoly of non-local news and ‘global
news’ by a very few number of news organisations, whose news con-
tent will simply be repeated in other news outlets. Within individual
metropolitan newspapers like Los Angeles Times there is a lack of people
to comprehensively cover national and foreign news. The words of one
correspondent echo a lot of the anxieties that news workers themselves
feel about this shift: ‘there’s never been a better time to be a public
official’ (correspondent). The reduction of people reporting on foreign
and national news impacts not just in terms of the decreased amount
of original news produced, but also on other practices within the news
production process by forcing fewer people to cover a wider area. That
is, their ‘catchment area’ (correspondent) has significantly increased.
Stretched in this way, stories are being produced on thinner research
and less in-depth reporting, with a greater reliance on wire services,
stringers and other forms of news providers (e.g. PR professionals). As
such, it favours an understanding of what constitutes ‘global news’ as
dictated by existing social elites that dominate political rhetoric about
international affairs and narrows the scope for ‘outside’ actors to form
part of such news discourse. That is, by having to ‘really pick your
shots’ and being informed by a sense of ‘remind me why we’re doing
this again?’ (correspondent) based on local and commercial considera-
tions, there is arguably an inclination to confine global news to only the
most obvious and dominant stories that repeat the discourse of either
established political actors or other dominant global news outlets. By
actively reducing foreign and national staff, the ability for journalists
to investigate news that is not within their perceived ‘demographic’ as
dictated by the culture of the organisation, is hampered by not only a
sense of irrelevance, but also by their place in the production line of
news dissemination, that is as the original producer of the story. Rather,
the framing and story-selection process is largely pre-empted by non-
journalistic practices to which news reporters within a newspaper such
as Los Angeles Times can only respond rather than decisively control.
The Los Angeles Times worldview
When it comes to how we may then understand the way in which

domestic news organisations such as Los Angeles Times appropriate
public deliberation in any global context, this takes on a very specific
character. As has been outlined above, the market logic of how news is
organised, the internalisation of the commodification of news among
news workers, the move to a faster, shorter news-cycle, all work to mani-
fest forces of power at play within the very practices of news produc-
tion. These also impact upon the nature and sorts of relationships that
are formed between news producers and other actors in society. That is,
the joint pressure to produce news in a faster cycle together with the
pressure to produce news that upholds the values of the news produc-
tion process (in terms of traditional journalistic values, but significantly
also in terms of the notions of ‘clever writing’, ‘transferability’ across
news outlets and appealing to advertiser and reader ‘wants’ as have been
elaborated upon above) encourages an increased reliance on official,
well-established sources and news wires for news stories, especially those
that have no immediate local ‘relevance’. This is encouraged by the
drive to significantly shorten stories as space has decreased: ‘I tried to
report stories as vigorously as I always did, but you wouldn’t get as many
sources into the story. There is a difference between writing a 400 word
story and a 1000 word story. You can’t include all the points you want
to make’ (correspondent). As is highlighted in the textual analysis below
(see Tables 4.1 to 4.6), this favours global news stories that rely on just
a few elite sources that are able to claim immediate credibility based
on their position within society. Moreover, fewer journalists working
across different countries and regions are able to immerse themselves
in a specific area and are thus less able to broaden their network of
sources, and less able to carry out face-to-face or even telephone inter-
views with sources. Instead, increasingly source-journalist interaction
takes place virtually, which will immediately limit certain access points
for some marginal and resource-poor groups. Although research on Los
Angeles Times confirms that journalists continue to understand their
routines of newsgathering to be based on a well-established network
of contacts and a pool of other journalist resources to produce relevant
news stories, the changing circumstances of their practices challenge
this traditional account. The majority of correspondents working with
these types of news stories are forced to rely on other 24-hour news
outlets, wire services and selective online sites in an attempt to keep
abreast with the changing nature of news production. What is more,
journalists are working in an environment where certain societal actors

are increasingly prioritising and understanding the conditions for access
to the news media arena. This is not to say that dominant groups will
therefore do anything to seek the limelight in news media, but there is
certainly a sense among news workers that they are being undermined to
some extent by an increase in news management techniques, especially
through online activity. Although the motivations for using blogs and
online news sites in a mass media news organisation may be guided by
a perceived attempt to consider the ‘voice of the public’ (correspond-
ent), the dominant forces of online activity and the structure of the
on/off-line relationship are arguably producing a competitive space for
discourse definitions where large sections of society are not competing
members (cf. Davis 2007 as well as Chapter 5). Looking at news coverage
in Los Angeles Times of what may be considered ‘global issues’ such as
‘Iran’, ‘Climate Change’ and the ‘Financial Crisis’, demonstrates the way
in which practices that attain to localisation processes and the pressure
to produce news within a faster and cheaper news cycle favour the rep-
resentation of only a few different elite viewpoints – often from a local
or American context – in global news discourses (see Tables 4.1 to 4.6).
These tables illustrate both broader, more general, categories of actors
represented as well as more detailed categories for each global issue, in
order to illustrate how these different elite groups are constituted.
These tables show how three very different issues, which could be
seen as ‘global’ issues, have been covered during a six-month period
Table 4.1 Viewpoints represented in coverage of Iran in the 6-month period

from 4 August 2008 to 4 February 2009. Sample: 117 articles
350
US Iran Other
300
Viewpoint represented
250
200
150
100
50
0
State Interest Media Academics Professionals Ordinary
groups citizens
Actor
Table 4.2 Viewpoints represented in coverage of Iran in the 6-month period

from 4 August 2008 to 4 February 2009. Sample: 117 articles
300
US Iran Other
250
200
150
100
50
0
Executive Cleric/ Legislative Judiciary Former Interest Media Academics Professionals Ordinary
Political officials groups citizens
leaders
Actor
Table 4.3 Viewpoints represented in coverage of climate change in the 6-month

period of 5 September 2008 to 5 March 2009. Sample: 79 articles
180
US California Other
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
State Interest Scientists Other Business/ Ordinary
groups academics professionals citizens
Actor
(except for the coverage of the financial crisis which stretches over a
three-month period due to the sheer volume of coverage, keeping the
sample size comparable in all three cases) in Los Angeles Times. These
tables show that in all three examples, government officials and other
affiliated institutions/actors are by a considerable amount the most
represented viewpoints. In fact, in the coverage of Iran they are almost
Table 4.4 Viewpoints represented in coverage of climate change in the 6-month

period of 5 September 2008 to 5 March 2009. Sample: 79 articles
120
US California Other
100
80
60
40
20
0
Executive Legislative Judiciary Former Interest Scientists Other Business/ Ordinary
officials groups academics Professionals citizens
Actor
Table 4.5 Viewpoints represented in coverage of the financial crisis during the
3-month period 9 January 2009 to 9 April 2009. Sample: 128 articles
300
US Other
250
Viewpoints represented
200
150
100
50
0
State Financial Other Interest Academics Ordinary Media
sector professionals/ groups citizens
industry
Actor
twice as represented as all other actors in society put together, making

up 304 of the total 472 viewpoints counted (see Table 4.1). Within these
political elites, the Executive is by far the most represented (247 counts),
followed by the Legislative (16 counts) (see Table 4.2). Outside of this
group of actors, the most significantly represented viewpoints are those
that may be defined as ‘interest groups’, mostly dominated by US-based
Table 4.6 Viewpoints represented in coverage of the financial crisis during the
3-month period 9 January 2009 to 9 April 2009. Sample: 128 articles
160
US Other
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Non-management
Executive
Judiciary
Former
companies
companies
finance
Ordinary
officials
Interest
groups
Academics
citizens
Media
Top financial
Other financial
Other
professionals/
industry
Legislative
Actor
think tanks and non-academic research institutes that promote specific

interests, followed by other media outlets and academics. These actors
make some claims to expertise within American society that news work-
ers rely on in practicing journalistic values of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutral-
ity’. However, the viewpoints of these actors make up only a small part
of the overall coverage on Iran. Indeed, what these figures show is the
extent to which the discourses surrounding Iran, and Iran-US relations,
are formed by political elites, whether they be in government or other
leading political institutions of ‘authority’ in society demonstrating the
extent to which news practices are affiliated with the organisation of the
nation-state. Of course, a part of this also has to do with the inability
for Western media to roam freely within Iran and get access to vari-
ous sources. Instead, in the coverage of Iran, they have to rely a great
deal on stringers and other media in their reporting (indicated by the
proportion of viewpoints represented by Iranian media, making up 54
per cent of the total number of viewpoints attributed to media sources),
which also narrows the scope of viewpoints represented. As such, the
debate on Iran and the place of Iranian society in the global system
takes place on an inter-state level almost exclusively between the US and
Iran, guided and shaped by factions of society that are already estab-
lished and powerful, rather than on any post-national, sub or non-state
level that may be challenging these relations of power. This is not to
say, of course, that these discourses on Iran shaped by political elites are
homogenous or consensual in any way. There is most certainly a great
deal of conflict among these groups of actors and there is a real discur-
sive competition played out in the coverage of Iran. However, what is
key in this context is that it is a discursive competition in which only a
few actors are participating members.
Tables 4.3 and 4.4 demonstrate a slightly larger scope of debate in the
coverage of climate change compared to that of Iran. Although the cov-
erage of climate change is still dominated by the viewpoints of political
elites, making up 153 of the total 343 viewpoints counted (45%), there
are other significant actors outside this sphere that are making claims
to the discursive battle-field in the news coverage, most notably inter-
est groups and scientists. It is clear in this analysis that credibility and
authority has manifested itself in the news production process beyond
state actors to include civil society groups, and accessibility to the proc-
ess of deliberation is broader when it comes to climate change than
when it comes to Iran. This may also explain why climate change is the
most frequent example used by GCS advocates to illustrate their con-
cept (cf. Anheier et al. 2007). The rationale behind this is to some extent
supported by the coverage it has received in Los Angeles Times. However,
the research findings outlined above suggest that there are several fac-
tors that ought to be considered in this context. For one, California is
one of the most prominent states, if not the most prominent state, in
national debates on the environment, and it is a top policy concern
among the state executive. Indeed, as the analysis illustrates, the cov-
erage is still primarily dictated by the viewpoints of US-based political
elites. The non-state actors concerned with climate change also, there-
fore, have a large presence in California making them easy to access for
local news reporters. Moreover, the place of California as a federal state
in the political debate on climate change immediately gives it local
relevance and therefore a major source of news coverage to Los Angeles
Times. Indeed, it is interesting that despite the ‘globality’ of climate
change as an issue, and it being presented as such in the literature on
GCS, the scope of the viewpoints represented in the coverage are much
more local – both in terms of national and even in terms of the state
of California – than the coverage of Iran. In fact, as much as 324 of the
total 343 viewpoints counted (94%) stem from within the United States.
It remains it seems within Los Angeles Times, an issue largely contained
within national and federal borders.
The coverage of the financial crisis (Tables 4.5 and 4.6) also dem-
onstrates a primarily national scope of viewpoints and also shows
a predominantly Executive-led discourse on the issue. The public

deliberation on the financial crisis within the news coverage is largely
exclusive to political elites (242 out of the total 567 viewpoints counted
or 43%) and then followed by the financial sector (142 counts or 25%),
predominantly top executives within that sector along with their cor-
porate analysts. Academics and interest groups have some stake in the
debate, but comparatively very little. Again, this is not to say that
the financial or political spheres speak in homogenous voices. There are
certainly conflicting discourses within the coverage of the financial crisis,
but the main stakeholders in the conflict of debate based on the news
coverage it has received are financial and political elites within society
as confined mainly to the nation-state. It is clear that financial chief
executives are seen as the most appropriate voices of authority on the
issue outside the state and ‘analysts’ are drawn from within the financial
sector rather than outside (echoing also the coverage of the G20 London
Summit ‘inside’ the Excel Centre on BBC World News as discussed in the
previous chapter). This arguably provides a very narrow scope of delibera-
tion as corporate analysts and financial chief executives operate within
the same societal space, and indeed often share that space with top state
officials. The viewpoint analysis of the financial crisis therefore resembles
existing relations of power within society, rather than necessarily chal-
lenging or shifting those.
As such, the news coverage on Iran, climate change, and the financial
crisis demonstrate fundamental issues regarding the nature of news
practices at a locally defined traditional news outlet. The reason for
looking at these three very distinct issues in the newspaper is to illus-
trate not only the repetition of practices in news production across news
topics – and the way they operate along existing relations of power –
but also to question more fundamental assumptions regarding GCS and
the media. ‘Global issues’ in Los Angeles Times are primarily deliberated
upon within national and local boundaries and primarily dictated on
the terms of political elites. Where civil society groups participate,
they occupy a privileged position within the domestic context of the
news organisation and do so in issues which have immediate local rel-
evance as dictated by commercial interests and dominant local political
rhetoric. Indeed, it may be argued that in the current organisation of
news, the case of Los Angeles Times illustrates the extent to which the
definition of issues that are open to public deliberation beyond society’s
elites is shaped by the relationship between the production of news and
developments in the global political economy rather than any other
basis of definition appealing to a notion of shared ‘global norms’.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the case of Los Angeles Times is pertinent to debates on

GCS because it illustrates the way in which news outlets traditionally
defined territorially and operating within some form of local ‘space’
are responding to developments in global media that are supposedly
moving us towards a globalised understanding of citizenship and public
deliberation. What the case of Los Angeles Times highlights is the extent
to which such deliberation is increasingly being dictated by commercial
interests and developments in the global political economy that have
pushed for the further fragmentation and localisation of news dis-
courses. Where news organisations such as Los Angeles Times participate
in any form of global deliberation, they do so on terms that primarily
satisfy commercial pressures, focusing on ‘soft news’ with strong human
interest elements that ‘travel’ well across space and time, or issues that
have been pre-determined by powerful domestic political rhetoric or
dominant news disseminators and are therefore ‘obvious’ or ‘risk-free’.
The financial struggles that the newspaper industry as a whole
has been facing, especially within the United States, have become
entrenched within the news production process at Los Angeles Times
partly through its change in ownership and business structure that
enforced a significant shift in vision within the organisation towards
a more specific market-led logic. As the terms of competition have
changed, the response of the management has been to prioritise com-
mercial interests by limiting expensive and resource-draining national
and, especially, global news, in order to ‘scramble for niche’ within a
crowded global news market. Rather than competing with dominant
global news disseminators, Los Angeles Times, previously one of the top
three national papers in the country, has shifted its news practices
towards a much more local/insular character. As such, global news
tends to be news easily and cheaply copied from elsewhere, either
within Tribune Company or from global news networks and agencies.
Moreover, news practices continue to be closely associated with the
existing domestic social order and when global issues are covered in
the newspaper, they are so predominantly along the terms of political
elites within the United States. Any ‘dialogue’ with actors outside of the
United States on ‘global issues’ is limited.
The notion, then, that the ‘global media’ is moving us towards a post-
national, deliberative constellation whereby democratic practices are
sustained, and indeed legitimate, on the basis of communicative inter-
action produced in and by mediated processes ignores fundamental
questions about the nature of news practices. What has been high-
lighted here is the extent to which the organisation of news supports a
‘global public sphere’ that is largely exclusive to and determined by the
public deliberations of political and social elites. If indeed the media
is the necessary resource for public deliberation, then contemplations
on democracy based on such deliberation must consider how public
deliberation is organised. Any notion of GCS that relies on the delibera-
tive model as a democratising force in the global system must therefore
account for these developments within the practices of news.
5
‘Global Civil Society’ and
Alternative Online News:
The Case of OhmyNews
International and Groundreport
In this chapter, the focus on news practices shifts from mainstream

news outlets to global alternative news outlets that have emerged spe-
cifically with the development of the internet. It is undoubtedly the
case that the currency that has seemingly been granted to a concept of
an emerging GCS has to a large extent centred on developments in new
information technology that have produced new forms of mediating
information and in this case news. Indeed, it may be argued that much
of the enthusiasm and critical currency surrounding the notion of GCS
has come from the perceived possibilities of the internet over and above
developments in mass media. A significant reason why the internet has
been received with such enthusiasm in debates on democratic practice
is because it is largely seen to have emerged, unlike offline counter-
parts, as a medium not traditionally confined to or contextualised by
national systems. What is more, by its inherent structure it is argued to
cater for immediate interactivity and the dissolution of producer/user
boundaries. As such, it is seen to challenge established understandings
of democratic practice by transforming the spatial and temporal aspects
of political activity and, indeed, who can participate in and in what
way participation can occur in shaping such activity. What is under
scrutiny in this chapter, therefore, is the way in which developments in
news specifically online encourages such a reading of social and politi-
cal transformations.
In order to explore this understanding of online news, this chapter
will look at what is arguably the most significant and potent aspect of
journalism on the web in debates surrounding GCS; namely the ability
for (global) citizens to directly participate in and produce news con-
tent for public consumption. This chapter will therefore look at two
emblematic case studies of this shift in news production towards ‘global
117
citizens’, the global user-generated news-sites OhmyNews International

and Groundreport, t examining news practices in light of how they are
assumed to operate in the literature on GCS. These news sites both
represent the kind of developments that have been advocated by many
of the discussions surrounding the way in which the internet shifts key
concepts in democratic theory: OhmyNews International as the global
arm of the South Korean based OhmyNews is often referenced as a key
example of open source citizen-based journalism that is able to repre-
sent public opinion to institutions of power, and significantly, a non-
Western example; and Groundreportt based in the United States which is
growing in significance on the global stage with its widespread syndica-
tion to major news outlets and practice of minimal editorial input with
regards to not only what news should make the site, but also where on
the news agenda topics should feature. It therefore exemplifies complete
citizen-led participatory deliberation that the development of online
news is so often celebrated for. Crucial to note, OhmyNews International
has, as of January 2011 and subsequent to this research, stopped run-
ning as a citizen journalism news site, becoming instead an aggregator
site for citizen journalism produced elsewhere, highlighting many of
the complexities brought to light in the analysis presented here.
Ultimately, this chapter will illustrate how global online news sites
remain rooted in specific cultural contexts and depend on crucial
national, social, political and economic conditions within these con-
texts in order to ‘succeed’ as a sustainable alternative news outlet.
What is more, it aims to highlight the individualised, personal and
‘hyper-local’ practices of global news production online within both
OhmyNews International and Groundreportt operating in very contrasting
contexts that speaks to a fragmentation of public interest challenging
any notion of a ‘global public opinion’ based on some shared moral
order within the global ‘space’.
OhmyNews Internationall – a brief history
OhmyNews International is the global arm of the South Korean based

citizen journalism site OhmyNews, first launched in 2000. It is worth
providing a brief outline of the circumstances in which OhmyNews was
launched as a domestic site and its impact on political communication
in order to understand its pertinence in debates on GCS and also to
illuminate the significance of domestic contexts in debates on so-called
globalised internet activity. OhmyNews was founded by ‘progressive
journalist and political activist’ (Joyce 2007: 5) Oh Yean Ho who had
‘Global Civil Society’ and Alternative Online News 119
prior been working for a leftist monthly magazine called Mal and had
become frustrated with what he perceived to be the domination of con-
servative media within Korea. Oh believed that the Korean media could
be realigned by increasing citizen participation: ‘While I was a journalist
for Mal, I continuously thought about things like how I could change
journalism – so that not only professional journalists, but also citizens
participated in it’ (Oh Yeon Ho quoted in Yu 2003). As Joyce argues,
this emphasis on participation came not only from Oh’s democratic
ideals, but also from a pragmatic perception that Korean citizens were
more progressive than the media they consumed, thus, by making their
voices heard this would balance the Korean media landscape (Joyce
2007). Against a backdrop of unparalleled technological investment
and innovation that has seen Korea having one of the highest rates
of internet connectivity in the world, and nurturing a population in
which many Koreans feel comfortable contributing their own content
to an online space (Joyce 2007), Oh founded OhmyNews in 1999, play-
ing on his own name as well as the popular phrase ‘Oh my God’. The
site officially launched on 22 February 2000 at 2.22 pm, a date full of 2’s
meant to signify OhmyNews’ break with traditional twentieth-century
journalism (Joyce 2007). As Oh stated upon its launch:
Born in the spring of the new millennium, OhmyNews declares it is

making a complete departure from the media culture of the 20th
century. We are going to change the culture of how news is pro-
duced, distributed, and consumed, all at one time. Every citizen’s a
reporter. Journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who
seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share
them with others.
(Oh Yean Ho quoted in Gruen 2009)
Under this guiding motto ‘every citizen is a reporter’, OhmyNews set up

an open-source system of news production that encouraged everyone
to write and submit articles, while maintaining some elements of pro-
fessional media by employing professional editors to check and filter
stories as they came in, which some argue has been a key contribution
to its success (Joyce 2007). This means that after a brief registration
process – which was set up in order to limit anonymity of reporters
thought to increase the quality of reporting – anyone who is willing can
essentially report on and submit stories of their own choosing as well as
comment on or directly contact other citizen reporters. As such, it aims
to challenge traditional journalism by essentially breaking down the
conventional relationship between reporter and public and eradicating

some of the divisions between these roles.
Thus, the editorial process at OhmyNews differs from traditional media
by adopting a model that relies on ‘the perfect cooperation and harmony
between the professional journalists and citizen reporters’ (manager)
developing a new kind of relationship between professional and amateur,
outlined further in Figure 5.1. It seeks to produce news that is primarily
collected and written ‘through the lens of ordinary citizens’ (manager)
and that, crucially, allows anyone to participate in the formation of
news discourses. It does, however, follow similar ethical guidelines as
professional journalists with regards to how that information should be
produced by having trained editors that screen, fact-check and edit stories
before publishing them, especially with ‘sensitive stories that contain
claims that potentially damage news makers’ reputations’ (manager).
This is a central feature of OhmyNews that also marks it out in comparison
to other citizen-led sites and is what gives it a character that is different
from blogging in the eyes of its content producers:
I think people like going to OhmyNews knowing that it’s not a blog.
So there is some special quality about OhmyNews … it’s not a blog, it’s
professional, we have editors who are working, who are checking
your stuff, who are fact-checking, it’s a professional agency.
(Contributor)
What is more, the site has a list of ethical guidelines on its website, both
domestic and international, that it advises its citizen reporters to follow,
emphasising familiar professional journalistic values such as fairness,
balance and accuracy. Managers and editors retain the right to revoke
membership of any contributor who is considered to have violated
the agreement and code of ethics they signed on when they joined. The
site also has its own full-time professional reporters who ‘jockey with
reporters from big newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets for
scoops in government and business’ (Gillmor 2006: 127). This is a key
part in how OhmyNews understands itself to ensure credibility as a legiti-
mate news source and also as being ‘one notch above bloggers on the
food-chain’ (contributor). OhmyNews calls this ‘harmonious’ relation-
ship between citizen reporters and professional journalism ‘responsible
participation’ (manager) that encourages citizens to report in their
own voice while maintaining the level of accuracy and credibility that
OhmyNews places great importance on. One staff member described
the vision as: ‘I think the idea was to make it a really good quality
Screening by
Essays & Columns
Citizen News
Film & Book Reviews
reporters Guerrilla
Media Criticism
Desk
Publication
Hard News Screening by

Staff
Analysis Editorial
reporters
Columns & Editorials Desk
editorial process
Source: Presentation by OhmyNews at 6th International Symposium on Online Journalism,
University of Texas, 2005.
publication that anyone could write for and if they weren’t very good
at writing, we could help them’ (editor).
What is crucial to understand about this editorial process that also
reflects a lot of the implicit account of the media in debates on global
democracy is that it is seen to be uniquely realised by the internet. That
is, in Oh’s words,
[T]he Internet is an open space where the concept ‘every citizen is

a reporter’ can be best realised. Internet space does not have any
limitations of either time or space, does it? Paper newspapers have
limitations of time and space. Wherever there is a limitation of time
and space, this cannot help but limit the participants, isn’t it so? But
where there is no limitation of time and space, anyone can participate.
So it is the most proper place to realise ‘every citizen is a reporter’.
(Oh Yean Ho quoted in Yu 2003)
Importantly also, in the context of global deliberation, is that beyond

participation the editorial process employed by OhmyNews is based on a
(re)emphasis on independence and autonomy in journalism that it per-
ceives to have been lost in corporate mainstream news media through
various pressures either political or economic. By being an open-source
news site predominantly led by the stories its readers want to write, it is
argued to ensure ‘independence from everything’ (manager):
OhmyNews strives to listen to the voice of no one but our readers’

and citizen reporters’. OhmyNews, by design, cannot bend its
editorial integrity because of illicit pressure from anybody. Our

citizen reporters will submit whatever story they deem newsworthy
and worth attention, and OhmyNews cannot reject them without
first offering them publicly justifiable reasons. Should anyone find
that we are rejecting some critical stories out of pressure from any
one, OhmyNews will instantly come under great fire and public
scrutiny by our own citizen reporters.
(Manager)
In this way, OhmyNews’ vision of media developments, especially in

its move to create OhmyNews International, epitomises the role that
news media is granted within the concept of GCS; it conceptually
breaks down restraints of time and space, thus providing a possibil-
ity for global citizenship to emerge by allowing mediated information
and communication to be both global and instant, and secondly, it
conceptually removes the perceived forces of power seen to influence
and shape such mediated communication, providing a possibility for
‘domination-free’ deliberation in a public sphere. It is, therefore, an
ideal news site to scrutinise in practical terms.
OhmyNews in Korean context
Starting with 727 citizen reporters, a staff of four and 64,000 readers,
the growth of domestic OhmyNews within Korea has been exceptional.
In September of 2000, the number of citizen reporters had risen to
5000, in May 2006 it had gone up to 42,000 individuals and in March
2009 the number of registered citizen reporters was reported as being
over 70,000 with a readership of an average 2.5 million page views per
day, placing it in the top 30 traffic generating South Korean web sites
(Gruen 2009). The developments that surrounded OhmyNews in the
immediate years after its launch are crucial to understanding not only
its success, but also to understanding the context in which OhmyNews
decided to launch an English-language site and make their model
global. OhmyNews has become such a popular example to draw on in
discussions on internet and democracy because it is unusual in its mani-
festation as not only a ‘full-fledged participatory news [site]’ (Lasica
2003) but also to have had real and observable impact upon politics
within South Korea. The site is widely attributed to have been respon-
sible for the election of the left-leaning president Roh Moo-Hyun in
2002 – who had been shut out of mainstream media – by having Roh
supporters publish messages and garner the support of youth voters via
OhmyNews (Joyce 2007; Gruen 2009; Kim, Moon & Yang 2004). Upon
the eve of the confirmation of Roh’s victory, Oh wrote on OhmyNews:
‘As of today, the long-lasting media power in Korea has changed. The
power of media has shifted from conservative mainstream newspapers
to netizens and Internet media’ (Oh Yean Ho, Harvard 2004). A great
deal of literature has attempted to analyse how OhmyNews managed to
assert itself in the Korean media landscape the way that it did, but it is
perhaps worth drawing on Oh’s own analysis to understand this. For Oh
it is clear that it is to a large extent, although not exclusively, a Korean
phenomenon and he highlights five reasons why OhmyNews may have
become so successful:
First, Korean readers were disappointed by the mainstream conserva-

tive media for a long time and yearned for alternative media. Second,
Korea’s Internet infrastructure is superior to most other countries. We
enjoy over 75% broadband penetration. It makes multimedia,
always-on service and interactive news service possible. Third, South
Korea is small enough that our staff reporters can reach the news
scene in a few hours to check whether a citizen reporter’s article is
correct or not. Fourth, Korea is a uni-polar society. The entire country
can be quickly engulfed by a couple of issues. But the most important
reason is that Korean citizens were ready to participate. Korea has a
young, active and reform-minded generation, those in their 20s and
30s and early 40s.
(Oh Yean Ho, Harvard 2004)
As such, OhmyNews grew out of a specific context that amalgamated key

factors unique to its national landscape that would be nurturing and
supportive of a citizen-led news production model on the internet. As
has been outlined by a number of historians, it is important to note that
the remarkable economic growth of the country from the Korean war
until the 2000s which facilitated large investments in technology has
happened in conjunction with a very strong state based on centralised
authority and intensified press repression that actually continued after
the democratisation of the political system in 1987 all the way into the
early 1990s (Gruen 2009; Yang 2000). As such, there were some very
unique conditions within South Korea that facilitated the growth of
OhmyNews that are often not fully appreciated in debates on the internet
and democracy, especially when transferred to a global context. This is
highlighted by the difficulties OhmyNews experienced with their launch
of a Japanese version of their site in 2006, OhmyNews Japan, which failed
to foster the same kind of growth and popularity that had marked the
launch of OhmyNews Korea and was relatively quickly disintegrated after
only a couple of years. Some have argued that this may be precisely due
to the different conditions that favour or disfavour citizen journalism
in the two countries (cf. Gruen 2009). What matters here, however, is
how this analysis may also inform an appropriate understanding of the
globalised version of the news production model employed by OhmyNews
which was launched on the fourth year of the site’s anniversary in 2004,
and indeed the challenges the international site has faced.
News production at OhmyNews International
The international English-language version of its site has received much

less scholarly and media attention than its Korean counter-part – with
much less factual data produced about it – despite echoing in its forma-
tion a lot of the celebrated potential of a globalised alternative news
portal. Upon its launch Oh enthusiastically stated:
OhmyNews International began operating on the occasion of our

fourth anniversary, and this marks the beginning of the globalisation
of a native Korean product. OhmyNews International will gradually
expand to allow the citizens of the world to participate by writing
their own articles in English. Until now, ‘Every Citizen is a Reporter’
has been applied only to speakers of Korean. Now it will grow to
include people everywhere.
(Oh, Address to 2004 World Association of Newspapers 2004)
Although logical in light of the inherent structure of the internet,

moving news production from its national context to a global context
is a fairly atypical practice for the majority of alternative news sites,
citizen-led or otherwise. Despite the widespread perception that the
internet has automatic global reach (within the remits of actual access
to the internet, which of course immediately eliminates the majority of
the world’s population, in essence ridiculing any such perception of the
net) most online only news sites are in fact very nationally or region-
ally focused. If indeed aimed at a global audience and intending to
attract a global contributor base, such news sites move away from being
concerned with general news and focus on a specific topic or event,
for example technology (TechCrunch) or the ‘Y2K bug’ (Siliconvalley.
com). The move from OhmyNews Korea to an OhmyNews International
site is therefore a very interesting experiment in attempting to put into
practice the removal of time and space constraints of international

journalism, in general terms, and also an insight into the difficulties
with making claims on a global perspective for a global audience,
even – or perhaps especially – in the online world.
Economic prisms
One of the fundamental challenges for online only news sites that
has been the most frequently noted in discussions on the ‘democratic
potential’ of the internet is its (lack of) sustainable financial structures.
Indeed, the notion that the internet makes information ‘free’ has prob-
ably been its most simultaneously applauded and deplored feature. For
OhmyNews International, as a for-profit news organisation, it has come
to occupy the most substantial challenge for its survival as an alterna-
tive news outlet. OhmyNews International is funded by parent company
OhmyNews which is reported to derive 60–70 per cent of its, as of 2009,
approximately $6.5 million in revenue from advertising, 20 per cent
from the syndicated sale of news pieces, and about ten per cent from
miscellaneous sources, including fees for alerts (Forbes 2009; Center
for Media and Democracy 2007). At the time of writing, however, it is
looking to change the balance of this business model to incorporate
a source of revenue from an OhmyNews ‘club’ with members receiv-
ing added services by paying a fixed membership fee. However, this
business model primarily concerns the domestic OhmyNews Korea site
and the financial struggles within the parent company as a result of
a combination of the global financial crisis and increasing competi-
tion from other online sites (Businessweek, 01 November 2006) has
meant that the cut-backs that were made were mostly felt at OhmyNews
International, which ‘never made any money’ (editor). At the time of
research, OhmyNews International had only one full-time editorial staff
member (down from five in 2006) whose position was being funded
from external sources, no professional reporters, and the minimal
spending on keeping the server updated came from ‘some extremely
minimal income’ (editor) from the advertisements that are run on the
site. As with the majority of online only global news sites, and indeed
mainstream news organisations (see especially Chapter 4), the long-
term sustainability of OhmyNews International continues to be in con-
stant jeopardy despite its perceived value among its management and
indeed contributors (indeed, subsequent to this research, the site has
entirely re-launched and rather than functioning as a news-generating
site, it is now an aggregation site for other citizen-journalism sites and
forums dedicated to the issue of citizen-journalism). The inability to

make the international site profitable, in contrast to the domestic site,
is arguably an amalgamation of problems concerned with both being a
‘global’ news organisation and by relying on citizen-produced content.
As one staff member stated:
I think because with citizen journalism you are never going to know
what’s going to come in and I thought that [is] a weakness of the
website, because readers never knew what they were going to get […]
so advertisers weren’t going to come, because there was no clearly
targeted demographic.
(Editor)
The way in which these economic restraints manifest themselves in the

news production process is crucial for understanding the terms under
which alternative online news outlets may be seen as a representation
of ‘global public opinion’. It immediately changes the editorial proc-
ess outlined above with regards to the parent company and domestic
counter-part OhmyNews Korea. The way in which the international site
is run at the time of research resembles a far simpler model that relies on
a much more prominent role for its citizen reporters as sole contributors
to the news site, with no professional reporters concerned specifically
with ‘hard news’, nor any other editorial staff beyond the single editor
(see Figure 5.2). It therefore shifts the relationship between profes-
sional and amateur that has been an integral part of the success of the
domestic site.
The limited resources with which the international site has to pro-
duce a much greater spread of content strips down both the volume
and quality of news content that gets published on the site. What is
more, although the majority of citizen journalists do not engage in
reporting for financial benefit, the lack of a comprehensive funding
Essays & Columns

Film & Book Reviews
Minimal
Citizen Media Criticism Publication
screening by
reporters Hard News
single editor
Analysis
Columns & Editorials
Figure 5.2 Editorial process at OhmyNews International

structure for the activity of reporting does mean that, similarly to the
effects of resource constraints in mainstream media (see Chapters 3 & 4),
both story-selection and coverage of stories is done with the use of
the most immediate and cost-efficient resources available. Similarly to
trends happening in mainstream media, this encourages a shift in the
sourcing process towards relying on and copying already-produced
news, whether from online sites or from off-line news outlets, that gets
re-packaged in articles for OhmyNews International. One citizen reporter
described his news production process as:
My main source is always going back to the internet. At times I go to

the printed press, the daily newspapers, and there I take an idea or
two […] I go into the web, I do a search on it, I compile all the differ-
ent sources that I see and I do a kind of global overview from what
I’ve collected, and then I try to trim it down. It’s a patchwork that
I cobble up and then I try and make it look as seamless as possible.
(Contributor)
What this highlights is the crucial question of the extent to which citizen
journalism necessarily produces original content, even when it presents
material as a news story rather than opinion-pieces or commentary. The
fact that citizen reporting is forced to be practiced on minimal resources
and often outside of contributors main occupation means that both time
and space are central concerns in understanding the context in which we
are to analyse the news produced on citizen-led online only news sites.
The question of what actually constitutes ‘new’ news on alternative news
sites is emblematic of this debate. As another news worker observed:
[t]he people writing for OhmyNews haven’t got the time, nor have
they got the expertise to generate news. They have to depend on
newspapers. So whatever they pick up from the newspapers, it’s just
a copy of it […] So most of the stories that appear in OhmyNews
are not news based. Because these people are all amateurs. They
don’t have the facilities, opportunities or support to generate news.
Whatever news they come across is something which is a repeat of
the newspaper or the internet.
(contributor)
As is further elaborated on below, this is a significant feature of the coverage

on the site, which tends to reference local media, especially, in its stories
and, more than anything else, provide an analysis of information drawn
from news reports in mainstream media. What is more, the resource

constraints with which OhmyNews Internationall operates have significant
implications for the ability of editorial staff to obtain the resemblance of
professional journalism that OhmyNews identifies itself with. Because of
its open-source system for news production, it is precisely the reassurance
of a comprehensive editorial filter that provides OhmyNews with the
credibility it seeks as a news organisation. However, the lack of adequate
funding channels for online only news sites makes it difficult for editorial
staff to engage in anything other than fairly superficial editorial processes
involving validating information and fact-checking using wires, match-
ing stories from other sites, and other web-based research. One editor
remarked that their editing process consisted almost entirely of ‘googling’
(editor). The resource restraints in this context are even the more glaring
due to the global character of OhmyNews International’s news production.
In other words, very minimal editorial staff based in one or two places (it
used to be a joint operation with editors based in both the United States
and in Korea, but the editor has subsequently become solely based in the
offices in Korea) are receiving information from around the world that
they are trying to verify with only immediately available resources. As
one editor noted:
I look for things like internal consistencies, I look for things like
factual errors. But when I am confronted with an entire world’s
worth of content I cannot be an expert on all of it, and I do not have
knowledge of all of it […] For example, I have an author who writes
quite a lot out of Afghanistan, and I simply have no way of knowing
whether or not it’s purely fabrication, slanted, whatever. I have no
idea. And most of these stories are not about events that are large
enough to appear in other English-language publications.
(Editor)
As a caveat, some articles get published with a note saying ‘only light
editing’, which in the words of one staff member is their ‘internal way
of saying that this isn’t as strenuously edited as we’d liked, because
we can’t’ (editor). Or the stories do not get published at all, although
this is a rare occurrence and happens most frequently with stories that
are advertising for something: ‘Maybe it’s a contest put on by some
regional government to do whatever. Those are the types of things that
I am particularly wary of publishing, especially because there may be
a political slant that an editor out of country isn’t aware of, for exam-
ple’ (editor). As such, there is a real sense in which the constraint on
resources, similarly to developments in mainstream media, comes to

fundamentally challenge questions of quality and validity of informa-
tion that enters and comes to be represented as news.
Furthermore, one of the unique features of OhmyNews International as
a user-generated news outlet was its initial willingness to pay financial
reward to its citizen reporters for their articles. Each citizen reporter ini-
tially received up to $20 for every article published as well as possibly
receiving more through a ‘tip’ system where readers can ‘tip’ reporters
for writing particularly good articles. Although on the Korean site of
OhmyNews there have been isolated cases of authors earning thousands
of dollars in tips for a story, the tips and payments serve more as encour-
agement than income: ‘The payment system may send a message to
citizen reporters that what they were producing is valuable, but also fits
the interactive model of the site’ (Joyce 2007). However, on the inter-
national site this pay structure has taken on a more significant role and
the fact that it has gradually dissolved, moving from only paying arti-
cles published on the front page to only paying the best articles of the
month based on an awards system, to eventually having no payment
at all for published articles is not entirely without consequences. It also
speaks of the financial difficulties OhmyNews has experienced with its
international site. Although the majority of citizen journalists are not
concerned with financial gains, the removal of pay is still an important
factor in understanding the practices of news production at OhmyNews
International. First of all, in parts of the world where $20 may feel more
of a substantial sum of money than in the most developed economies,
this has removed part of the incentive to submit articles. As one citizen
reporter based in India remarked:
When they stopped paying me I stopped writing because in my

writing there is a lot of ground to cover. Time, money, expense,
everything is involved. So I was looking for something where all my
expenses are covered.
(Contributor)
As such, the lack of pay for citizen reporters at OhmyNews International

does exclude some contributors, and very significantly one staff mem-
ber noted a decrease in stories from countries such as Nepal, India and
Pakistan, which had initially been unusually active contributors, when
the pay structure changed. More commonly, rather than stopping citizen
journalists from reporting completely, it has arguably removed the
incentive to submit articles on as frequent a basis as when payment was
secured. As one contributor stated: ‘I think [the payment system being

dissolved] may have affected the rate for feature writers how much they
submit their articles’ (contributor). The reduction in volume of articles will
play a crucial part in the editorial process in that there is less lee-way for
editors to decide not to publish a story if they do not find it of suitable
quality. At the same time, however, the elimination of pay for published
articles also notably diminished the amount of articles that were sent to
editors that were plagiarised stories from elsewhere, most often from local
or national press, as it ended the trend of ‘people who were writing stories
for money, people plagiarising for money’ (editor). This trend had espe-
cially been observed in the influx of articles from poorer countries where
the monetary reward provided by OhmyNews Internationall held more
significance. However, because plagiarised stories were especially com-
ing from the global South, there was a sense in which re-writing these
stories and publishing them on OhmyNews Internationall was part of the
re-distribution of what is deemed newsworthy in the media: ‘you have to
look at it this way, they were reporting news from countries that don’t
really hit the international press, so they were providing a kind of service
by bringing these stories to the public eye’ (editor). This must be consid-
ered a key attribute of OhmyNews Internationall as it continues to be these
kinds of stories based on national or regional media – whether in the style
of a re-written report or as a commentary – that make up the majority of
the articles on its site. To lose contributors from this part of the world com-
pletely, therefore, is a significant manifestation of the economic prisms
shaping alternative international online news (see also Figure 5.4).
What is more, the (lack of) financial structures that underpin the
online news market reinforce and shift the nature of the competition for
user-generated content for a site like OhmyNews International. That is, the
motivation for citizen reporters to produce news becomes predominantly
about the gain of other types of capital than economic capital which will
impact on where they chose to concentrate their efforts. In particular,
this capital comes to be measured in terms of the level of publicity
possible above and beyond any other consideration. As former com-
munication director for OhmyNews, Jean K. Min, has said: ‘One reason
why people write for us is that they can get huge numbers of eyeballs,
sometimes 100,000 clicks for a single story […] If you want to make your
name, this is the place!’ (Min 2004). This is crucial for understanding the
way in which OhmyNews Internationall fits into the broader online media
market operating along a business model that relies to such a considera-
ble extent on voluntary and free labour. By removing financial gain from
the incentives of attracting news producers, OhmyNews Internationall has
to compete with other online news sites for contributors on terms that
mainstream news organisations able to pay professional journalists do
not, namely on the basis of how many people will potentially read their
story. The motivation to produce news in an online public space has a
great deal to do with its potential reach and the potential recognition
that may come with that, as one contributor stated: ‘I started writing to
promote myself so that I can make my own name. People should know
me’ (contributor). Because of the very complex and convoluted structure
of how information is reached on the internet, this competition for
‘hits’ is a far more multifaceted element of the news production proc-
ess at online only news sites than the way the competition for ‘ratings’
is traditionally understood. One of the unique features of online news
is that its reach is to such an extent determined by ‘linking’. That is,
there is an acute awareness among online only news sites that having
stories ‘linked’ to other very big and dominating websites is central to
attracting more readers. One OhmyNews staff member outlined how this
understanding of how to get more ‘hits’ meant that certain sections that
have appeared on OhmyNews Internationall such as ‘OhmyNews in brief’
(only temporarily part of the site) was a ‘deliberate attempt to get hits
on Google’. That is, top news stories, usually entertainment or human
interest based, would be re-written and published on the site, ‘careful
not to repeat wording so Google would take it as an original story, and
then if you are lucky Google News will put it on the front page and those
stories that make it on the front page gets huge numbers of readers,
so I think that’s how websites get their traffic, through doing that’
(editor). The increase in sites competing for (free) user-generated con-
tent is therefore essential for understanding the environment in which
OhmyNews International seeks to operate and indeed to sustain a continu-
ous news cycle that can be seen as a credible news source. This shift in
the terms of competition towards free labour in exchange for publicity
has seen some citizen reporters that used to be frequent contributors to
OhmyNews International move to other sites based in places where people
are the biggest internet users and where they feel there is a higher level
of publicity, such as US-based Groundreportt which is analysed later in
the chapter. The manner in which these contributors ‘migrate’ within
the online news world is important because of the centralisation of
especially global news sites within certain regions, especially the United
States (GlobalPost, Groundreport,t Worldpress, Salon, Indymedia, to name
a few), and to a lesser extent Europe (AgoraVox, Opendemocracy). The
way in which the national context of these sites comes to shape news
practices is therefore essential to explore.
National prisms
Although the vision initially has been ‘to spread citizen journalism
to the world’ (Euntaek Hong, former editor-in-chief of the English-
language site, quoted in Dawley 2006), the growth of the international
site has been much more moderate than its domestic counter-point.
It was reported to have 6000 registered contributors in March 2009
(Forbes 2009) in over a 100 different countries and at the time of
research had roughly 100,000 unique visitors per month (staff member
at OhmyNews). The latest data provided of what this audience looks like
dates back to a presentation given by OhmyNews in 2005 and shows an
overwhelming amount of its readership to be concentrated in Europe
and North America, as well as a relatively sizable proportion to be
located in Asia Pacific (see Figure 5.3).
As is indicated by this audience break-down, the news production
process at OhmyNews International may, despite noble ambitions to be
so, not be appropriately understood as being global in the sense that it
is often assumed to be in the literature on globalised non-state activity
and indeed by its own management and contributors. One contributor
summarised this vision in his explanation of how he had come to
OhmyNews International:
It was a very interesting English experience, because here you were

most of us with English as our main or first language expressing
ourselves to an international audience using a Korean vehicle. All of
South Asia 2.1
South America 4.6
North America 36
Middle East 0.9
Europe 38.5
Asia Pacific 16.7
Africa 1.2
Figure 5.3 Geographical break-down of readership of OhmyNews International
as of 2005
Source: Presentation by OhmyNews at 6th International Symposium on Online Journalism,
University of Texas, 2005.
these dynamics I thought represented globalisation. It seemed this

idyll of globalisation, of bringing us all together, of tearing down the
borders.
(Contributor)
However, in reality, the vision of ‘bringing us all together’ is problema-

tised not only by the notion that English is seen as the ‘global’ language
with which this is meant to occur, which immediate skews globality
towards certain actors over others, but also the fact that the audience
break-down does not reflect this assertion. It is clear that readership
comes predominantly from Europe and North America, making up
over 70 per cent of the audience on OhmyNews International, and that
because of its Korean context, it also has a relatively high readership
from the Asia Pacific region (16.7%). Almost none of its readership
comes from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa and less than five
per cent is located in South America. For a news production model that
relies almost entirely on interactivity and participation from its audi-
ence in the production of news, such a geographical break-down clearly
matters in what news gets produced and what stories sustain longer
staying-power on the site despite having contributors placed all over the
world. It does this in both obvious and subtle ways.
A great deal of reader interest in certain stories will tempt editors to
keep those stories on the front-page in order to satisfy their audience,
and editors are easily able to track this traffic by registering the amount
of hits each story gets. In particular, this is felt when there are stories
posted concerning the Asia Pacific region, especially Korea, such as the
stories concerned with North Korea’s security and nuclear activities
which are attributed their own section ‘Dateline North Korea’ on the
site1. There is also a sense in which the site will feature stories that
somehow connect Korea to ‘hot’ topics concerning other regions, such
as how population growth in Europe2 or immigration policies in the
United States3 compare to that in Korea. As one editor remarked, ‘I will
say that articles about Korea do better than articles about everywhere
else’ (editor). It is also noteworthy with ‘media-friendly’ stories that
have a great deal of coverage and are likely to be searched for in high
numbers on the internet over long periods of time, such as the H1N1
virus, more commonly referred to as ‘swine flu’, which has had stories
featured about it and kept on the front-page of OhmyNews International
consistently throughout the period of research since the story first
broke.4 But perhaps more significantly, citizen reporters are themselves
able to track the amount of hits their own stories are getting and will
therefore be able to gather an impression of the kind of news that cater

specifically to the audience of OhmyNews International. As one citizen
reporter stated:
I wrote a few articles on Latin American issues, but I noticed that

those weren’t necessarily picked up, just from the number of hits,
they weren’t read as much as the ones about Korea or the ones about
US politics. So I noticed that was interesting, because regionally the
people who are reading OhmyNews are more based in Eastern Asia.
Their interest in Latin America is maybe not as strong as it is in obvi-
ously Asia and then maybe the United States.
(Contributor)
This is not to say that readers are only ever interested in stories that
concern the region in which they are based, but it does seem to impact
on what stories contributors feel will do well on the site and may con-
tribute to giving global news sites certain contextual identities. This
is important because part of the motivation for becoming a citizen
reporter on a global news site is to have your stories read by as large a
number of people as possible, globally. A concern with the perceived
geographical break-down of reader interest, which may be partly
informed by the geographical break-down of where readers are located,
is therefore highly significant in understanding that even so-called
global news sites that seemingly operate as ‘independent from every-
thing’ still have certain cultures and identities attached to them. This is
supported by looking at the regions that are covered in the news stories
on OhmyNews International (see Figure 5.4). This shows very clearly that,
despite the feeling that articles ‘are quite widely distributed’ (editor) in
terms of the regions that are covered on the news site, the break-down
of news coverage more or less follows the geographical structures of its
readers in the outside world.
Figure 5.4 illustrates what the geographical breakdown of the news
coverage looks like when each article over a period of a year is catego-
rised according to the most dominant region featured in the coverage.
This highlights, most significantly, that as much as a fifth of the coverage
on OhmyNews International during the period of February 2009–February
2010 is about the Asia Pacific region, with almost an equal amount
concerning North America, followed by Europe. It should also be noted
that despite claims of having 6000 contributors from more than 100
countries, this means only in essence that the reader has registered on
the site, and during the time period under research, the 653 articles
Other
International 4% Europe
4% 15%
Latin America
14%
Africa North America

4% 18%
South Asia
8%
Australasia
Asia Pacific 4%
20%
Middle East
9%
Figure 5.4 Geographical distribution of regions covered on OhmyNews International

from February 2009 to February 2010. Sample size: 653 articles
published were only written by around 40 different authors. Perhaps

partly due to the limited number of actually active contributors, Figure
5.4 also indicates that it is possible to shift the geographical structures
of the offline world in online news coverage by having very active indi-
vidual citizen reporters from certain regions, in this case Latin America
which makes up 14 per cent of the news coverage despite only making
up less than five per cent of the overall readership. What must be ques-
tioned, however, is that with the incentive for citizen reporting resting
to such a degree on ‘eyeballs’, and citizen journalism outlets coming to
compete with each other in an increasingly fragmented media market
online, whether such individual activity is sustainable over longer term.
As a citizen reporter based in Pakistan argued, consideration for geo-
graphical make-up of audience and their perceived geographical interest
became a key reason for his move to increasingly write for other news
sites more catered to his story interests:
There was a time when I liked to write on OhmyNews. After that I

discovered [another news site]. Now every week I write for [another
news site]. Why? What I felt was people were not interested in my
country in that area, South Korea.
(Contributor)
As such, the national base of OhmyNews International along with the

geographical break-down of its readers/producers plays an important
part in shaping the culture of this news site, albeit sometimes in subtle
ways. When placed in the broader context of online citizen journalism
in its entirety, this is a crucial observation as the overwhelming majority
of online international news sites are almost exclusively coming out of
the global North, particularly the United States. OhmyNews International
is almost a sole exception. In other words, despite the common under-
standing of the internet as removed from or operating above national
contexts, there is still relevance in debates on directions of ‘news flows’
when it comes to alternative international news outlets online and
these ‘flows’ go predominantly from North to South.
There is a further way in which national contexts come to play a part
in the production of news discourses at OhmyNews Internationall and it
centres on a fundamental journalistic transformation in the conceptu-
alisation of public interest. What traditionally defines public interest in
international reporting is an understanding of how global issues may be
relevant to the lives of the audience at which the reporting is aimed. For
domestic news outlets this definition is more or less shaped and clearly
outlined by the national context of its news consumers which acts as
a guide for the editorial process. In an increasingly globalised world, it
would make sense that the amount of global issues considered of rel-
evance to domestic audiences and therefore worth reporting on would be
increasing, but as we have seen in Chapter 4 with Los Angeles Times, this is
not actually the case. The place for the reporting of global issues, it seems,
is increasingly confined to precisely global news outlets, whether satellite
broadcasters such as BBC World News or internet sites such as OhmyNews
Internationall and Groundreportt (see below). These outlets in principle,
however, do not have the definitional resources of a national context
in which their audience is placed to draw on in order to conceptualise
an understanding of public interest. In the case of global satellite broad-
caster BBC World News we have seen that the fact that the majority of
its reporters, despite being stationed all over the world, share a common
institutional, journalistic and national culture helps reporters to come to
a common understanding of what the public interest is and should be
and binds the reporting together to speak with ‘one voice’ (see Chapter 4).
The structure of OhmyNews International, however, does not allow for
that kind of commonality of a concept of public interest to be shaped.
Its citizen reporters come out of vastly different national contexts, do
not necessarily have any training or sufficient contact with OhmyNews
staff in order for a strong institutional culture to become ingrained in
the news production process, and nor do they share an immediately

obvious journalistic culture. The code of ethics that OhmyNews advocates
provides only a minimal guide in these terms, but it does not provide
an overarching purpose, topic or theme of interest as is often the case in
many other successful online global news sites, such as the anti-capitalist
theme of Indymedia or the human rights focus of Oneworld (and to a
lesser extent Groundreportt with its focus on ‘hyperlocal’ news as explored
below). Although the position OhmyNews in domestic terms has come
to occupy in Korean politics grants it a very specific political identity
that may inform much of the contributions to its Korean site, this does
not seem to have translated into the operations of its English-language
international site. Instead, OhmyNews Internationall as a practical and
philosophical open-source system that does not want to reside in any par-
ticular set of definitions as to what news coverage should be about, must
rely upon a much more individualised d understanding of what stories are
in the public interest. That is, citizen reporters at OhmyNews International
each draw on their own national contexts, their own understanding of
what OhmyNews Internationall as an organisation is and should be, and
their own understanding of journalistic culture – which may again also
depend to a large degree on the mainstream media they are exposed to
in their individual domestic settings – in order to come to a conception
of (global) public interest.
Personal prisms
Faced with such an open, flexible and uncertain guide to defining

what is in the public interest, many citizen reporters fall back on the
resource ubiquitously available to them: personal interest. As one editor
outlined:
There are themes to the stories that individuals write, there are
not themes overall […] Every author seems to have a theme […]
[OhmyNews International] have many stories about many radically
different things.
(Editor)
Thus, contributors overwhelmingly draw on themes they are privately

invested in when deciding and researching stories, whether this will be a
response to the coverage of these issues in mainstream media or whether
this will be based on information from elsewhere that has (wrongly) not
been covered by mainstream media, or as is most often the case, whether
it is based on immediate activities citizen reporters are engaged in – an

‘activity-based approach’ (contributor) to story-selection. Therefore, the
site has a great deal of coverage on very specific individual topics rang-
ing from press freedom in Kyrgyzstan or life in small-town America, to
the Australian Football League or traditional Japanese cultural events, to
name a few examples that made up a great deal of the coverage in the
sample analysed between February 2009–February 2010. These stories
appear on the site based on the activities of a few individual contribu-
tors who will write continuously mainly on these topics drawing from
either local media or from personal activity. These types of stories will
dominate the coverage in conjunction with commentaries and individ-
ual analysis of dominant news events based on coverage in mainstream
news. One news worker summed it up as ‘a lot of it is based on my
personal attraction, my interest in the issues, and people I meet through
various interactions’ (contributor) echoing the general understanding
of the story-selection process among most of the people interviewed.
Hence, in the absence of having a brief or any editorial instructions as
to what they should write about, the story-selection process becomes
less about values that might define what is newsworthy and more about
documenting an agenda based on the personal activities of individual
citizen journalists. Furthermore, this personalisation of public interest is
encouraged by the lack of resources available to news generators for the
site. That is, an activity-based approach to story selection and drawing
on sources that are readily and easily available to contributors anyway
is a cheap and efficient understanding of what makes news. This moves
the understanding of news away from something to be ‘discovered’ to
being much more about what is already known or already of interest
to the reporter. As such, there is an implicit change in what constitutes
news that also better fits an online only for-profit business model with
minimal revenue by covering stories in a way that does not demand
added expense, making it a markedly different process from that of
mainstream traditional news outlets.
This redefinition of public interest into personal interest for the publicc has
consequences not only for traditional understandings of how journalism
should be practiced – and conventional news values helping to define
what is newsworthy as part of that – but also, crucially, the relationship
between news media and the representation of public opinion. In many
ways, this shift may speak to a truer representation of public opinion
than that of traditional news media as it removes from the concept of
public interest as it is practiced within mainstream media in the current
global media market the elitist terms under which this concept is defined
that stems from mass media news practices being so closely linked to the
activities of social and political elites (see Chapters 3 & 4). This shift in
determining what is newsworthy has precisely been one of the missions
of OhmyNews. As Oh has stated in one of his manifesto defining articles:
In the 20th century, a presidential press conference was news, and

tears shed by one’s lover the night before were not. We will now be
restoring that lost half of the news.
(Oh, OhmyNews 2006)
As such, there is an extent to which the introduction of the ‘private’

into the public realm is seen as a central part of ‘democratising’ media.
However, this is a complex argument in practice. There is a danger here
of equating the democratisation of public discourse with the privati-
sation of public discourse. A key consideration in this context is the
often-confused debate on news production and opinion writing and
its implications for discussions on public deliberation. This debate has
become more, not less, pertinent in light of online news activity. What
OhmyNews International illustrates is the shift in balance of content on
online alternative news sites towards more commentary, opinion and
personal advocacy. As one editor outlined with regards to the sort of
articles that were sent in:
I guess it was in three tiers. We got news that people had regurgitated
from their national or local newspapers that otherwise wouldn’t have
made it onto an international website. So it was news reporting but
it wasn’t original news reporting […] We really got very little on the
ground, in the street, this is me looking at this and this is happening.
We got very little of that and it was mostly opinion […] too many
opinion pieces, like we would get so many opinion pieces about Iraq
we would say has this got a new angle, no, don’t publish it.
(Editor)
As such, in light of economic and national prisms of news production,

online only news writing by citizens around the world should not just
be understood in terms of an extension of news gathering. Much more,
the activity of news sites that have appeared online are a public space
for personal opinions on already gathered news. Indeed, the publicity-
driven competition for writing for an international news site is closely
tied to the wish to get new opinions into the ‘global public sphere’ rather
than new news, limited by the restraints of not being a professional
journalist. As one contributor stated: ‘I use this medium to share my

own ideas […] I’m a sort of poet, I want to express myself. I never think
whether it is suitable for OhmyNews International or not, I just write it’
(contributor). This also means that submissions of articles at OhmyNews
International will increase at times of big events already firmly placed
on the top of the international news agenda, seen for example in the
high volumes of contributions about the Iraq war or the US presidential
election, as online users contribute individual analysis of such events
based on the resources immediately available to them. The coverage of
these types of issues will have minimal referencing to sources beyond
the mainstream media, but unlike topics that receive less general cover-
age in international news, they do draw contributions from individuals
who could be said to be ‘experts’ such as academics, published authors
on related books or OhmyNews International’s designated, often very
experienced, ‘feature writers’ who will write their personal analysis of
topics in conjunction with contributions from citizen reporters.
Moreover, this increase in commentary, opinions and the general
personalisation of public interest also ties into questions of journalistic
values that are at the root of liberal narratives of the media. Although the
notion of open source news production may adhere to a philosophy that
places neutrality at the forefront of news practices by neutrally validating
anyone’s news as news, the way in which open source news production
is practiced leaves the gateway open for advocacy to become a defin-
ing part of story-selection. In other words, despite the appropriation of
professional journalistic values such as neutrality and impartiality in the
reporting of stories as suggested by the citizen journalism guidelines out-
lined on the OhmyNews Internationall site, the simultaneous activity-based
approach to what stories to write and the personal interest guided under-
standing of what ought to be in the news means that citizen journalism is
also in some ways a form of individual lobbying of specific ideas. As one
American citizen reporter active in women’s human rights groups noted:
My motivation [for writing for OhmyNews International] was really

that I was involved in Amnesty International in Korea, the English-
language group and was learning a lot about violence against women.
I had always taken a concern with women’s issues, violence against
women and so forth, but I was learning a lot in the Amnesty group
and I really wanted to raise awareness about it and when I was read-
ing the newspapers, I really wasn’t finding the human rights abuses
against women. So I wanted to promote that and raise awareness.
(Contributor)
In this way, the concept of advocacy and news may be said to merge
with each other: ‘for me, it [advocacy vs. news] is often one and the
same’ (contributor). This may manifest in rather obvious ways such
as the above example of violence against women where OhmyNews
International is used as a direct outlet for activists in civil society groups
to lobby for certain ideas in a public remit, specifically looking to
reconstruct the agenda of public discourse. Of course, quite apart from
questions regarding journalistic impartiality, having actual activists
produce news on alternative news sites about their activities arguably
provides a challenge to professional journalism in terms of the depth
and knowledge of the issues at hand. As one citizen reporter noted: ‘the
beauty is that you are more selective about what you can do and then
the product can be stronger because you have those contacts and you
have more of a personal tie to them in a sense’ (contributor). What is
more, this development in alternative online news sites also provides a
platform for activists to network and for a large number of specifically
issue-focused citizen reporters OhmyNews International is highly signifi-
cant precisely as a networking tool. As one contributor concerned with
the issue of the ‘comfort women’ in Korea stated:
If there was any way for the community to get this story out on a
larger scale [I would do that]. And at the time OhmyNewss was my go-to
outlet for that. And the more articles I found myself writing, the
more people would contact me to ask to write about other issues, or
to ask me to write for other publications.
(Contributor)
Alternative online news sites are therefore central in the debate on the
way in which the internet facilitates mobilisation of activist groups
and social movements. It should be noted, however, that the interac-
tivity of participatory news sites is not a straight-forward contributory
factor to political mobilisation. For all the communication exchanged
off the back of articles published on OhmyNews International that looks
to network and mobilise, there is also a great deal of communication
exchanged that acts as a destructive force to this mobilisation. In the
most obvious terms, the ability for anyone to comment on and contact
citizen-reporters writing for the site also acted as a deterring mecha-
nism for some people. That is, the possibility (arguably aided further in
cases where anonymity is permitted) to write intimidating comments or
e-mails was noted by several contributors as being a key factor in people
stopping to write. One editor noted: ‘I think sometimes [OhmyNews
International] wasn’t a friendly space for women. Now they have a

policy don’t write nasty comments, but we used to get quite a bit of
nasty comments, and I knew a girl who stopped writing because she
got a nasty mail’ (editor). Another news worker also stated: ‘I do find it
frustrating that I can be so viciously attacked and nobody else comes to
my aid’ (contributor). This exclusionary part of online communication
is part of the much broader debate regarding precisely the way in which
deliberation operates along certain power relations, problematising the
legitimacy attached to its decision-making.
What is more, this obvious amalgamation of news and advocacy is
actually a limited part of the output of OhmyNews International and the
notion of news as issue lobbying on citizen-led online news sites is a
much more complex development than simply understanding these
outlets as spaces for different viewpoints of global civil society groups to
be represented and mobilised. As has been alluded to above, a great deal
of coverage has a more personal or local focus and approach that does
not follow common understandings of either civil society activism or
public deliberation in a global ‘space’. Indeed, the relationship between
citizen journalism and civil society associations defies any linearity or
generalisation. Instead, active users and news workers at OhmyNews
International understand this relationship in terms that are entirely
context-specific. For users in some contexts (and notably confined to
a few contributors based in the North-Western hemisphere), it is a
relationship that is at the forefront of their activity as citizen reporters,
and they understand user-generated content on alternative global news
sites to provide an ideal opportunity to represent the viewpoints of
interest groups to which they feel personally affiliated. For others, and
arguably the majority, there is a much more hostile understanding of
this relationship, and the focus of reporting for OhmyNews International
is much more personal and disassociated from any type of association,
whether governmental or non-governmental. To a large extent, this
relationship comes down to very individual understandings of power
relations within the mainstream media and society at large. That is,
for some citizen reporters a lot of civil society groups are already suf-
ficiently represented and powerful in society to need any further voice
in user-generated news content:
There’s a lot of civil society NGOs which I stay away from that are
supported by government or private corporate interests. Those people
I don’t give them the spotlight because they already monopolise it
[…] If it’s Greenpeace, Save the Children, these are huge organisations
and corporate structures, they have millions of dollars, they don’t

need me, a little citizen-journalist to bring light to their plight. A guy
like me is trying to help out the little guy and make the little guy
look like a bigger fish than he or she actually is.
(contributor)
As such, the question of who ‘deserves’ to be represented by citizen

reporters is a personal understanding of the make-up of society by each
individual contributor, not necessarily informed by a neutral or impartial
understanding of credible sources, but rather informed by deeply subjec-
tive opinions. This is also supported by another contributor based in
Pakistan, whose context similarly informs his understanding of his role:
All civil society exploits situations, including the media, to put pres-
sure on the Punjab government. They use everything they have. To
be frank with you, this civil society includes bureaucrats, business-
men; they have their own interests […] I don’t believe in this civil
society […] I’m trying to represent the common Pakistani, a common
man, a common human.
(Contributor)
As such, there is not one coherent understanding within OhmyNews

International as to for whom and by whom alternative online news is
produced. Instead, the site is made up of very different approaches to
style and content of news that represent many different things to many
different people. This is to some degree precisely what the site is also
celebrated for:
I think the beauty of OhmyNews is that it incorporates a lot of differ-

ent writing styles and it allows you to sort of go beyond the rules, if
you can even say that. Because essentially we are not hired, we are not
employees, a lot of it is just interest in getting the news story out.
(Contributor)
Thus, there is a sense in which online contributors understand the

personalisation of public interest, or the philosophy ‘I write about
what I like’ (contributor) as a move towards a more autonomous news
production process that escapes the pressures of professional news
organisations ‘where you have deadlines, where you have very strict
guidelines to the style […] they have their biases, they have their edito-
rial constraints and they have their corporate agenda that they have
to advance’ (contributor). As outlined in Figure 5.5, this does to some

extent manifest itself in terms of a wider distribution of types of voices
than what may be observed in traditional mainstream media, especially
in international reporting, but it does not, it is important to note,
necessarily manifest itself in a way that privileges a dialogue between
non-state actors across a global ‘space’ as is so often assumed.
As illustrated by Figure 5.5, the viewpoints represented in the news
content on OhmyNews International do follow a much more even
distribution pattern between state and non-state actors than what has
been the case in mainstream news outlet (see Chapters 3 & 4). Non-
state actors such as interest groups and ordinary citizens are in slightly
more proportion to state authorities, and the figure also illustrates that
a substantial amount of viewpoints represented in the news content
come from other media (based on articles that actually reference their
media sources – because of the commentary nature of a lot of stories
the information drawn from other media will not be made explicit
or referenced and this number is in actual terms bound to be a great
deal higher than illustrated here). However, despite assumptions that
alternative news outlets that have emerged on the internet through
citizen activism are primarily a space for ‘global civil society’ to deliber-
ate, the most dominant social group whose viewpoint is represented in
citizen-produced news content is still that of political elites within the
state, whose viewpoints make up one third (33%) of the total number of
viewpoints represented in the coverage. Where non-state interest groups
are represented, they are so predominantly from regions that also have
the largest OhmyNews International audience/users, namely Asia Pacific,
North America and Europe. Interest groups and other civil society actors
from the Global South, as with mainstream news outlets, continue to be
underrepresented making up only a minimal amount of the viewpoints
that get represented in the news coverage on OhmyNews International.
Any dialogue that may take place, therefore, does so between Asia and
the North-Western hemisphere. The news site is an important example
in illustrating the difficulties and complexities that come with shifting
news practices from a domestic to a global canvas where the challenges
of online news sites generally, both local and global, and the structural
inequalities of the offline world are often exacerbated and intensified.
The news practices at OhmyNews International reflect and are shaped
by this in intricate and multifaceted ways that question fundamental
assumptions about the medium of the internet in the literature on ‘glo-
bal civil society’. It is worthwhile exploring this further by looking at
another global news site, which has arguably succeeded in areas where
120
Europe North America Australasia Middle East Asia Pacific

100 South Asia Africa Latin America International
80
60
40
20
0
State Interest Media Ordinary Business/ Own Academia Professionals Celebs/ Other
Groups citizens Financial voice Sports
personalities/
Criminals
Actor
Figure 5.5 Viewpoints represented in news content on OhmyNews International during the period of January 2010–May 2010.
Sample: 60 articles
145
the international dimension of OhmyNews has struggled, and has come

to occupy an increasingly significant place in the global news market
and, indeed, in debates on the internet and democracy.
News production at Groundreport
Groundreportt – a brief history

Groundreportt was founded in 2006 by recent US-based university gradu-
ate Rachel Sterne, whom while interning with the US mission to the
United Nations came to report daily on security council sessions,
including a pivotal speech by the United Nations Secretary General Kofi
Annan on the crisis in Darfur and was struck by the level of informa-
tion regarding ‘these really critical and urgent global issues’ (Sterne,
personal communication) not making it out to the public. After follow-
ing her internship with a job at LimeWire, the file sharing platform,
getting familiar with a broad range of technology that allows for cheap
and powerful publishing, Sterne set up Groundreportt as a way to ‘allow
people to really know what’s going on in the world because if the public
is more informed, they can put more pressure on their governments
to make responsible policy decisions’ (Sterne in interview with Big
Think, recorded on 12 June 2009). As such, the motivation behind the
launching of Groundreportt stemmed, similarly to OhmyNews, from an
understanding that developments in open source technology provided
a platform for cheap publishing combined with a desire to use this to
address perceived fallacies within existing news dissemination. Central
to this understanding was also the notion of citizen journalism that
relies on ordinary citizens to produce news content rather than relying
on professional journalists that are perceived to be constrained by the
needs and wishes of the news organisations they work for (editor). As
with contributors at OhmyNews International, there was a clear percep-
tion in the establishment of Groundreportt that citizen-generated content
adheres to a more autonomous news production process than prac-
tices ‘constrained’ by professional news organisations. What is more,
Groundreportt is importantly centred on the idea that citizen generated
content that depicts news from the standpoint of personal experience
by people who are living within the local context of news stories gives a
more ‘truthful’ and ‘accurate’ account of events and the actual opinions
of the public than reporters lacking the insights of local context. Indeed,
its website slogan is: ‘Hyperlocal News & Opinion Around the World’.
Unlike OhmyNews, Sterne’s preoccupation with hyperlocal news from
around the world was rooted specifically in the lack of and perceived
problems with the coverage of international news in mainstream media,

and Groundreportt has been, from the outset, a global citizen journalism
platform:
[E]specially in the West, international news is very biased and what

we cover and how we cover it always has the same narrative, always
has the same perspective, and it usually covers the same regions. So
the idea was not only are we going to widen the net, but we are going
to allow people to tell a story who are local, who live there, instead of
it being through this Western lens, and then also allowing a human
voice to actually tell the story, so it’s not this meaningless faceless
story but there’s a bit of human engagement.
(Sterne, personal communication)
As such, the ‘mission’ of Groundreportt has been to broaden and balance

the perspective in the coverage of global news by relying on local
citizens based all around the world to tell the stories of their own
contexts in their own words. In this sense, Groundreportt has been more
heavily invested in being specifically a global news site, rather than
having evolved out of a national project as in the case of OhmyNews
International. It has, therefore, arguably also enjoyed more success spe-
cifically as an outlet for global news, and has found itself being the sole
citizen news contributor streaming on the largest online sites at big
global media events, such as the Beijing Olympics, where it partnered
up with YouTube alongside Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York
Times. It is also very active on the side of syndication, syndicating
news with popular sites such as Huffington Post and Google News,
which continues to be a key selling point to its expanding contributor
base. As is so common with specifically alternative international news
sites, despite being considered an important player by some within
the online news market (Rachel Sterne was named one of America’s
25 Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs in Business Week in 2009),
Groundreportt itself gathers only a fraction of the traffic compared to
national news sites in the United States and it currently claims just
under 200,000 unique visitors per month (compared to the 6.5 million
that Huffington Post gets for example). As such, although it is a success
story in the world of online ventures – especially of the global kind – by
the mere fact that it is ‘financially self-sustaining […] and is requiring
no subsidies from anyone’ (editor), it is still far from being a particularly
profitable business and has come to rely on a different kind of capital,
especially by being linked to larger news outlets.
Economic prisms
Groundreportt was launched with seed money from Sterne’s own savings
and family and has managed to cover its costs with a few cash prizes,
content partnerships and above all advertising (The New York Review of
Ideas 2009). In fact, advertising currently makes up 90 per cent of its
revenue, but the income this generates is minimal. Syndication is a
great way of generating traffic, but it is difficult to get paid syndication
(Sterne, personal communication). As with OhmyNews International,
it has therefore had to restructure its initial financial structures.
Similarly to OhmyNews, Groundreportt initially based its operations on
a notion that sharing the profits with its contributor base was the
only fair way to run a user-generated news site. It did this in a slightly
more direct manner by having a pay-structure in place that meant that
contributors would earn a revenue share based on their traffic (Sterne,
interview with Big Think, June 2009). As such, contributors would earn
an income directly in proportion to the revenue they were generating
for the site with their material. Despite the money that could be earned
being mostly minimal, the idea of a direct profit-sharing business model
for a user-generated news site has from an innovation perspective been
a unique selling-point for Groundreport. As one contributor noted with
regards to his initial involvement with the site:
I was looking for sites that […] had some revenue and income and
I think this was really the only one that really gave me money for
what you wrote because it was a pay-pal account that they would
transfer money to. So I found it very fair.
(Contributor)
As such, Groundreportt incorporated a system that would see contributors

receive money based on traffic as well as a star-rating system used on
the site, where readers can rate individual stories. However, after only
a couple of years it has become apparent that this system is no longer
workable for the site. A number of factors have contributed to the recent
ending of this pay-structure that also highlight broader questions in the
debate on the role of the internet in the democratisation of the media
and, indeed, the global system.
First of all, there simply was not the capital available to support it,
especially as the contributor base increased. As has been illustrated in
the case of OhmyNews International as well, this speaks to the lack of
financial investment in international news within the media market.
Beyond that, however, the problems surrounding the pay-structure at
Groundreportt highlight complexities within the infrastructure and user

practices of the internet itself. The site was targeted with ‘comment
spamming’ (editor) in which someone would post plagiarised small
articles and in the comment section would ad popular spam keywords
in order to generate traffic:
[y]ou comment spammed it, like buy Rolex, buy Viagra, whatever thing
would generate traffic. Suddenly it looked like, because people were
picking up these comments through Google, because [Groundreport] t
googles very very well because it’s ‘news’, there would be these spikes
in traffic around these comment spammers who were the same people
who were writing these same little plagiarised articles in order to get
the revenue share.
(Editor)
As such, the pay-structure of Groundreportt arguably came to symbolise not

simply the democratisation of open-source news content, but also the
structural fallacies of a user-friendly commercial model in an open-source
context, highlighting its vulnerability to commercial exploitation. This
was highlighted by one contributor based in Pakistan who stated,
most of the people come to Groundreportt just to earn some money

[…] I have seen that. I have received from different people, even
some people from India […] they wrote me and told me how to make
money from the website.
(Contributor)
Initially, in order to address the difficulties with the economics of

revenue-share, the pay-structure became centred on an award-system
that, rather than distributing revenue across all contributors, awarded a
specific sum of money ($1000) each month to the story with the most
traffic, similarly to the practices at OhmyNews International. However,
this system became unworkable for a number of key reasons. It became
clear early on that the topics that gathered the most traffic would also
be the most ‘sensational’ topics (contributor). They were also being
accused of being the most exploitative. As one former editor explained
with regards to a story from Bangladesh,
Somebody wrote a story about the prostitutes of the capital city of

Bangladesh that got a whole lot of hits. And he won. And a lot of
the other readers and writers in Bangladesh were really outraged and
said, this is exploitation, manipulating and gaming the system. So the

next month [Sterne] noticed that the people who had complained
they were writing articles now about the prostitutes in Bangladesh,
and they won the price in the second month.
(Editor)
In other words, the measuring mechanism of number of ‘hits’ most com-

monly used to measure ‘success’ or status and achievement on the inter-
net, especially with regards to user-generated content, is problematic in
an unregulated environment where very particular content is linked to
much broader interests and concerns. The example of the prostitutes in
Bangladesh highlights not only questions regarding exploitation of sub-
jects in news coverage (arguably an area frequently ignored in debates on
unregulated open-source news content), but also the way in which the
introduction of financial structures that may emulate business models of
professional news organisation in very direct and obvious ways encour-
ages the systematic commercialisation of news practices; an argument
often directed only towards mainstream media (see previous chapters).
Although the award-system may be re-introduced at Groundreportt in a
different context, ‘like rewarding courage and rewarding bravery and
risk-taking and sort of important stories’ (Sterne, personal communica-
tion), the concern with sharing profits with contributors has become less
of a central concern for Groundreportt and the site is, at the time of writing,
looking to replace this with a non-profit element or a ‘Groundreportt Fund’
where investments will go to fund specific projects in conflict areas and
where there is a perceived need for more coverage. Despite the fact that
a great number of contributors interviewed understand the gains for
writing for Groundreportt in non-financial terms, the breakdown of the
financial structures put in place to support news-gathering illustrates
fundamental concerns about the possibility for online sites such as
Groundreportt to offer a viable alternative for high quality international
news. There is no guarantee that the site will be able to hold on to its
contributor base in the face of competition that may offer financial gains
for their writing. The financial structures remain significant for some –
especially for those contributors based in the global South who may see
their work as ‘free lunches for Groundreport’ t (contributor) – despite the
recognition that Groundreportt provides other advantages that is also now
considered in the management of the site:
We see other advantages in publishing on our site which is that many

of our contributors have been able to get full-time jobs, fellowship in
gradschool by pointing to their record online, so it has really helped

them to build up a portfolio of their journals and work.
As such, a key motivation for writing for Groundreportt lies in the oppor-
tunity to practice and showcase writing skills that may not otherwise
find an outlet. As one contributor remarked, ‘it’s a free education for
me’ (contributor). However, it is important to note that Groundreport, t
similarly to OhmyNews, is specifically a for-profit organisation that
prides itself on providing a commercially viable business, which it also
recognises as adding to its status and attractiveness in the global media
market, not least among alternative user-generated news sites. As the
manager outlined,
We are deliberately for-profit and part of the reason for that is

that we don’t want this to be like a broccoli-only journalism that’s
good for you. We want it to be commercially viable and we want
it to be something that will stand on its own two feet and doesn’t
depend on grants and thus can be shut down […] up until this point
international news just hasn’t been competitive enough in terms of
telling good stories and telling engaging stories, and people sort of
glaze over when they hear international news stories or hard-hitting
news, so what we want to do is add a little bit more humanity and
engagement to the stories and push to do that by our for-profit
structure. We are trying to appeal to a popular audience.
Thus, Groundreport’s
t for-profit structure has become integral to its defini-
tion and understanding of international reporting in the global media
market, despite being based in the United States where there is an
increased reduction in investment in such reporting (see Chapter 4). In
this way, Groundreportt is aspiring to be emblematic of what underwrites
the news logic of a ‘global civil society’ – that is, as we are becoming
global citizens, so the popularity of global news from other fellow global
citizens should be on the increase. However as has been noted above, this
is not a common logic among alternative news sites, and it incorporates
a complex multifaceted process.
Editorial prisms
As is implied by the motivations behind setting up Groundreport,t the
site follows a similar philosophy in terms of its editorial process as
that of OhmyNews, but has some significant differences in its practices

surrounding the relationship between professional and amateur report-
ing and of the nature of news values within that. Similarly to OhmyNews,
the notion of setting up an alternative online news site centred on the
idea of ‘open-content’ (editor), a system that would in theory allow
anyone around the world to publish stories of their choosing. Upon
its launch, this meant that Groundreportt employed practically no edi-
torial filters and left the space entirely ‘open’ where stories could be
posted on the site with immediate publication. Thus, it removed the
filter occupied by professional journalists in OhmyNews that OhmyNews
management considered granted it credibility in the online news mar-
ket. However, the influx of plagiarised material and various forms of
spamming has seen the organisation implement an editorial process
at Groundreportt that is more similar to that at OhmyNews. It has editorial
guidelines posted on its site that delineate the need for non-commercial,
non-offensive, non-pornographic original content for an article to be
published. In order to ensure this, Groundreportt relies on a team of around
20 volunteer editors based around the world (‘they have to be fluent in
English so a lot of them are in the US, UK, Australia etc.’ (Sterne, personal
communication)) to check contributions. These editors are users who are
‘very good and active’ and have applied to become part of the editorial
team that reviews and approves content, but are not necessarily profes-
sional or trained journalists and are not employed by Groundreportt in any
formal capacity. Only articles that fit the parameters of Groundreport’s t
editorial standards are published and of the roughly on average 300
stories they receive a week, only about 100 of those are published (of
course, this number can vary a great deal) (Sterne, personal communi-
cation). This screening will also take great consideration of the actual
reporter him/herself, rather than merely the report. As such, credentials
and background will be considered in the decision as to whether to
publish a story, especially in circumstances where the story is potentially
big or sensitive. Following this logic of centring the editorial process on
the notion of ‘reputation’, Groundreportt also operates a ‘white list’ which
includes the ‘best’ contributors – based on their reputation and previous
credentials – that allows their reports to bypass the editorial filter and be
published and syndicated immediately. For comparative purposes, the
editorial process may be illustrated in terms of the model in Figure 5.6.
Groundreport,t similarly to OhmyNews International, attempts to oper-
ate an editorial policy that places it ‘in-between a completely open
system and the more rigorous standards of a traditional news organi-
sation’ (Sterne, personal communication). However, there is arguably
‘White- Non-commercial,
listed’ non-offensive,
Citizen non-pornographic
reporters original content
Publication/
Syndication
Non-‘white- Non-commercial, Screening

listed’ non-offensive, by
Citizen non-pornographic volunteer
reporters original content editors
Figure 5.6 Groundreport editorial process
less emphasis on the professional aspects of the production of news

at Groundreportt within this process, which is evident not only from its
lesser concern with having professional reporters and editors employed.
The front page is decided by a combination of popularity (number of
hits) as well as a ratings system that allows readers to rate individual
articles on a five-star scale. However, there is also a recognition of ‘time-
liness’ as a key value in the news content Groundreportt is able to provide
and decisions on the front page do accommodate ‘breaking stories’,
such as the content that was generated in the immediate hours follow-
ing the Mumbai attacks in 2008 that brought a great deal of attention
to Groundreportt and is further discussed below. With the incorporation
of Groundreport’t s news stream through the social networking site Twitter,r
where it is able to send running updates of its incoming most newswor-
thy stories, this aspect of ‘breaking stories’ on its front page has taken
on even more significance, as it directly competes with big and estab-
lished news organisations to be first with new information.
Crucial to Groundreportt in the editorial process is the emphasis on
original content, seeing this as its major value in the convoluted and
heavily duplicated online news market. Original content in this context
is understood as ‘it needs to have been written by the person who is
submitting it or they need to have the right to be submitting it’ (Sterne,
personal communication). This is the primary concern in the editorial
process, but is by no means a straightforward quality to determine.
The notion that originality is defined in terms of having been writ-
ten by the person who is submitting it does not tackle the concept of
‘original content’ in broader terms highlighted in the case of OhmyNews
International, that form part of the debate on the complexities of a
fragmented global media market in a digital age (cf. Hafez 2007; Davis
2007; Redden & Witschge 2010). That is, it does not tackle the broader
concerns regarding ‘original content’ in a news production process that
is predominantly desk-bound. Despite an emphasis by management on
local news that is gathered from personal experience of the event, this
form of news-gathering is the exception rather than the rule among
the majority of contributors. The ‘personal interest’ guided approach
to story-selection, discussed at great length above with regards to
OhmyNews International and also prevalent at Groundreport, t means that
content is often produced in relation to and drawing upon dominant,
mainstream news content. In other words, writing for alternative online
news sites such as Groundreportt is often a personal activity that must take
place as secondary to income-based work and, as such, is constrained
by a lack of time and money that sees most contributors relying on the
internet and mainstream news outlets for story ideas and information
rather than gathering original content ‘in the field’. As one contributor
remarked when comparing himself to professional journalists,
I wouldn’t say I’m as good as an AP journalist or a CNN reporter or

BBC. I have a lot of respect for that kind of work. It’s very profes-
sional. I think they deserve a lot more praise than the kind of work
that we do because we’re just sitting at home, it’s home-based work,
we’re sitting at home and coming up with a formula of writing.
(Contributor)
Another contributor argued, similarly, that Groundreportt in this sense is

not a producer of news content that should be understood in the same
context as professional news organisations:
You’d be fooling yourself to think that you will be getting the jour-
nalism from a prestigious magazine on a citizen journalism site. It’s
kind of buy and beware. It didn’t cost you anything to get on there,
you can only get what you pay for. Some of it might be incredibly
interesting and valuable. Some of it might just be thrown out.
(Contributor)
It is also clear that these types of stories that comment on mainstream

news stories (in Western media) are the ones dominating the front page
of the site and that generally tend to get the most readers although a
great deal of the content on the site, overall, draws from mainstream
local media in Non-Western contexts. Although the majority of content
may be based on personal interest, informed by mainstream news

content already produced, or researched from the desk, it should be
noted that there are some significant instances where contributors
have written stories based on local contacts, interviews and observa-
tion that put into practice the vision of original locally told news to
a global audience expressed by the founder of Groundreport. This is
especially the case for very local news that highlights stories in the
immediate community – the ‘hyperlocal’ of citizen journalism that
is part of the Groundreportt slogan – such as a story on a series of road
accidents in the town of Chitral in Pakistan5, for example, or interviews
with individual activists about specific projects6. These types of stories,
however, tend to gather far less hits than more ‘timely’ mainstream
news stories, especially concerning the United States, which is further
explored below. Perhaps more significantly, there are cases where
Groundreportt serves as a platform for trained or professional journalists
writing from or about closed or authoritarian societies to provide
original stories that they are not able to publish in their national media,
such as the series of stories written by ‘Harriet’ on the life and struggles
of Zimbabwean protest singer ‘Viomak’7. This contributor noted,
Mostly I write political articles that are for protest movements […]
mostly I deal with political issues. Looking at the situation in
Zimbabwe, I feel that maybe I’m doing a good service to the nation
because I do it. Nobody dares to write about it in Zimbabwe because
of the situation.
(Contributor)
More frequently, Groundreportt is active in transferring reports through

their co-operation with other sites, such as people reporting on Twitter
or on individual blogs about events in contexts of limited informa-
tion access, notably Iran and Afghanistan, posting these on their site.
By being a citizen journalism site, they may feel more liberated to do
this than competing professional news organisations. In this sense,
alternative online news sites gathering international news are able to
provide a platform for local citizens in closed societies where there is
heavy media censorship to produce locally informed stories that may
not otherwise have an outlet. This is a crucial development within the
global media market that may serve to challenge the dynamics of how
dominant news discourses are produced. However, this is complicated
by the fact that not only are the lack of resources limiting in terms of
the depth and breath of the content produced, but it may be argued
that it requires an editorial process that is substantially supported by

a heavily invested and resourced editorial team able to fact check and
research content from places where access to information is extremely
difficult. This is a challenge recognised by especially those contributors
who are trained journalists:
Editorial is something, it can’t just be edited, but editors have to be

very updated about what’s happening around the world.
(Contributor)
[Groundreport’s]
t editorial work is not nearly as good as other sites, and
it has to improve because some of the writing has a lot of loop holes
in it, and it has to be accurate and well-stated. The quality will need
to improve and then people will take it seriously.
(Contributor)
The fact that editors at Groundreportt are not necessarily trained, work
on a voluntary basis in their spare time and do not have a systematic
editorial procedure to follow that the organisation employs leaves it
vulnerable in a mediated format that still relies to some degree on
credibility and trust. Often, this is most obvious in the content with
mistakes in very straightforward information that is easily accessed such
as accurate names and figures, a fact illustrated, for example, in the
site’s coverage of the controversy surrounding the Danish Mohammed
cartoons of 2005 and their subsequent aftermath, which Groundreport’s t
coverage intermittently mistakenly referred to as being Dutch and
stemming from the Netherlands in some of their articles8. It is far more
difficult and significant, perhaps, in content referring to more complex
situations where information is scarce. Although this argument is well-
rehearsed in debates on user-generated news content and is also a key
question in the discussion of OhmyNews International, in the context of
Groundreportt it takes on a slightly different character as it also ties into
wider questions about user-generated online news sites as ‘neutral’ or
‘objective’ platforms that have been central in the liberal narrative of
news media and that need to be explored.
Within the editorial process at Groundreport,
t the question of neutrality
or objectivity that infiltrates and sustains so much of news understand-
ing in traditional terms – evident across mainstream as well as alternative
news outlets such as OhmyNews – is from a managerial point of view not a
particular concern at Groundreport. Indeed, in terms of its editorial policy,
there is an emphasis on ‘transparency over neutrality’ (Sterne, personal
communication). That is, in addition to creating a profile, contributors

are encouraged to complete a detailed biography in their profile that
outlines their occupation and political background and affiliations. It is
also this approach to reporting that allows Groundreportt to be a platform
for non-governmental organisations and advocacy groups to directly post
stories and press releases on the site. This makes up a significant portion
of the stories that are posted on Groundreport. As Sterne outlined,
The way we see it, NGOs are usually in places that are undercovered
by the media and […] have unparalleled access to a conflict and
are dealing directly with that kind of story. And also have stories
that should be getting exposure. So the way we see it is that we are
happy to work with them, but they need to clearly state […] we are
an advocacy organisation, this is our mission, these are our goals, so
you know it’s coming from them, it’s not being positioned as com-
ing from a neutral news story. So if we are transparent about who is
posting it, we are ok about it being published.
As such, Groundreportt as a global news site incorporates an active

redefinition of news values that arguably has grown out of the citizen
journalism ‘movement’. That is, rather than understanding this form of
journalism in comparative terms to that generated by professional news
organisations that adhere to the aim of a neutral and fair perspective,
there is an appreciation that content generated by ordinary citizens –
whether trained journalists or not – should rely on making their inevi-
tably ‘biased’ perspective transparent. As one editor remarked,
Groundreportt makes no pretensions to be objective. Objectivity is

pretension. No one is objective and it’s impossible to be objective.
There is no pretention of objectivity at Groundreport. People just have
a better sense, they have to figure out your agenda as well as figure
out what you are saying.
(Editor)
Ideas of advocacy therefore become part of news practices rather

than practising news in a way that forces a specific set of parameters
onto advocacy organisations as may be the case in mainstream media
(cf. Fenton 2010b). Organisations such as the Institute for War and Peace
Reporting (IWPR), America Without Gas, and Survival International9
are able to post their articles directly onto the site rather than act as
additional ‘secondary’ sources or ‘experts’ as part of the balancing act

within a news piece as is often the case in mainstream media. Although
this shift in values from neutrality to transparency is an interesting
shift in debates on news and public deliberation in a global space, it
is not actually one that has been entirely appropriated by Groundreport
contributors. Although the majority of contributors understand their
activity as a citizen reporter to be a form of ‘activism’ rather than
straight reporting, there is still a dominant understanding of reporting
of any kind to at least adhere to traditional journalistic values that speak
of impartiality and neutrality. As such, contributors may understand
themselves as activists either by advocating for certain issues to get on
the agenda such as environmental and human rights issues:
I would describe myself […] as an environmental and human rights

activist who writes stories.
(Contributor)
Or by placing the views of certain actors in the forefront or privileging

certain voices in the coverage:
I would like to believe that I am doing some form of activism because

I am trying to promote the people who are into activism […] I am
trying to paint a picture that people are not getting.
(Contributor)
However, at the same time as having this very political understanding

of engaging in news production by the topics and the sources that are
selected in this process, there is still a strong sense among a number of
contributors interviewed that the actual coverage of stories should appeal
to notions of balance and impartiality. Here there is a clear cultural
specificity to the way in which journalism – and citizen journalism – is
understood and practiced, which arguably also speaks to the diversity and
fragmentation of a global news outlet that deliberately rejects any collec-
tive organisational culture or politics in its production process. That is,
there has been no particular effort or desire to provide a strong coherent
picture of journalism or the nature of news content within Groundreport
as may be the case in traditional news organisations (see previous chap-
ters). One reason for this is recognised by Sterne as being the diversity
of journalistic cultures: ‘journalism throughout the world has different
definitions. So what we consider journalism in one place, would not be
considered journalism somewhere else and vice versa’ (Sterne, personal
communication). As such, the rejection of traditional professional values

like impartiality and neutrality is common among contributors based in
the United States where Groundreportt emerged, who share its distrust and
scepticism towards ‘agendas within news organisations’ (Sterne, The Paley
Centre for Media: Panel on Social Media and Journalism, February 2010).
Such contributors overwhelmingly understand their own practices as
‘writing opinion-pieces’ (contributor) or ‘expressing my opinions and my
thoughts’ (editor), whereas the majority of the contributors based else-
where – especially South Asia and to some degree Africa and Europe – still
consider traditional professional values like impartiality and neutrality as
central values in the way that they understand news production:
What I try to do is to leave out the personal opinion of things and try
to put a balanced view. I know it is impossible to be entirely balanced.
There is a certain bias in what one says and does, that can’t be avoided,
but I’m conscious of that fact and I try to put things in an even keel.
(Contributor)
There is therefore a great deal of diversity in the kinds of stories that

appear on the site, some stories being straight press releases from organi-
sations launching new projects or advocating a specific issue, some stories
being reports on local events in a similar style to news agency reporting
(basing these stories on news reports from local and national media), and
some stories being commentaries and opinion-pieces. The discrepancy
in the understanding of what essentially qualifies as news writing along
cultural lines at Groundreportt highlights and ties into a wider debate on
the way in which the global ‘space’ it represents is distributed across and
manifested in fragmented diverse local contexts that come to define it.
As with OhmyNews International, it therefore becomes crucial to discuss in
more detail the national prisms that shape Groundreport’s t news practices.
National prisms
Groundreportt and indeed the so-called success of Groundreportt must be
understood in relation to its base in a specific national context with a set
of certain conditions. The motivation behind establishing the site came
from a specific US and Western understanding of a gap in foreign news
coverage, and in particular a certain type of foreign news coverage:
We’ve been pretty deliberate in outlining the kind of content that is

expected and encouraged on the site. And a lot of it is world news,
political news, a little bit of business and technology news, and
then stories that are sort of social justice and conflict, where you see
human rights abuses or something along those lines. And especially
if it’s not being heavily covered by the mainstream media, that’s the
kind of story that we’re interested in.
With its understanding of the media very much dictated by a perception of

Western mainstream media and directing its news coverage in response to
the fallacies within that, it is perhaps also no surprise that most of its audi-
ence resides within the West, especially the United States (see Figure 5.7).
Country Uniques (Cookies) Uniques %
United States 61,204 47.67
India 15,866 12.36
United Kingdom 8095 6.31
Canada 5975 4.65
Philippines 4765 3.71
Pakistan 2835 2.21
Australia 2395 1.87
Singapore 2010 1.57
Norway 1491 1.16
Ireland 1425 1.11
Malaysia 1320 1.03
Bangladesh 1209 0.94
France 1035 0.81
United Arab Emirates 989 0.77
Mexico 960 0.75
Germany 930 0.72
Figure 5.7 Unique visits per month at Groundreportt as of April 2010

Source: Quantcast.
Based on unique page views per month, this figure illustrates the top
16 countries that make up the readership on Groundreport, t showing that
the United States makes up almost half (48%) of the Groundreportt audi-
ence. Indeed, an analysis of the entire global unique visits distribution
for Groundreportt shows that Europe and North America combined make
up around 70 per cent of the total global readership. What is more,
the data gathered on the demographics of this readership show that it
is generally more affluent and with a higher index of graduates than
the internet average, with 82 per cent having a household income of
$30,000 or above (as much as 31% of that having a household income
of $100,000 or above) and 58 per cent of the readership being gradu-
ates or postgraduates (source: Quantcast). This highlights the extent to
which Groundreport, t even as an alternative online news source, attracts
a similar kind of audience in demographic terms as mainstream glo-
bal news broadcasters such as BBC World News (see Chapter 3) and,
crucially, also relies on this audience to be producers of the news they
consume. As such, it may be argued that Groundreport, t similarly to main-
stream news outlets, is a news outlet produced both by and for social
elites mainly based in North America and Europe. What is curious about
Groundreportt in this context, however, is the claim it has made to a solid
readership in South Asia, in India especially where visits make up 12 per
cent of the global readership. This phenomenon is clearly demonstrated
on the site where there are notable amounts of news stemming from
India, and to a slightly lesser extent Pakistan and Bangladesh (see also
Figure 5.8). On the basis of the data gathered from contributors from
South Asia it is clear that a number of factors explain this trend, notably
the amalgamation of the initial relatively substantial financial reward
for publishing along with the English-language focus on the site and
the spread of broadband technology in the region. As one contributor
based in India noted,
[t]he recent spread of broadband technology which even has come to

my own village which is very remote, and so people with very little
education who know English are able to, maybe they feel initially
that they are able to make money, but as they mature they feel they
are doing something worthwhile.
(Contributor)
It should be noted, however, that the geographical distribution of unique

visits to the site is by no means necessarily replicated in the geographi-
cal distribution of contributors for which data is not available, let alone
International
2%
Latin America Europe
3% 5%
Africa
4%
North America
25%
Australasia
South Asia 0%
56% Middle East
1%
Asia Pacific
4%
Figure 5.8 Geographical regions covered on Groundreportt during the period 1

January 2010–1 May 2010, sample size: 1288 articles
active contributors which is far less than the 7000 registered users.
Nonetheless, it does provide some indication for understanding how
global news may come to be defined on the site. This is further helped
by looking at the geographical distribution of stories that are published
on the site (Figure 5.8), which demonstrates the importance of also
considering the difference in level of activity among contributors, some
publishing perhaps only once since they registered (or not at all), and
some publishing several stories a week.
Figure 5.8 illustrates the distribution of regions that are the predomi-
nant topic or source in a sample of 1288 different articles posted on the
site during the period of 1 January 2010 until 1 May 2010. This figure
shows clearly that South Asia is substantially the region that is mostly
referenced in the stories posted on Groundreportt with 712 of the total
1288 stories in the sample being about or predominantly sourced in
South Asia, making up 56 per cent of the coverage. This is followed by
stories being about or coming out of North America, which make up a
quarter (25%) of the total news coverage on the site with 322 stories.
All the other regions make up only five per cent or less of Groundreport’s
t
news stories, illustrating – as with OhmyNews International and indeed
BBC World News – how global news outlets tend to be dominated by cer-
tain regions depending on the context in which they are operating and
the manner in which they have developed. In fact, in purely quantitative
terms, Groundreportt has a far more uneven global distribution of coverage

than both OhmyNews International and BBC World News despite being
celebrated as a successful new alternative outlet for specifically interna-
tional news. It is clear that the popularity of Groundreportt in South Asia
has grown within the region and manifested itself in the news stories
the site is able to produce. As will be elaborated upon below, this may
also explain the recent talks of establishing a Groundreport India that
will gather news specifically focused within the region of South Asia. It
should be noted that this does not mean that South Asia necessarily has
the most contributors. Rather, a great deal of the stories about or com-
ing from South Asia are posted by only a relatively few number of con-
tributors that will post regularly and often with multiple stories about
their local regions. What is more, as mentioned above, the quantity of
stories posted about each region does not necessarily correspond to the
stories that are most popular and that make it to the front page (see
Figure 5.9). The front page, being partly dictated by traffic and a ratings
system, tends to feature stories about more ‘timely’ issues also appearing
in (Western) mainstream media. This is clearly appreciated by contribu-
tors themselves in their understanding of what makes a popular story on
Groundreport. A number of non-US contributors understand the ‘success’
of a story on the site to be linked to the extent to which it is of concern
to the United States as well as the extent to which it is either ‘sensation-
alist’ or is ‘mainstream’ (contributors), that is, it concerns issues that are
‘timely’ (contributor) and discussed within the news agenda of interna-
tional mainstream media:
I have seen that the reports and the articles that are related to IT, to
the computer sphere, to the internet, they are very popular […] Besides
that, posts related to the United States they were quite famous.
(Contributor)
If something is very timely I do think that it gets a very high propor-

tion of views.
(Contributor)
In fact, the most popular stories on Groundreportt concern mainly ‘soft

news’ stories that have some element of sex, celebrity, lifestyle, crime
or entertainment coming mainly from India and the United States (see
Figure 5.9).
Figure 5.9 illustrates that the most read stories on Groundreportt (apart
from straight advertisements – such as the Bebo social networking site or
Headline Topic Region Views
“Bebo Profile” Advertisement World 110,302
“Modified GM Diet for Weight loss” Lifestyle/health India 81,837
“Fake Semi-Nude Pictures Upset Ash” Celebrity/sex India 45,877
“Marisel Garcia Caught in Webcam Technology/sex United 40,545

Spy Hacker Craig Feigin Case” States
“Taiwan Hottest Babe – Yao Yao” Celebrity/sex Taiwan 28,957
“Michael Jordan’s Girlfriend Yvette Celebrity United 28,453

Prieto” States
“Vince Weignang Li Decapitates Tim Crime Canada 23,451

McLean Aboard Canadian Greyhound
Bus”
“Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 Alien Entertainment United 23,235

Force Bounty Hunters Video Game” States
“Ten Sport” Advertisement India 22,629
“Husband Cut Off Wife’s Ears, Nose Crime Afghanistan 21,192

on Eid Day”
Figure 5.9 Top ten most viewed stories on Groundreportt (as of April 2010)
the television channel Ten Sport – which would not make it past the edi-
torial filter Groundreportt has since put in place) are predominantly celeb-
rity or entertainment stories as well as sensational crime stories which
arguably dominate internet activity at large. In light of the fact that traffic
to the site tends to be generated to a large degree from search engines as
has also been touched upon in the case of OhmyNews International, this is
perhaps not so surprising. News stories that speak to what are commonly
known frequently searched topics or are already part of the mainstream
news agenda will tend to be searched for more online, and this is how
users can be directed to stories on Groundreportt rather than traffic com-
ing to the site as a result of users going straight to the homepage, as may
be the case for websites of big, well-established news organisations. This

highlights the fact that alternative online news sites must be under-
stood in the broader context of not only the commercialisation of news
media but also how and for what purposes the internet is predominantly
used, rather than as autonomous spaces that necessarily challenge such
practices. Indeed, the role of search engines in the infrastructure and
operations of the internet was quickly recognized by Groundreportt and
search-engine optimization has been a far more central strategy for the
site than at OhmyNews International. This means that emphasis has been
on ensuring that words used in the headlines of articles are similar to the
words likely to be used in a search on search engines, as well as engaging
in more technical aspects of the structures of the URL and meta-data to
make it easier to search for the webpage (Sterne, personal communica-
tion). Apart from the internet friendly topics of sex and celebrity in
general, which are actually deliberately resisted by a great deal of con-
tributors and do not make up a large part of the site’s content, the fact
that large portions of its audience reside in India and in the United States
would speak to the fact that stories do well when they deal with topics
that are at least familiar or ‘make sense’ to these audiences.
Of course, the dependency on search engines in order to generate traf-
fic does not mean that Groundreportt is exclusively popular only when it
publishes stories on celebrities and sex. The way in which internet users
often reach alternative news sites such as Groundreportt also means that
there have been cases where Groundreportt has generated an enormous
amount of traffic by being one of the first to have coverage of a very
timely story that they have then been able to break updated news on
before mainstream media. This sort of ‘crisis reporting’ is highly signifi-
cant for platforms such as Groundreportt as it to some degree moves their
platform into mainstream media. The example often quoted to illustrate
this is their coverage of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, where ‘beginning
less than an hour after the Taj Hotel siege, Groundreportt published over
80 text and video reports throughout the attacks, breaking updates
hours before mainstream media, and recruiting additional reporters
via Twitter’ (www.groundreport.com). It was, in particular, the recruit-
ment of eyewitness reports via Twitter and Groundreport’s t cooperation
with other alternative online sites that added to the volume of cover-
age of this event as it was happening as well as its ability to break news
before mainstream media. Its popularity with users in South Asia has
also reinforced its potential in such specific circumstances. However, it
is important to place this in an appropriate context, and reiterate that
these stories may only receive a couple of hundred hits, a couple of
thousand at maximum, which is a tiny fraction of the audience reached

through television, especially, during these kinds of events. What is
more, looking at the coverage at the time of the attacks10, it is important
to highlight the extent to which these postings were largely summaries
of coverage in other media, rather than first-hand witness accounts, and
were written by the same handful of people throughout the three days,
rather than a widespread accumulation of different voices. The coverage
was predominantly based on local Indian media, written for Groundreport
in traditional journalistic style, drawing attention to key quotes from
Indian officials and eyewitness accounts emerging from local news
reports. Where there were seemingly first-hand accounts from citizens
‘on the scene’ (in Mumbai), these were posted via Global Voices, an aggre-
gation site of blogs from around the world which provided summaries
of the ‘blogosphere’ from Mumbai during the attacks. Although some
of these would refer to having first heard the news through people they
were following on Twitter, r these postings would mainly include quotes
from various bloggers and tweeters in Mumbai, often responding to
what they were seeing streamed to them on television: ‘It’s 00.17 on 27
November as I write. CNN on Twitter tells me that the city is under siege
again. A grenade apparently went off at CST and shooting was reported
in Colaba. NDTV.com live TV shows that the Oberoi lobby is on fire and
an “encounter” is on at the Taj and Trident Hotel.’11 As the coverage pro-
gressed over the three days, analysis and opinion became increasingly
part of the coverage with contributors providing personal commentary
on the cause, significance and aftermath of events.
As such, what is crucial to elaborate on in this context is the extent to
which Groundreportt can be seen to challenge the news agenda – stating
such aims as part of its mission – or whether it under the conditions in
which it operates, must simply respond to an agenda dictated elsewhere.
It is quite clear from Groundreport’s
t own site and description of itself that
unlike the notion presented at BBC World News the understanding of
global news coverage is not ‘global issues from a global perspective to
a global audience’ (see Chapter 3), but as has been mentioned above a
much closer affinity to ideas of the local making up the global. In this
way, it speaks to the part of the literature on global civil society that wants
to particularly emphasise its ‘multi-scalar’ quality (cf. Bob et al. 2007),
understanding civil society activity as simultaneously local and global, or
‘glocal’ as was once the ever-popular term of choice. Indeed, Groundreport’s t
slogan of ‘Hyperlocal News & Opinion Around the World’ highlights its
understanding of ‘global citizen journalism’ as being not the reporting
of global issues in particular, but of news of local concern aggregated on
a single global news site. As such, despite not wanting to enforce claims
on what is newsworthy, Groundreportt is more active in trying to imple-
ment some form of definition of public interest within its coverage of
international news that marks it out from traditional global news outlets.
However, as popularity and number of hits is such a central selling point
for Groundreportt to its contributors, this relies on a notion that local
reporting is able to stimulate and sustain (global) public interest and in
practice this has proven to be a minimal part of the news practices at
Groundreport. These stories are frequently on the site, often adapted from
local media, but they rarely make the front page or accumulate very many
hits. The series of stories on Chitral in Pakistan, for example, that perhaps
illustrates this form of news writing the best, produced prolifically by the
same ‘white-listed’ contributor, gathers on average only 100–200 hits per
story.12 Indeed, it is clear from the data that the local news produced is
predominantly produced with a motivation in mind to inform other local
people or people who have a connection to the local context:
If I’m writing local I’m writing [for a] local [audience]. If I write about
[…] global issues I write to the other audience.
(Contributor)
Really, I doubt people, the audience, if I write local news [that] the
global audience will read it.
(Contributor)
Furthermore, for contributors based in closed societies or in conflict-

ridden countries, one key issue is to inform people who might have
connections to those societies around the world, for example, the
Zimbabwean diaspora or Nepalese emigrants:
People need to know what’s happening in a country like Nepal […]

there are around million Nepali people scattered all over the world,
so they want to hear news.
(Contributor)
In this way, Groundreportt does represent a platform in which the local can
be expressed, but it does not follow a logic that speaks to some notion of
a global ‘space’ or ‘global moral order’ that implies a form of collective
dialogue among global citizens. Of course, there are elements of news
practices at Groundreportt that do speak to some significant shifts in global
news dissemination. There is certainly an extent to which contributors
understand Groundreportt to be a space where they can represent different

and challenging pictures of their own countries to a global audience
than the representations usually construed in mainstream international
media. As one contributor based in Pakistan noted,
Part of my writing on Groundreport, t not only Groundreportt but other

websites that I write, is just to change the image of Pakistan. Just to
disband the fears, and actually the media illusion of this country.
Because when you look at Western, like CNN or BBC, something bad
or something wrong news is about Pakistan, always. So I wanted to
change the impression and the image of this country.
(Contributor)
In light of what stories are most widely read on the site, whether such
writing actually gets a readership beyond its own national borders or not
is a pertinent question, but with regards to the news production process
itself, Groundreportt can be considered an outlet that may contribute to
the challenge of directional ‘flows’ in global news media in that it allows
news production from the global South to reach the global North, rather
than the other way around. That is, there is a sense in which Groundreport
offers a platform for predominantly South Asian news workers to produce
news for a news outlet consumed predominantly by an audience based
in the North-Western hemisphere. However, this ‘dialogue’ – if it exists –
must be understood in the context of the operations of global media and
the terms upon which it dictates such potential flow of ‘dialogue’. That
is, it is most likely to ‘speak’ most frequently in (commercial) terms that
are familiar to the centre of global media as highlighted by the types of
stories that receive the largest readership (Figure 5.9). There is a possibility
for locally informed news content from the global South that challenge
these trends and this is a significant development within global news,
but it remains a fairly minimal and segregated activity when it does not
respond immediately to events on the dominant mainstream (Western)
news agenda (e.g. the Mumbai attacks). The ‘dialogue’ otherwise tends to
be centred on local contexts. Indeed, it has also been recognised within
Groundreport’s
t management that the fragmentation of the site has a
strong national and local character and it is therefore moving towards
devolved news sites, having local versions that are easier to navigate and
easier to focus. As Sterne outlined,
Local is sort of the best way to gage what people are interested
in, much more logical way of organising news, so that’s why we
are taking Groundreportt from throwing everything together on a

homepage to creating local versions. Because all of citizen journalism
is from a hyperlocal perspective.
At the time of research, this process started with talk of launching

a Groundreport India, which seeks to capitalise on the popularity of
Groundreportt in India and South Asia mentioned above, moving towards
setting up local sites for the United Kingdom, New York City and other
large US cities. In this way, it is echoing the initial ideas of OhmyNews
of having different country-specific news portals rather than pursuing
a collective global news outlet, which it has struggled with. However,
as OhmyNews also discovered – especially in the case of its launch in
Japan – individual national contexts – technology, politics, econom-
ics, and culture – are fundamental factors to the successes and failures
of such developments and only time will tell what national contexts
favour the ambitions of Groundreportt outside the United States. It does,
however, speak to the complexities of running a sustainable global news
site within the current news environment and the common misappre-
hension of such sites in terms of being spaces for the development of a
‘global public opinion’ or indeed a ‘global civil society’.
Conclusion
Both the case of OhmyNews International and the case of Groundreport

highlight crucial issues in the debate on the relationship between the
internet and democracy, and especially about how this relationship
fits with the concept of ‘global civil society’. A great deal of scholarly
attention has been paid to the potential of the internet or the structure
of the internet in abstract terms with much less attention paid to the
actual practices that produce online content. When it comes to prac-
tices of news media on the internet, a lot of developments are assumed
and implicit in broader analysis of social and political transformations
rather than rooting such analysis in a critical understanding of these
practices. There has been an implicit account of online news media in
much of the literature under scrutiny in this thesis as sustaining a global
‘space’ for public deliberation where mainstream offline news media
may fail to do so. Much of this implicit account relies on the inherent
structure of the internet to produce news discourses that are not only
more ‘globalised’ but also more ‘deliberative’, allowing for a ‘global civil
society’ to emerge and claim some form of legitimacy. What the studies
of OhmyNews International and Groundreportt highlight is the importance

of not abstracting online news practices from broader structures and
discourses that operate outside, through and within the online space.
Rather, online news practices, even in alternative citizen-generated
news outlets, must be understood in relation to the context and condi-
tions that embed them.
OhmyNews International has grown out of a context of a very suc-
cessful domestic online news site that has largely been considered to
have had enormous impact on the political situation in South Korea.
However, OhmyNews International illustrates the difficulties and chal-
lenges with moving such practices into a global space without the
strands of ‘collectivity’ that may be associated with more locally focused
news practices. Instead, OhmyNews International has struggled to make
ends meet financially, it has struggled with paying its contributors,
and it has struggled with employing the same editorial process as that
of OhmyNews Korea that is part of defining its mission to establish a
solid relationship between professional and amateur news gathering
and also to grant it similar status and credibility. This has manifested
itself in terms of a complicated news production process that relies on
fragmented highly personalised news content produced predominantly
from a few specific powerful regions in the world.
Although Groundreportt has been more of a success in terms of the
status it has been able to claim in the global news market, especially by
linking itself to other big news outlets, it also highlights the complexi-
ties in speaking of a ‘global’ news site online. Financial challenges, a
limited editorial process, and the centralisation of hyperlocal content
within essentially only two or three regions of the world has marked
the news practices at Groundreport, t which has led it to eventually move
towards a more scaled-down approach of structuring its organisation.
Both these news outlets demonstrate ways in which dominant news
discourses may be challenged and ways in which news media may
be seen to be ‘democratised’. This is especially the case in instances
when alternative online news sites such as OhmyNews International and
Groundreportt have been able to produce crucial locally informed news
content, especially from closed societies, that otherwise would be kept
out of the public realm and that provide an expansion to the otherwise
narrow process with which news discourses are formed. Indeed, it could
be argued that the aggregation of local and personalised news content
from citizens based around the world may be seen as a move towards
a more legitimate representation of ‘global public opinion’. However,
the way in which citizen reporters predominantly and overwhelmingly
practice their understanding of what is newsworthy and how to cover

news in very individual ways informed by personal interest rather than
any notion of a particular public may also be seen to deeply undermine
the collective that forms the basis of a global civil society that is supposed
to deliver the resources necessary for global publicc deliberation. That is, it
must be questioned to what extent such news practices centred around
a hyper-personal definition of public interest challenges the overarch-
ing notions of a ‘global moral order’ or even a ‘global common good’
that advocates of global civil society rely on, by crowding out public
discourse with individual disparate private discourse done in the public
domain. Furthermore, it challenges the notions of neutral or impartial
news discourse that runs through the globalised liberal narrative that
underpins the role of the media in the literature on ‘global civil society’,
most clearly acknowledged at Groundreportt which has moved away from
endorsing such values entirely towards an emphasis on ‘transparency’
instead. This is a challenge for a concept that draws so heavily on liberal
ideals of the public sphere and it also denotes a significant redefinition
of ‘autonomy’ within news practices by attaching an understanding of
‘autonomy’ not to ideas of ‘neutrality’, ‘impartiality’ or even ‘objectiv-
ity’ of mediated information, but rather to the complete privatisation
and individualisation of such information, essentially by making news
production ‘writing about whatever I want to’.
Moreover, both OhmyNews International and Groundreportt highlight
the unequal coverage of news that is already familiar in discussions on
mainstream international reporting. The kind of worldview that is pre-
sented in international news production – both online and offline – is
a complex picture that cannot be removed from the wider political and
economic structures in the global system, and the inequalities of these
structures are replicated and entrenched also within news outlets that
seek to challenge dominant news discourses. OhmyNews International
and Groundreportt with their deliberate focus on citizen journalism may
be able to provide a more balanced distribution of voices in its news
content, shifting some of the focus away from political and economic
elites, but it does so without the overall structures in place to ensure
that this news content is a space of ‘domination-free discourse’ based
on accountable and accurate information or that it necessarily chal-
lenges the commercialised nature of internet activity at large. The news
content produced on OhmyNews International and Groundreportt favours
news that refers to the parts of the world where it also draws the larg-
est audience and both sites exclude content from large regions of the
world, especially Latin America and Africa. What is more, both sites are
deeply tied to not only the region in which they are based in terms of
the quantity and success of their stories, but also to the broader uses
of the internet, quite separate from the news sites themselves, illustrat-
ing that ‘global’ news organisations, even online, are rooted in national
and concrete contexts that are significant in understanding the way
news discourses are shaped. To say, therefore, that the inherent struc-
ture of the internet has globalised news, removing the barriers of the
out-dated nation-state order, is not only to misrepresent the way in
which internet activity actually operates in terms of how global it is, but
also in terms of how deliberation is carried out in the news discourses
produced. This is no less emphasised by statistics that illustrate the most
popular online news sites globally, which expectedly, perhaps, more or
less follow the flows of news in the offline world, dominated by cor-
porations from the United States and the United Kingdom (some sites
within the same corporation counted separately) (see Table 5.1).
Therefore, it is important to understand the ways in which news prac-
tices at ‘fully-fledged’ participatory news sites occupy a crucial place in
debates regarding democratisation and resistance in the global system
by allowing ‘more voices to be heard’ (contributor) and to communicate
with each other across borders, but also crucially doing so following the
power relations of the wider structures of the global political economy
and redefining the nature of news discourses towards a more individu-
alised and fragmented definition of the ‘global common good’. That is,
the potential of the internet needs to be rooted in a critical assessment
of political, economic and cultural conditions, and crucially, needs to
be understood and debated in the context of developments within news
media in general beyond the online world.
Table 5.1 Table of most popular news sites globally

1. news.yahoo.com
2. bbc.co.uk
3. cnn.com
4. news.bbc.co.uk
5. Nytimes.com
6. my.yahoo.com
7. Weather.com
8. news.google.com
9. huffingtonpost.com
10. msnbc.msn.com
Source: Alexa Internet (as of May 2010).
6
A Liberal Paradox: Media
Developments and ‘Global
Civil Society’
The research into the way in which developments in news media are
evolving across different mediums and types of news organisations,
all pertinent to the concept of ‘global civil society’ (GCS), needs to be
placed within its proper critical context that also addresses the way in
which these have important implications for how we may conceptual-
ise social and political change. This is crucial to bridge the discourses
of different fields of inquiry that need to be in much closer dialogue.
As has been argued in this book, discussions on the changing nature
of democracy and practices of resistance within International Relations
(IR) that have centred on the emergence of a ‘global civil society’
invoke a very particular account of how the media, and in particu-
lar news media, is understood to operate that, in fact, contributes to
the coherence and currency of the concept of GCS itself. In this final
chapter, it is important to highlight the findings of the previous chap-
ters that illustrate, in conjunction, the way in which the account of the
media in the literature on GCS is based on a misapprehension of how
mediated discourses are produced, a lack of appreciation of the power
relations manifested within and through news practices, and the way
in which developments in media challenge the notion of ‘globality’ as it
is commonly discussed. This chapter will then go on to consider what
the implications of these findings are for the idea of GCS, not just in
empirical terms, but how these expose crucial difficulties with the very
concept itself. Such considerations speak to the difficulties with not
only the idea of GCS as a ‘bounded’ global space, abstracted from power
inequalities, but also with the idea that in the overall democratisation
of the global system moving it towards the cosmopolitan model, it is
possible to ‘privilege’ GCS in the construction of both effective institu-
tions andd the broadening of avenues for public deliberation at a global
173
level. What is more, such a conceptual critique informed by the research

into news practices must also consider what these difficulties mean
for what GCS comes to represent as a concept of resistance in the cur-
rent context. Indeed, this chapter will raise the question whether the
appeal to a global ‘space’ of politics and the privileging of the abstract
individual in democratic practice freed from any social, economic or
political context and relations of power does, in fact, illustrate how GCS
has emerged as a concept driven by an individualised (lack of) political
engagement that appeals to the very neoliberal logic of late capitalism
that it claims to ‘resist’.
Developments in news practices
Firstly, then, it is important to outline the key empirical findings of the

previous chapters that explore the way in which media developments
are shaping news practices across different mediums in both global and
local forms. As was outlined in Chapter 1, the case has been made in this
book that the concept of GCS invokes a very particular understanding of
developments in media that could be said to follow a globalised liberal
narrative of the media. That is, GCS implicitly endorses an understand-
ing of media history in which the media is seen to have developed as an
autonomous force for positive change, a source of empowerment, and
a representation of public opinion. The media, in such accounts, incor-
porates elements of technological determinism in which technological
developments are apolitical resources for social change, tools that have
acted as facilitators for ‘new’ politics, global interconnectedness, and
regained empowerment of the people. In particular, advocates of GCS
implicitly assume that the media is developing in such a way that it is
possible to speak of some form of ‘global citizenship’ based on the emer-
gence of a global consciousness and a shared global moral order that
expands, or absolves altogether, territorial boundaries. What is more,
this expansion of political community is happening through global
public deliberation partly made possible by developments in media that
allow for GCS to emerge through communicative politics occurring in
the ‘global public sphere’. Finally, this political activity should have a
forceful legitimate bearing on the restructuring and governance of the
global system, partly exercised by the expression and representation of
‘global public opinion’ in the media.
In this book, developments in news practices at four key sites of
news production across three different mediums have been examined
in light of this understanding of the media, all pertinent in discussions
A Liberal Paradox 175
on GCS: developments surrounding satellite television and global news

networks; the way in which central traditional local or national
news outlets are responding to changes in (global) media; and the way
in which developments with the internet and online news may be
changing the terms of the debate. These different sites of news produc-
tion have all separately and jointly highlighted some key challenges
to the understanding of the media invoked by the concept of GCS.
Indeed, developments in media are shaping news practices in a far more
complex and contradictory way than the narrative seemingly endorsed
by advocates of GCS. As we saw in Chapter 3, global satellite news net-
works, although sometimes understood as providing a global space of
activity, are in actuality operating through specific prominent ‘prisms’
of geo-political, national, economic and cultural considerations that
come to shape the way in which news is gathered, structured and repre-
sented. Despite appeals to a ‘global perspective’ at broadcasters such as
BBC World News, we have seen that the way in which news gathering
is structured and organised means that domestic political culture plays
a prominent role both in terms of what is considered globally signifi-
cant as well as what is in more abstract ways seen to be appropriate and
legitimate news for a global news agenda. What is more, developments
in the global media market impinge upon journalist autonomy in such
a way that news practices at BBC World News are shaped by not only
increasingly economic and strategic considerations that speak pre-
dominantly to the domestic public interest of the national base of the
broadcaster, but also by a continuous nation-state defined worldview
that rests on dominant political rhetoric from a few key institutions
of power. As such, the worldview presented by BBC World News privi-
leges state actors from the global North, in particular Europe and the
United States. Non-elites are predominantly treated as disparate, indi-
vidualised voices, responding to elite activity. In the current context
of media developments, this worldview is in fact further entrenched
by professional journalistic values such as balance and neutrality that
are traditionally understood to uphold the autonomy of news spaces.
Indeed, the importance of upholding such values in an economically
pressured environment means a favouring of issues and topics with
which journalists and the dominant audience base are politically and
culturally familiar, entrenching an already existing global news agenda.
As such, the development of global satellite news networks do not in
and of themselves constitute the kind of shift to ‘global citizenship’
and establishment of a ‘global moral order’ in the way that is implied
in the literature on GCS. Rather, news practices within these news
organisations are emblematic of broader political, economic, social

and cultural contexts that shape the terms by which any shifts to and
constitution of ‘globality’ may be considered, hindering any notion
that such a space may be abstracted from territoriality, power and the
inequalities of the global political economy.
Furthermore, an often-neglected part of the debate on GCS is the
way in which traditional national or local news outlets ‘fit’ within
the assumed narrative of media history that underpins the emergence
of a GCS. Chapter 4 explored this question by looking at the way in
which global news is changing at the US-based newspaper Los Angeles
Times. What this case study crucially illustrates is the overall increasing
fragmentation of the global media market that is seeing national or
local news outlets under increasing commercial pressures moving them
towards both further consolidated as well as localised and niche-driven
news practices. What this means, in effect, is the reduced coverage of
‘global issues’ and the increasingly insular angle on any such topic
within the newspaper that limits any ‘dialogue’ with actors outside local
and national boundaries. Moreover, it limits any participation in such
‘dialogue’ to domestic political and social elites. This was seen across
the coverage of global issues, such as the financial crisis, climate change
and the position of Iran in world politics. In the case of Los Angeles
Times, such an approach has been reinforced by a change in ownership
and business structure that has prioritised a market-led logic within
the news production process, argued to be replicated across many
other traditional news organisations. This logic has been increasingly
internalised by news workers at all levels of the organisation who have
been forced to develop practices that are more able to accommodate
business concerns. The definition of what constitutes global news in
that context, therefore, is decided on terms that primarily satisfy com-
mercial pressures, focusing on ‘soft news’ with strong human-interest
elements that ‘travel’ well across space and time, or on ‘obvious’ or
‘risk-free’ cheaply produced issues that have been pre-determined by
powerful domestic political rhetoric or dominant news disseminators.
As such, the way in which local/national news organisations form part
of the debate on a ‘global public sphere’ poses some real challenges to
the argument advanced in the literature on GCS. Rather than increasing
and expanding on a global public dialogue, traditional national/local
news organisations are moving towards an increasingly insular news
agenda, responding to the pressures of a fragmented media market and
a business-led understanding of their own practices. The way in which
they (minimally) participate in any supposed global public deliberation,
therefore, is dictated by commercial considerations that follow existing

dominant news agendas and political rhetoric, rather than transforming
and broadening these.
Finally, the hype surrounding the potential of new media technolo-
gies, especially the internet, has been central in any debate on the way
in which political activity and democracy may be transforming, not
least in the literature on the emergence of a GCS. A prominent part
of this discussion has been the potential for new ‘alternative’ voices
to become part of the ‘global public sphere’ and for ‘global public
opinion’ to be heard and influence key institutions of power. As such,
Chapter 5 explored the way in which ‘alternative’ news sites produced
predominantly by ‘global citizens’ may respond to this understanding.
What the studies of OhmyNews International and Groundreportt highlight
is the importance of not abstracting online news practices from broader
structures and discourses that operate outside, through and within the
online space. Rather, online news practices, even in alternative citizen-
generated news outlets, must be understood in relation to the context
and conditions that embed them. The ‘eye-ball economy’ (Fenton
2010 c) of the internet in which online news sites operate means that
even alternative and user-generated news sites tend to follow the
agenda set by dominant news organisations, responding to this by
personalising and hyper-localising news content. This means that who
deliberates and what is deliberated on in online news spaces is to a large
extent shaped by the power relations of the global political economy
that is entrenched within the structure and use of the internet. This is
evident not least by the dominance of large multi-media organisations
in the make-up of the most visited sites online and the prevalence of
entertainment and commercial information in online activity. It is
also evident in alternative news sites themselves by the dominance of
users situated within the immediate geographical context of the news
organisation and the global North and the pervasiveness of news topics
that concern these areas. What is more, these case studies highlight the
complexities with the rather simplistic link between digitisation and
democratisation. Although they certainly provide opportunities for a
broader spectrum of actors to participate in deliberative forums, news
practices within these sites also to a considerable extent privilege hyper-
personal definitions of public interest that could be argued to crowd
out public discourse with individual disparate private discourse done in
a public domain. This is further amplified by the challenge presented
by alternative news sites to traditional professional journalistic values
such as neutrality and impartiality which are replaced by an emphasis
on transparency of interest and the (re)interpretation of ‘autonomy’ in

terms of the personalisation of public issues. As such, the notion that
the internet somehow operates in a power vacuum beyond national and
political–economic contexts, able to fill the holes where existing tradi-
tional media is failing the emergence of GCS is deeply misleading. The
idea of a ‘global public opinion’ is just as problematic in the online world
as it is in the off-line one, and indeed the inequalities of such a notion
are replicated and entrenched in the online news space. Moreover, the
fragmenting and individualising nature of online citizen-led news prac-
tices presents further complications to such a conceptualisation of the
changing nature of political activity and democracy.
As such, the exploration of developments in news practices in these key
spaces of news present some central challenges to the way in which the
media is implicitly understood to function within the dominant literature
on GCS. What is considered to be a ‘global issue’ and what is not, how
those global issues are deliberated upon, who constitutes a participatory
actor in such issues, and the frames within which these actors must oper-
ate, are shaped by a complex set of discursive and non-discursive forces
that are manifested throughout the news production process. These
include the national contexts of the very news organisations themselves,
despite appeals to global perspectives in global news. What is more, the
actors and frames with which mediated news discourses represent global
issues are still to an overwhelming extent centred on an understanding of
the world in terms of nation-states and their political leaders. Indeed, the
primary legitimacy granted political activity surrounding global issues
still lies with state actors, and particularly nationally based political elites,
that dominate the way in which ‘globality’ is defined. Non-state actors
and civil society associations make up a marginal part of deliberations on
global issues. When other viewpoints are considered, they are so mainly
in an atomistic nature of representation made up of a limited number of
individualised, dispersed statements by private individual citizens. Where
collective forms of non-state actors and civil society associations do have
more of a voice in global news, they do so in specific localised contexts
where they are centrally based and play into dominant political rhetoric.
What is more, where news spaces may be seen to ‘democratise’ access to
discursive competition through digitisation, such processes are equally, if
not more, prone to fragment and personalise public issues. Indeed, the
very global system within which news spaces operate is reinforcing and
further entrenching this structure of news production and nature of news
discourses rather than moving news discourses in some way ‘beyond’
such terms of definition.
Implications of news practices for ‘global civil society’
Thus, there are some fundamental misapprehensions in the literature

on GCS of how developments in media are actually shaping news prac-
tices. These have some significant implications for how the concept
is used that arguably centre on two deeply interrelated concerns: the
transfer of civil society to a global ‘space’ (the question of globality) and,
secondly, the way in which relationships and networks which comprise
GCS must themselves be understood as instantiated within broader rela-
tions of power (the question of capitalism). These concerns jointly come
to highlight the difficulties the concept of GCS has with taking account
of its own context and the problematic position of ‘privileging’ GCS
within liberal democratic theory that appeals to a cosmopolitan order in
the restructuring of the global system. Indeed, these concerns arguably
illuminate the way in which the concept of GCS comes to conceptualise
resistance in a way that speaks only to those in positions of privilege
and those who have (capital).
What the study of news practices in different kinds of news organisa-
tions crucially illustrates is that the idea that news discourses are pro-
duced by and produce deterritorialised or globalised understandings of
the world – what Grimm has referred to as a ‘nation-transcending com-
municative context’ (Grimm 1997) – is deeply problematic. The appeal
to GCS as an abstract ‘bounded’ global ‘space’ of politics seems to dis-
regard not only the considerable part territoriality and the nation-state
still play in mediated discourses, including those that claim to be global,
but also the power relations of how any such global ‘space’ is actually
defined. As Hutchings argues, the capacity to participate in any such
space as a global citizen is parasitic on the dramatically undemocratic
and inegalitarian nature of the global order in general, both institution-
ally and normatively (Hutchings 2005: 97).
Indeed, the notion that it is possible to speak of political ‘spaces’ or
‘scales’ of practice without a regard for the power relations that con-
stitute such spaces and scales goes to the heart of the critique of GCS.
This crucially highlights the importance of understanding ‘globalisation
discourses’ in the context of global capitalism rather than as processes
‘pure’ from power inequalities. Even as a heuristic device such analytical
separation of spaces is problematic. As Kenny and Germain state,
[p]ositing such a sharp analytical separation between economic,

political and social phenomena, which are more properly consid-
ered in direct relation to each other, injects into Western liberal
applications of global civil society an idealizing bias, and a tendency

to romanticize NGO activities and civic organisations […] Civil
society, the state and the market are mutually constituted, as well
as sometimes in tension. To conceptualize them, on an a priori
basis, as perpetually arranged in conflict or enmity, is to deplete the
interpretative arsenal available to those seeking to understand global
politics today.
(Kenny & Germain 2005: 11)
As such, the autonomy that GCS problematically relies on applies

both to the autonomy of an abstract notion of ‘global’ as well as to
the autonomy of an abstract notion of ‘civil society’. This latter point
speaks partly to the (mis)application of a Gramscian conceptualisation
of civil society that Keane, among others, has identified as discussed in
Chapter 1. That is, the widespread assumption that civil society repre-
sents a ‘third sector’ becomes evermore perplexing in a global context
where intricate relations undermine any ability to not only assert
that which is not the state, but perhaps even more so, that which is
not the economy (Fierlbeck 1998). Indeed, as Shaw also acknowledges,
the use of civil society in this way is based on a lack of comprehensive
discussion of the concept which means theorists of GCS miss issues
like the tension between the national and the global and they evade a
broad analysis of institutions in civil society beyond the narrow focus
on social movements (Shaw 1999: 122) The study of news practices
approached in the way it has been here makes some crucial confirma-
tions with regards to this.
Furthermore, the study of news practices sheds light on some
fundamental assumptions regarding the legitimacy of deliberative proc-
esses that necessarily rely on the media as their constitutive resource.
As has been outlined in Chapter 1, GCS is a communicative political
project that privileges public deliberation as its key democratic prac-
tice, both as a way to come to collectively binding decisions as well as
a way to govern and act as an agent of resistance in the global system.
These processes are supposedly happening via the emergence of some
form of ‘global public sphere’. However, the power relations of the
global political economy are equally reproduced within this global
public sphere of public deliberation by which GCS draws its legiti-
macy and political agency in the governance of the global system. As
such, the ‘global public opinion’ or ‘global moral order’ that is sup-
posedly expressed by GCS (assumed to seemingly happen primarily
through the media) is, in fact, equally or to a considerable extent the
opinion and order representing the inequalities and power relations

of the global political economy, even with the growth of new media
technologies. As Curran and Witschge found in their recent study of
the online global e-zine Opendemocracy, divergent cultures, values,
economic interests and affiliations as well as politics of gender and
language within structures of online news discourses highlight that
‘the world is divided and fragmented in ways that impede the develop-
ment of global norms and public opinion’ (Curran & Witschge 2010:
104). To utilise such conceptualisations of global politics in the way
that is invoked by the concept of GCS is therefore, at worst, a way of
legitimisingg the existing relations of power rather than – as advocates
claim – a way of conceptualising spaces of resistance to them. Thus,
based on this observation, the idea within much of the literature as
outlined in Chapter 1, that it is possible to ‘privilege’ GCS in the con-
stitution of cosmopolitan democracy that demands both effective
institutions and d the broadening of avenues for public deliberation at
a global level – implied in Held’s notion of ‘double democratisation’
as well as Fraser’s understanding of the transnationalisation of the
public sphere, for example – disregards the full context within which
this is theorised that undermines such an argument. The architecture
that is needed to support these understandings of transformation is
not in place. In other words, such conceptualisation speaks to the
broader difficulties in liberal democratic theory with taking account of
actually existing democracy. Indeed, it comes to present a paradoxical
understanding of GCS within this broader theoretical framework that
demands of such a concept to simultaneously create and be created by
a new global order. As Lupel argues, GCS depends for the sake of its
legitimacy on the very conditions that it must itself play a pre-emptive
constitutive role in securing: ‘Global civil society must construct its
own conditions of possibility. It is the ship at sea, still under construc-
tion’ (Lupel 2005: 130).
Thus, it is clear that how we interpret developments in media, and
perhaps especially news, is absolutely crucial for how we might con-
ceptualise broader social and political change. Any attempt to do so,
therefore, must engage with questions of the different narratives that
run through media history and cannot simply base broad conceptuali-
sations on implicit, seemingly neutral understandings of how the media
operates and the place and role it has within society. Failing to engage
critically with media developments in debates on social and political
transformations, including debates on changing terms of democracy
and resistance, allows for concepts to be used that do not consider the
full implications of the context in which they are applied. GCS has
arguably developed and gained a great deal of currency as a concept in
debates on democracy and resistance by, among other things, endors-
ing a specific understanding of the nature of media in a global age that
promotes a liberal narrative of media developments that are a far cry
from actual developments in media.
This presents some crucial problems for GCS as a useful concept in
contemporary debates. Rather than arguing that the developments we
are witnessing within media are directing us towards ‘the mobilisation
of global public opinion’ (Kaldor et al. 2005), we are instead facing
a situation where developments of the media are also, to a substantial
extent, further fragmenting and marginalising public voices in favour
of increasingly (private) elite decision-making that continues to rely
on the nation-state. Making claims to and legitimising the global
moral order expressed by advocates of an emerging GCS on the basis
of these developments, therefore, arguably situates GCS as a concept of
resistance that struggles to articulate the transformation rather than
the entrenchment of existing power structures. This demonstrates the
crucial need to bridge the parallel fields of inquiry across disciplines
that are all, essentially, concerned with grasping and articulating the
changing terms of global politics in order to more adequately discuss
contemporary understandings of how we may make demands on the
democratisation of the global system.
Broader implications: Global civil society as the political

logic of late capitalism
Based on these difficulties with the concept of GCS presented by devel-

opments in news practices, there may be grounds for highlighting a few
broader questions regarding the emergence of such powerful ideas in
contemporary political analysis. Here, in the final section of this book,
the argument will be introduced that what the peculiar and classically
liberal paradox of GCS mentioned above illuminates is the difficulty
advocates have with tackling the linearity between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ of
social and political change, which stunts its analytical use in questions
of democracy in the current context. What is more, it illuminates the
crucial need to articulate a deeper appreciation of the context out of
which concepts of social and political transformation emerge that
demands a proper engagement with social actors and their environment
that goes beyond simply the study of ideas.
Thus, there is a need to go beyond just an empirical critique of GCS

where many critical assessments of the concept end. As Chandler
states:
[W]hile drawing attention to the issue of power is central to the

critique of those international relations theorists who posit the exist-
ence of actually existing of global civil society, it is not adequate as a
critique of global civil society as a communicative project. Normative
commentators can accept the empirical critique and would suggest
that the reality should then be challenged to meet the normative
communicative demands.
(Chandler 2009: 122)
What this would mean, essentially, in the context of this book con-
cerned with the role of the media is that we could simply state that
seeing as the media does not currently satisfy the role expected of it
in the literature on GCS, our project must be to therefore change or
‘fix’ the media so that it meets the liberal ideals necessary to sustain
a concept of GCS. This could, in principle, be accepted by many GCS
scholars and critics alike. Limiting the critique to such empirical focus,
however, arguably underestimates, or misses altogether, the political
dimensions of the historical context out of which debates on GCS have
emerged. What is more, it arguably misses the crucial epistemological
and ontological issues that the study of news practices brings to light
regarding ideational and material relations and their implications for
deliberative democratic politics in a global context.
As has been outlined in the findings on the study of news practices
at different kinds of news organisations, mediated discourses are not
simple ‘mirrors’ of reality or autonomous ‘neutral’ articulations of
meaning informed by or informing interactions of ‘communicative
reason’. Rather, they are products of a complex set of practices steeped
in relations of power and contingent upon particular contexts that
demand an appreciation of them as sites of struggle. As Thompson
argues, mediated communication is always a contextualised social
phenomenon: ‘it is always embedded in social contexts which are struc-
tured in various ways and which, in turn, have a structuring impact
on the communication that occurs’ (Thompson 1995: 11). For many
political theorists, this is an essential feature of any communicative
interaction and the critique of public deliberation as a form of legiti-
mate democratic practice on the basis of this has been well articulated
in many different kinds of literature, not least within media studies
(cf. Dahlberg 2007; Dahlgren 2009). What projects that centre on

public deliberation as legitimate democratic practice end up ignoring
is, as argued by Wilkin, the extent to which ‘what constitutes common
sense is never simply an expression of some neutrally discerned popular
will but is always an expression of the power of those dominant social
groups who have sought to use the means of communication to dis-
seminate such understandings of the world and which therefore sets
potentially powerful obstacles to our autonomy and our ability to make
rational judgments’ (Wilkin 2001: 118). This is a crucial point, but there
is a further important point to make, namely that advocates of GCS
lack, therefore, a comprehensive theory of transformation. That is, they
may understand public deliberation to take place within a sphere where
citizens are free and equal and thus a sphere where political and eco-
nomic domination is abolished, but it is by no means obvious that such
abolition can be brought about through the process of public delibera-
tion and public reasoning itself (Elster 1997). What may be defined as
‘reasonable’, therefore, is, to a considerable part, contingent upon the
structures and power relations of the communication systems in place to
facilitate this public deliberation. Moreover, this becomes evermore
pertinent in a global context in which there is a lack of institutional
framework and collective political community equivalent to that of a
domestic civil society from which GCS tries to abstract. As such, the
concept of GCS struggles to explain the very transformation it is itself
supposedly a constitution of, which leads to the paradoxical position in
which GCS is expected to provide the very conditions that it also itself
relies upon as a concept.
Indeed, there is a forceful argument to be made that the appeal to
the privileging of public deliberation as the key process of democratic
practice and the appeal to a global space of politics (which, as outlined
in Chapter 1, jointly aim to overcome the burdens of representative
democracy in an outdated international order), in fact, speak to the
lack of clear sites and articulations of power which evades the need to
engage and be accountable to others that comes from territorial ground-
ing (Chandler 2009). That is, it may be argued that the use and advocacy
of GCS as a descriptive and normative concept of social and political
transformations in a context where processes of change are far more
complex and contradictory than the fairly simple logic that dictates
that we are witnessing the inevitable expansion of social relations and
political engagement, in fact, has been driven by the fragmented, individ-
ualisedd and lack of collective political engagement. In other words, the
privileging of the individual and appeal to normative communicative
processes leading to a ‘growing global consensus’ in the literature on

GCS have arguably been a way of articulating the democratisation of
the global system without engaging with questions of political legiti-
macy and collectivity that are crucial to actual functioning democracy
but are being undermined in the current system. As such, GCS becomes
defined by the lack of collective political engagement centred on the
abstract individual in the ‘global space’ freed from any social, economic
or political context in which politics becomes purely individual self-
expression (Chandler 2009). In other words, GCS comes to appeal,
paradoxically, to the neoliberal logic of late capitalism it claims to
‘resist’. As Chandler states:
Politics becomes globalised when political actors experience a loss of

social connection and political aspirations are expressed in increas-
ingly abstract and unmediated forms. In this sense, discussions of
a shift from ‘territorialised’ to ‘deterritorialised’ politics reflect the
decline of strategic, instrumental, engagement concerned with trans-
forming the external world and the rise of a more atomised politics
of self-expression – of awareness, of identity and of values.
(Chandler 2009: 2)
To appeal, therefore, to GCS as a concept of resistance in a global system

in which the nation-state is being limited in its abilities as a legitimate
actor to control forces of power, is arguably a way of conceptualising
resistance without focal points of struggle or accountability; or indeed,
without acknowledging the relations of power that the concept of GCS is
contingent upon in its articulation of global public opinion and norms,
allowing such articulations to be the expression of only those in already-
existing positions of privilege. This is not to say that global issues do not
exist and that the answer is to revert to an understanding of the world
solely in terms of nation-states. Nor is it to deny processes of globalisa-
tion. But it is to note the complexities involved in simply globalising
domestic concepts – such as civil society – in the current context, often
regarded as the only progressive response to contemporary world devel-
opments. What is more, it is to note that the role of the media in such
theorising needs to be comprehensively interrogated and contextualised
in order to adequately use such political concepts. This is especially
important at a time when ICTs are being hailed as instigators of revolu-
tions across the globe to such an extent that they are seen as the defin-
ing feature of broad democratic movements. Crucially, it needs to be
highlighted that the popular idea that the decline of efficacy and ability
of existing political institutions (e.g. nation-states) to represent people is

being solved by developments in media technologies filling such gaps is
deeply problematic and misleading. At a time when media developments
are to a considerable extent moving public issues further and further
away from the public realm, global or otherwise, and into the hands of
elites and fragmented individualised self-expressions, the need to hold
on to a notion of collective political subjects in conceptualisations of
resistance becomes therefore, perhaps, more pertinent than ever.
Appendix
All the case studies were approached with the same holistic multi-
dimensional methodology, which combines methods of research
including institutional analysis, observation, interviews and textual
analysis. In total, 73 interviews were carried out during a two-year
period from 2008–10 (see Table 6.1 for how these are distributed across
the case studies). The interviews were semi-structured and would last,
on average, roughly an hour carried out either in person or over the
telephone or Skype (bar three interviews which were done via e-mail
upon request by the interviewees). Importantly, the interviewees
covered a broad range of roles and positions within the organisations,
including shareholders, managers, editors, correspondents and com-
mentators. In the cases of BBC World News and Los Angeles Times, these
interviews were supported by brief observation periods at the news
organisation.
The interviews for each of these case studies were based around
a set of themes guiding the questions. For BBC World News, these
broad themes guiding the interviews were concerned with the defini-
tion of global news and the story-selection process for a global news
broadcaster tailored towards the notion of a ‘global public interest’; the
coverage of news for a global news broadcaster as opposed to a domestic
news outlet; the role of the institution; the commercialisation of news
and developments in the global media market.
Table 6.1 List of interviews

Case study No. of interviews Dates
BBC World News 20 2009
Los Angeles Times 22 2008/2009
OhmyNews International 16 2010
Groundreport 15 2010
For Los Angeles Times, these broad themes concerned the influence
of market developments; the impact of ownership and changes in
financial structures; commercial pressures; the re-structuring of the
newsroom; and changes in the make-up of news coverage in local and
global terms.
For OhmyNews International and Groundreport, t the themes looked to
address specifically the way in which alternative global online news sites
differ from traditional mainstream news organisations in terms of the
‘globality’ of news coverage and the nature of influences on news prac-
tices. These broad themes concerned the editorial process on ‘citizen-
journalism’ sites; the impact of the financial structuring of online-only
global news; the role of the institution; the story-selection process and
how contributors are informed of stories; the practices employed when
writing stories; the interpretation of professional journalistic values;
and the motivation for contributing to online-only news sites.
Textual analysis of news coverage on BBC World News
This analysis is based on a sample of 100 news programmes watched

during the period January 2010–June 2010, each lasting just under 30
minutes. The analysis excludes coverage specifically dedicated to sport
and business segments, unless such news items formed part of the
main running order of the news programme. This was because it was
considered to unnecessarily skew the results too much towards Western
sources. The geographical regions, both for the particular lead story
in the news programme along with the viewpoints represented in the
overall coverage, were coded as closely as possible according to how
the BBC categorised their location of bureaux. Therefore, for example,
Egypt and Libya were coded as the Middle East rather than Africa, as
these areas were predominantly reported on by and in conjunction
with the Middle East bureau. Afghanistan and Pakistan were coded as
South Asia. Viewpoints from Russia and the former Soviet bloc up until
and including Belarus were coded as Europe, whereas Kyrgyzstan and
Kazakhstan were coded as South Asia, again following the categorisation
of the BBC’s own overview of bureaux locations. When coverage refer-
enced the European Union as a single actor, this was coded as Europe,
as with the African Union which was similarly coded as Africa, whereas
the UN, NATO, IMF and other international agencies that would span
regions were coded as International. With regard to the coding of the
lead stories in the 100 news programmes, this would be coded according
to the dominantt region or the geographical base of the dominantt actor
referred to in the opening tease of the programme. As such, a headline

tease referring to ‘there has been an earthquake in Haiti’, for example,
would be coded as Latin America, but a headline tease referring to
‘President Obama calls Haiti earthquake a humanitarian crisis’ would be
coded as North America. The coding would therefore be done based on
the context of what was considered to be the dominant piece of news
within the lead story.
With regard to the viewpoints represented in news coverage of the
entirety of the 100 programmes this partly draws from the method used
by Benson and Hallin in their historical study of the French and US
national press as it categorises the different viewpoints represented
in the coverage of political news stories (Benson & Hallin 2007). This
analysis was also done with an emphasis on the broader context in
which actors were being referenced, both with regard to the role they
occupied in the news coverage as well as the context of the society in
question. The coding of viewpoints as State, Business, Interest Groups,
Academia/Experts, Media, Celebs/Criminals, Professionals, Ordinary
Citizens, and Other was therefore done largely on the basis of how
they were covered within the news piece and how they were used in
the coverage. So, for example, in distinguishing between ‘Professionals’
and ‘Ordinary Citizens’, this was done on the basis of whether a per-
son’s profession was a significant part of their role in the coverage, such
as in the frequent case of lawyers or doctors. Similarly, where citizens
were treated as a collective group presenting certain interests, such as
in instances of protest and demonstration, these were understood to be
‘Interest Groups’. This would also be the case with individuals who were
presented as activists of some sort, including artists. Religious groups
would be coded as ‘Interest Groups’ when taken in the context of secu-
lar states, but would be counted as ‘State’ in instances where the context
tied them to the government in non-secular states; in the context of
Iran for example. The coding of political parties would also be informed
by the context of the society in question and the way the actor was pre-
sented in the coverage. In instances where the recognition of parties or
states was in question, such as Hamas for example, the coding would be
based on the perspective of the UK as the national base of the BBC and
would recognise this as an official party of government and be coded
Middle East/State accordingly. Former actors associated with the State,
such as former political leaders, would also be coded as State. Where the
UK recognises groups to be terrorist organisations, such groups would
be coded as Interest Groups. This category would also include think
tanks and other forms of research institutions, although actors from
universities would be coded as Academia/Experts. This would also be

the case when actors were referred to as ‘experts’ or groups of special-
ists, such as ‘scientists’, within the news coverage. Where reports would
simply assert ‘some say’ or ‘the international community’ without any
further specification, this would be coded as Other. In news stories that
lacked any reference to an actor, especially in the case of the reporting
of natural disasters, this would also be coded as Other. Each time an
actor was referenced in the coverage or a viewpoint was represented,
this was coded. Each individual actor would only be counted once
within the context of a single news story, despite being referenced
on several occasions in the same news item; although they would be
counted again if referenced in a different news item within the same
programme. So, for example, a news story featuring a quote from a
statement made by President Obama on Haiti and then a subsequent
sound-bite from a press conference with President Obama would only
be coded once as North America/State. But if a different news story later
in the same programme featured a statement from Obama this would
be counted as a separate representation of viewpoint. Also, if different
actors from the same group of actors were referenced within the same
story, this was coded as a separate viewpoint. Thus if the news item also
featured a statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this would
be counted as a new North America/State viewpoint. These operational
definitions allowing for such coding can be very difficult and can
inevitably present problems. It is therefore important to emphasise the
deeply interpretive and qualitative nature of such a systematic textual
analysis. Engaging in the coding of such operational definitions does,
however, present a useful dimension in understanding news practices
at BBC World News in the context of the broader analysis informed by
structural overviews and interview data, as well as textual analysis of
news coverage without the use of a systematic coding scheme.
Textual analysis of news coverage at Los Angeles Times
The sample for this analysis was gathered using Lexis Nexis, conducting
three separate searches for all articles containing the words ‘financial
crisis’, ‘climate change’ and ‘Iran’ within Los Angeles Times. The sample
for ‘Iran’ includes all coverage that contained the word ‘Iran’ during
the six-month period from 4 August 2008–4 February 2009. This was
then filtered to include only news pieces that discounted editorials and
stories that mentioned Iran but were not actually about Iran, or about
relations with Iran. If the story was mainly about something else, but
included news coverage on Iran as well, this was included in the sample.
This included pieces that were about the Middle East in broader terms
and mentioned Iran within those terms. This left a total sample of 117
articles, the majority from the Main News section, but also including
news pieces from Business and Calendar. Similarly, the sample for cover-
age on ‘climate change’ was gathered based on a search for all articles
containing the term ‘climate change’ during the six-month period of 5
September 2008–5 March 2009, filtered in the same way and leaving a
final sample of 79 articles. For the sample on the ‘financial crisis’, this
was based on a three-month period from 9 January 2009–9 April 2009,
filtered in the same way to include only news coverage on the actual
financial crisis (and not on other stories that would simply reference
the financial crisis within the news piece). The period used is shorter
due to the sheer volume of articles on this issue, leaving a final sample
of 128 articles and making it comparable to the samples for the other
two topics.
The operational definitions for this systematic textual analysis follow
a logic similar to the viewpoint analysis outlined above with regards to
BBC World News, again based on the analysis presented by Benson and
Hallin (2007), and use similar categories of actors and similar coding. As
such, coding of actors was done predominantly on the basis of how they
were covered within the context of the news pieces. In light of the fact
that there was a US presidential election campaign going on during the
period of some of the different samples, it should be noted that Barack
Obama and John McCain, before either were elected, would be counted
as US/State/Executive on the basis that they represented themselves as if
they were in government. Again, viewpoints were coded for every new
viewpoint represented. So when there were several different actors from
the same category of actors in the same news piece, these were coded
as separate viewpoints. However, if the same individual was represented
several times in the same news piece, this was only coded once.
Textual analysis of news coverage on OhmyNews

Internationall and Groundreport
The textual analysis of the geographical distribution of news coverage

on OhmyNews International is based on all articles posted on the site
during the one-year period February 2009–February 2010, constituting
a sample of 653 articles. This was repeated for the case of Groundreport,
t
but due to the much higher volume of articles posted on that site the
study was limited to a five-month period, constituting a sample of
1288 articles. Both sites are based on the same coding system as that for
the case study on BBC World News. As such, the operational definitions
of regions are structured on the same basis, following the geographi-
cal outline of newsgathering at the BBC (see above). The coding of
such regions was done according to the country/region that was most
dominantt in the coverage, either in terms of where information was pre-
dominantly sourced from or in terms of the topic of the story. Where
there was no reference of any kind to any country or region this was
coded as international. The case study on OhmyNews International also
includes a systematic textual analysis of viewpoints represented within
all the news content on the site during the period of January 2010–May
2010 and consists of a sample of 60 articles. This analysis is based on
the same operational definitions and coding system as outlined above
in the viewpoint analyses of BBC World News and Los Angeles Times.
However, added to the categories of actors was the category of ‘own
voice’. This consisted of direct representations of the author’s own view-
point within the coverage, the nature of much of the content making
it a significant actor to include in the analysis. The statistical data on
the sites was gathered either directly from the management of the news
organisations or from internet analysts, such as Alexa and Quantcast.
In the case study of Groundreport, t this also included an analysis of the
most viewed news stories on the site, gathered by using the website’s
own search mechanism for ‘most popular’ posts under each category of
news outlined on the homepage.
Notes
1 ‘Global Civil Society’ and the Media

1. As will become apparent, this refers predominantly to what might be called
liberal cosmopolitan thinkers, most notably Mary Kaldor, David Held,
Andrew Linklater, Richard Falk, Ann Florini and Jan Aart Scholte, and to a
lesser extent John Keane and Martin Shaw.
2. Crucially, however, some have argued that transferring this conceptualisa-
tion of civil society to a global space in the current context fundamentally
obscures and misconceives the central arguments about the operations of
power within the territorial state that Gramsci was attempting to highlight
(cf. Sassoon 2005).
3. This is not to say that Habermas endorses or necessarily agrees with the way
the concept of GCS is often presented. Indeed, Habermas has expressed con-
cerns about ‘globalisation discourse’ in this way (cf. Habermas 2006).
4. Interestingly, and possibly precisely because of the arguments made by some
public sphere theorists regarding the organisation of the media, some GCS
scholars such as Held are reluctant to use the phrase ‘public sphere’, while
remaining keen to embrace Habermas’ normative theory of communicative
actions. As Slaatta notes, rather than using Habermas’s notion, Held defines
culture as a ‘domain’ where symbolic orders, norms, standards and types
of discourses denote ‘the organisation of concepts and categories of mean-
ing which are essential to the mobilisation of a community’. Yet as Held
still wants to maintain that the advancement of democracy has progressed
through a struggle between civil society and the state he must therefore have
some regard for the very site where these struggles have taken place (Slaatta
1998). Thus, there is an appeal to the notion of a public sphere, but without
directly engaging with it, it is difficult to assert how in Held’s view this site is
constituted, and what role the media occupies. This is mainly implied by his
reading of other developments and his understanding of processes of globali-
sation as outlined above, where the media appears to be central.
2 The Organisation of News

1. See appendix for details on methodology.
3 ‘Global Civil Society’ and Global News Broadcasters: The

Case of BBC World News
1. This refers especially to the debates that came after ‘Sachsgate’, which one
interviewee remarked has had a profound effect on all BBC staff, including
the news staff.
192
Notes 193
5 ‘Global Civil Society’ and Alternative Online News: The

Case of OhmyNews International and Groundreport
1. http://english.ohmynews.com/english/eng_section.asp?article_class=13.
2. http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?article_
class=2&no=385976&rel_no=1.
3. http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=386048&rel_
no=1.
4. http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?article_
class=7&no=385733&rel_no=1.
5. http://www.groundreport.com/World/Ten- People-died-21- injured- in-
different-Road-Misha_2/2923677.
6. Cf. http://www.groundreport.com/World/Pads-Sudan-An-interview-with-
founder-David-Wakoli_4/2920394.
7. http://www.groundreport.com/article_list.php?tag=viomak.
8. http://www.groundreport.com/World/Kurt- Westergaards- Mohammed-
Cartoon-The-Image-Behin/2915281 accessed 1 May 2010.
9. http://www.groundreport.com/IWPR1; http://www.groundreport.com/
americawithoutgasgroup; http://www.groundreport.com/survivalinterna-
tional.
10. This is based on all the postings still available on the site from the period
26th of November to 29th of November 2008 covering the Mumbai attacks,
making up 41 articles in total.
11. http://www.groundreport.com/World/ Terror- Attacks- Continue- in-
Mumbai/2874188.
12. http://www.groundreport.com/article_list.php?tag=Chitral+Pakistan.
Bibliography
Allan, S. (2006), Online News: Journalism and the Internett (Maidenhead: Open
University Press).
Alleyne, M. D. (1997), News Revolution (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Alterman, E. (2003), What Liberal Media? (New York: Basic Books).
Amoore, L. & Langley, P. (2005), ‘Global Civil Society and Global Governmentality’,
in R. D. Germain. & M. Kenny (eds) The Idea of Global Civil Societyy (London and
New York: Routledge).
Anderson, K. & Rieff, D. (2005), ‘Global Civil Society: A Sceptical View’, in
H. Anheier et al. (eds), Global Civil Society 2004/5 (London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi: Sage).
Anheier, H. et al. (2001), ‘Introducing Global Civil Society’ in H. Anheier et al.
(eds), Global Civil Society 2001 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
Anheier, H. et al. (eds) (2007), Global Civil Society 2007/8 (London, Thousand
Oaks and New Delhi: Sage).
Ashenden, S. & Owen, D. (1999), ‘Foucault, Habermas and the Politics of
Critique’, in S. Ashenden & D. Owen (eds) Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting
the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theoryy (London: Sage).
Bardoel, J. & Deuze, M. (2001), ‘“Network Journalism”: Converging Competences
of Old and New Media Professionals’, in Australian Journalism Review, vol. 20,
no. 2, pp. 91–103.
Barry, B. (1989), Theories of Justice (London, Sydney and Tokyo: Harvester-
Wheatsheaf).
Beck, U. (2003), ‘The Analysis of Global Inequality: From National to Cosmopolitan
Perspective’, in M. Kaldor et al. (eds) Global Civil Society 2003 (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press).
Bell, V. (2007), ‘The Potential of an “Unfolding Constellation”: Imagining Fraser’s
Transnational Public Sphere’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1–5.
Benson, R. & Hallin, D. C. (2007), ‘How States, Markets and Globalization Shape
the News’, in European Journal of Communication, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 27–48.
Bettig, R. V. & Hall, J. L. (2003), Big Media, Big Moneyy (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers).
Bob, C. et al. (2007), ‘Media Spaces: Innovation and Activism’ in H. Anheier et al.
(eds), Global Civil Society 2007/8 (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage).
Bohman, J. (1998), ‘The Coming Age of Deliberative Democracy’, in Journal of
Political Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 400–25.
Brown, G. (2009), ‘Winning a Web for Global Good’, TEDGlobal.
BusinessWeek (2006), ‘“OhmyNews” Oh My Biz Problem’, 1 November.
Cammaerts, B. & Van Audenhove, L. (2005), ‘Online Political Debate, Unbounded
Citizenship and the Problematic Nature of a Transnational Public Sphere’, in
Political Communication, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 179–96.
Campbell, V. (2004), Information Age Journalism: Journalism in an International
Contextt (London: Arnold).
194
Bibliography 195
Carter, A. (2001), The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London and New York:
Routledge).
Castells, M. (2008), ‘The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication
Networks, and Global Governance’, The Annals of the American Academy, y vol. 616,
no. 1, pp. 78–93.
Castells, M. (2009), Communication Powerr (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Center for Media and Democracy (2007), ‘A Visit to OhmyNews’, 4th of
September.
Chadwick, A. (2006), Internet Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Chandhoke, N. (2002), ‘The Limits of Global Civil Society’, in M. Glasius et al.
Global Civil Society Yearbook 2002 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Chandler, D. (2007), ‘Deriving Norms from “Global Space”: The Limits of
Communicative Approaches to Global Civil Society Theorizing’, Globalizations,
vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 283–98.
Chandler, D. (2007b), ‘The Possibilities of Post-Territorial Political Community’,
Area: Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 116–19.
Chandler, D. (2009), Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and
Resistance (London and New York: Pluto Press).
Chouliaraki, L. (2008), ‘The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing
the Visibility of Suffering’, Global Media and Communications, vol. 4, no. 3,
pp. 329–51.
Compaine, B. (2000), Who Owns the Media? (London: L. Erlbaum Associates),
3rd edn.
Coleman, S. & Blumler, J. G. (2009), The Internet and Democratic Citizenship (New
York: Cambridge University Press).
Cottle, S. & Rai, M. (2008), ‘Global 24/7 News Providers: Emissaries of Global
Dominance or Global Public Sphere’, Global Media and Communication, vol. 4,
no. 2, pp. 157–81.
Couldry, N. (2007), ‘Globalization and the Public Sphere: Exploring the Space
of Community Media in Sydney’, in Global Media and Communications, vol. 3,
no. 1, pp. 79–100.
Curran, J. (1991), ‘Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere’, in P. Dahlgren &
C. Sparks (eds) Journalism and the Public Sphere in the New Media Age (London
and New York: Routledge).
Curran, J. (2000), ‘Introduction’, in J. Curran (ed.) Media Organisations in Society
(London and New York: Arnold and Oxford University Press).
Curran, J. (2002), ‘Media and the Making of British Society, c. 1700–2000’, Media
History, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 135–54.
Curran, J. (2002a), ‘Media and the Making of British Society c. 1700–2000’, Media
History, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 135–54.
Curran, J. (2002b), Media and Powerr (London and New York: Routledge).
Curran, J. (2005), ‘Mediations on Democracy’, in J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (eds)
Mass Media and Societyy (London and New York: Hodder Arnold), 4th edn.
Curran, J. (2010), ‘Media and Democracy: Key Issues and Contemporary
Concerns’, paper given at ECREA 3rd Communication Conference, Hamburg.
Curran, J. & Seaton, J. (2003), Power Without Responsibilityy (Abingdon: Routledge),
6th edn.
Curran, J. & Witschge, T. (2010), ‘Liberal Dreams and the Internet: A Case Study’,
in N. Fenton (ed.) New Media, Old News (London: Sage).
196 Bibliography
Dahlberg, L. (2001), ‘The Internet and Democratic Discourse: Exploring the

Prospects of Online Deliberative Forums Extending the Public Sphere’, in
Information, Communication and Society, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 615–33.
Dahlberg, L. (2007), ‘The Internet, Deliberative Democracy, and Power:
Radicalizing the Public Sphere’, in L. Dahlberg & E. Siapera (eds) The Internet
and Radical Democracyy (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
Dahlgren, P. (2005), ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication:
Dispersion and Deliberation’, in Political Communication, vol. 22, no. 2,
pp. 147–62.
Dahlgren, P. (2009), Media and Political Engagementt (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Davis, A. (2002), Public Relations Democracyy (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press).
Davis, A. (2007), The Mediation of Powerr (London and New York: Routledge).
Davies, N. (2008), Flat Earth News (London: Chatto and Windus).
Dawley, H. (2006), ‘OhmyNews, Where the Readers Report’, in Media Life,
20 June.
Demers, D. (2002), ‘Media Scholars Denounce AOL-Time Warner Merger’, in
D. Demers (ed.) Global Media News Readerr (Spokane: Marquette Books).
Demers, D. (2003), The Media Essays: From Local to Global (Spokane: Marquette
Books).
Deuze, M. (2003), ‘The Web and its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences
of Different Types of Newsmedia Online’, in New Media & Society, vol. 5, no. 2,
pp. 203–30.
Deuze, M. & Platon, S. (2003), ‘Indymedia Journalism: A Radical Way of Making,
Selecting and Sharing News?’, in Journalism, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 336–55.
Downey, J. (2008), ‘Recognition and the Renewal of Ideology Critique’, in
D. Hesmondhalgh & J. Toynbee (eds) The Media and Social Theoryy (London and
New York: Routledge).
El-Nawawy, M. & Iskander A. (2003), Al--Jazeera: The Story of the Network that
is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (New York: Basic
Books).
Elster, J. (1997), ‘The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory’,
in J. Bohman & W. Rehg (eds) Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and
Politics (Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press).
Elster, J. (1998), ‘Introduction’, in J. Elster (ed.) Deliberative Democracyy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Eveland, W. P. et al. (2004), ‘Moving Beyond “Just the Facts”: The Influence of
Online News on the Content and Structure of Public Affairs Knowledge’, in
Communication Research, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 82–108.
Ezzat, H. R. (2005), ‘Beyond Methodological Modernism: Towards a Multicultural
Paradigm Shift in the Social Sciences’, in H. Anheier et al. (eds) Global Civil
Society 2004/5 (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage).
Falk, R. (2000), ‘Global Civil Society and the Democratic Prospect’, in B. Holden
(ed.) Global Democracy: Key Debates (London and New York: Routledge).
Fenton, N. (2008), ‘Mediating Solidarity’, in Global Media & Communication,
vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 37–57.
Fenton, N. (2010), ‘Drowning or Waving? New Media, Journalism and Democracy’,
Bibliography 197
Fenton, N. (2010b), ‘NGOs, New Media and the Mainstream News: News from
Everywhere’, in N. Fenton (ed.) New Media, Old News (London: Sage).
Fenton, N. (2010c), ‘Social Networking, Political Citizenship and Democracy’,
paper presented at ECREA 3rd Communication Conference, Hamburg.
Fierlbeck, K. (1998), Globalizing Democracy: Power, Legitimacy and the Interpretation
of Democratic Ideas (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press).
Flew, T. (2007), Understanding Global Media (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Florini, A. M. & Simmons, P. J. (2000), ‘What the World Needs Now?’, in
A. M. Florini (ed.) The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Societyy (Tokyo
and Washington, DC: Japan Center for International Peace and Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace).
Florini, A. M. (2003), The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World
(Washington, DC: Island Press).
Forbes Magazine (2009), ‘The Struggles of OhmyNews’, 30 March.
Foucault, M. (2002), ‘Truth and Power’, in J. D. Fabion (ed.) Michel Foucault: Power
(London: Penguin Books).
Franklin, B. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in B. Franklin (ed.) Social Policy, the Media and
Misrepresentation (London: Routledge).
Fraser, N. (2003), ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, in C. M. Elliott (ed.) Civil Society
and Democracy: A Readerr (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Fraser, N. (2007), ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and
Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World’, in Theory, Culture &
Society, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 7–30.
Fraser, N. (2008), Scales of Justice (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Freedman, D. (2010), ‘The Political Economy of the “New” News Environment’
Friedrichs, J. (2005), ‘Global Governance as the Hegemonic Project of the
Transatlantic Civil Society’, in M. Lederer & P. S. Müller (eds) Criticizing Global
Governance (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Frost, M. (2009), Global Ethics (London and New York: Routledge).
Gans, H. J. (1979), Deciding What’s News (London: Constable).
Gillmor, D. (2006), We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People
(Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly).
Gimmler, A. (2001), ‘Deliberative Democracy, the Public Sphere and the Internet’,
in Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 21–39.
Glasius, M & Kaldor, M. (2002), ‘The State of Global Civil Society: Before and
After September 11’, in M. Glasius et al. (eds) Global Civil Society Yearbook 2002
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Golding, P. & Elliott, P. (1979), Making the News (London and New York:
Longham).
Goldsmiths Media Group (2000), ‘Media Organisations in Society: Central
Issues’, in J. Curran (ed.) Media Organisations in Societyy (London and New York:
Arnold and Oxford University Press).
Goodman, A. (1977), ‘Working for Television – the Experience of Censorship and
Control’, in P. Beharrell & G. Philo (eds) Trade Unions and the Media (London
and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Grimm, D. (1997), ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution?’, in P. Gowan &
P. Anderson (eds) The Question of Europe (London: Verso).
198 Bibliography
Gruen, A. (2009), ‘The Development of Citizen Journalism’, M.Phil. Dissertation,

University of Cambridge.
Guidry, J. A. et al. (2000), ‘Globalisations and Social Movements’, in J. A. Guidry
et al. (eds) Globalisations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the
Transnational Public Sphere (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press).
Gutmann, A. & Thompson, D. (2000), ‘Why Deliberative Democracy is Different’,
in E. F. Paul et al. (eds) Democracyy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge:
Polity Press).
Habermas, J. (1996), ‘An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject:
Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason’, in L. E. Cahoone (ed.) From
Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthologyy (Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers).
Habermas, J. (1997), ‘Popular Sovereignty as Procedure’, in J. Bohman & W. Rehg
(eds) Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Massachusetts and
London: The MIT Press).
Habermas, J. (2006), ‘Political Communication in Media Society – Does Democracy
Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on
Empirical Research’, Keynote Speech, ICA Conference, Dresden.
Hacker, L. H. & van Dijk, J. (eds) (2000), Digital Democracyy (London: Sage).
Hafez, K. (2007), The Myth of Media Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Hall, S. et al. (1978), Policing the Crisis (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Hallin, D. C. (1994), We Keep America on Top of the World d (London and New York:
Routledge).
Hallin, D. C. & Mancini, P. (2004), Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of
Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hamilton, J. T. (2004), All the News That’s Fit to Selll (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
Held, D. (1995), Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to
Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Held, D. (2000), ‘The Changing Contours of Political Community: Rethinking
Democracy in the Context of Globalisation’, in B. Holden (ed.) Global
Democracy: Key Debates (London and New York: Routledge).
Held, D. (2003), ‘Cosmopolitanism: Globalisation Tamed?’, Review of International
Studies, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 465–80.
Held, D. (2005), ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan Order’, in G. Brock & H. Brighouse
(eds) The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Held, D. (2006), Models of Democracyy (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 3rd edn.
Held, D. & McGrew, A. (2007), Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Cambridge and
Malden: Polity Press), 2nd edn.
Held, D. & Patomäki, H. (2006), ‘Problems of Global Democracy: A Dialogue’,
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 115–33.
Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988), Manufacturing Consentt (New York: Pantheon
Books).
Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (2002), Manufacturing Consentt (New York: Pantheon
Books), 2nd edn.
Herman, E. S. & McChesney, R. W. (1997), The Global Media: the New Missionaries
of Corporate Capitalism (London and Washington, DC: Cassell).
Bibliography 199
Horvit, B. (2004), ‘Global News Agencies and the Pre-War Debate: A Context Analysis’,
in R. D. Berenger (ed.) Global Media Go to Warr (Spokane: Marquette Books).
Hutchings, K. (2005), ‘Subjects, Citizens or Pilgrims? Citizenship and Civil
Society in a Global Context’, in R. D. Germain & M. Kenny (eds) The Idea of
Global Civil Societyy (London and New York: Routledge).
Joyce, M. (2007), ‘The Citizen Journalism Web site “OhmyNews” and the 2002
South Korean Presidential Election’, Berkman Center Research Publication,
no. 2007–15, pp. 1–21.
Kaldor, M. (2001), ‘A Decade of Humanitarian Intervention: The Role of Global
Civil Society’, in H. Anheier et al. (eds) Global Civil Society 2001 (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press).
Kaldor, M. (2003), Global Civil Society: An Answer to Warr (Cambridge: Polity
Press).
Kaldor, M. (2003b), ‘The Idea of Global Civil Society’, International Affairs, vol.
79, no. 3, pp. 583–93.
Kaldor, M. et al. (2003), ‘Global Civil Society in an Era of Regressive Globalisation’,
in M. Kaldor et al. (eds), Global Civil Society 2003 (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press).
Kaldor, M. et al. (2005), ‘Introduction’, in H. Anheier et. al. (eds) Global Civil
Society 2004/5 (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage).
Kant, I. (1996), ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’,
in L. E. Cahoone (ed.) From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology
(Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).
Keane, J. (1991), The Media and Democracyy (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Keane, J. (1998), Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Keane, J. (2001), ‘Global Civil Society?’, in H. Anheier et al. (eds) Global Civil
Society 2001 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
Keane, J. (2003), Global Civil Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Keane, J. (2006), ‘Introduction: Cities and Civil Society’, in J. Keane (ed.) Civil
Society: Berlin Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books).
Keck, M. E. & Sikkink, K. (1998), Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
International Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press).
Kenny, M. & Germain, R. D. (2005), ‘Understanding Global Civil Society:
Contestation, Citizenship, Governance’, in M. Kenny & R. D. Germain (eds)
The Idea of Global Civil Societyy (London and New York: Routledge).
Kim, H. H., Moon, J. Y. & Yang, S. (2004), ‘Broadband Penetration and Participatory
Politics: South Korea Case’, Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences.
Lasica, J. D. (2003), ‘What is Participatory Journalism?’ in Online Journalism
Review, August 7.
Linklater, A. (1998), The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations
of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Lowrey, W. (2006), ‘Mapping the Journalism-Blogging Relationship’, in Journalism:
Theory, Criticism and Practice, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 477–500.
Lupel, A. (2005), ‘Task of a Global Civil Society: Held, Habermas and Democratic
Legitimacy beyond the Nation State’, in Globalizations, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 117–33.
Magder, T. (2003), ‘Watching What We Say: Global Communication in a Time of
Fear’, in D. Thussu & D. Freedman (eds) War and the Media (London: Sage).
Manning, P. (2001), News and News Sources (London, Thousand Oaks and New
Delhi: Sage).
200 Bibliography
Marx, K. (1978), ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in R. C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels

Readerr (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co.), 2nd edn.
McChesney, R. W. (2004), The Problem of the Media (New York: Monthly Review
Press).
McChesney, R. W. (2001), ‘Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism’, in
Monthly Review, vol. 52, no. 10, pp. 1–19.
McChesney, R. W. & Schiller, D. (2003), ‘The Political Economy of International
Communications’, in Technology, Business and Society, Programme Paper
Number 11, UNRISD.
McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor).
McManus, J. (1994), Market--Driven Journalism (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage).
McNair, B. (2005), Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News, and Power in a Globalised
World d (Abingdon and New York: Routledge).
Meier, W. A. (2007), ‘National and Transnational Media Ownership Concentration
in Europe: A Burden for Democracy?’ in Meier, W. A. & Trappel, J. (eds) Power,
Performance and Politics: Media Policy in Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomost).
Meier, W. A. & Trappel, J. (eds) (2007), Power, Performance & Politics: Media Policy
in Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, Euromedia Research Group).
Meyer, P. (2005), The Vanishing Newspaperr (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press).
Meyer, P. (2009), The Vanishing Newspaperr (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press), 2nd edn.
Mouffe, C. (2005), On the Political (London and New York: Routledge).
Negroponte, N. (1995), Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books).
Nguyen, A. (2008), The Penetration of Online News (Saarbrucken: VDM Publishing
House).
Norris, P. (2001), Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the
Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Noughton, J. (2001), ‘Contested Space: The Internet and Global Civil Society’, in
H. Anheier et al. (eds) Global Civil Society 2001 (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press).
Oh, Y. H. (2004), ‘Korean Netizens Change Journalism and Politics’, Address at
Harvard Internet and Society Conference, Harvard, 11 December.
Oh, Y. H. (2006), ‘The Revolt of 737 News Guerrillas: A Revolution in News
Production and Consumption’, OhmyNews.
Olesen, T. (2004), ‘Setting the Social Agenda in World Politics: Media, Public
Opinion, and the Discursive Power of Transnational Campaigns’, Paper pre-
sented at the annual conference for Global Studies Association, University of
Warwick, Coventry, 7–9 July.
Olesen, T. (2005), ‘Transnational Publics: New Spaces of Social Movement
Activism and the Problem of Global Long-Sightedness’, Current Sociology, vol.
53, no. 3, pp. 419–40.
O’Malley, T. (2002), ‘Media History and Media Studies: Aspects of the Development
of the Study of Media History in the UK 1945–2000’, in Media History, vol. 8,
no. 2, pp. 155–73.
Ougaard, M. & Higgott, R. (2002), ‘Introduction: Beyond System and Society –
Towards a Global Polity’, in M. Ougaard & R. Higgott (eds) Towards a Global
Polityy (London and New York: Routledge).
Outhwaite, W. (1996), ‘General Introduction’, in W. Outhwaite (ed.) The
Habermas Readerr (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Bibliography 201
Page, B. I. (1996), Who Deliberates? Mass Media in Modern Democracyy (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press).
Paterson, C. (2005), ‘News Agency Dominance in International News on the
Internet’, in D. Skinner et al. (eds.), Converging Media, Diverging Politics (Oxford:
Lexington Books).
Pew Research Center (2008), ‘The Changing Newsroom’, Project for Excellence
in Journalism, July.
Picard, R. G. (2002), ‘Delusions of Grandeur: The Real Problems with Concentration
in Media’, in D. Demers (ed.) Global Media News Readerr (Spokane: Marquette
Books).
Pickard, V. W. (2006), ‘United yet Autonomous: Indymedia and the Struggle to
Sustain a Radical Democratic Network’, in Media, Culture & Society, vol. 28, no. 3,
pp. 315–36.
Polat, R. (2005), ‘The Internet and Political Participation’, in European Journal of
Communication, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 435–59.
Przeworski, A. (1998), ‘Deliberation and Ideological Domination’, in J. Elster (ed.)
Deliberative Democracyy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Ramdani, N. (2011), ‘Did the Internet Matter in Tunisia and Egypt?’, in
Opendemocracy, 18 February.
Rash, W. (1997), Politics on the Nett (New York: Freeman & Co.).
Rawls, J. (1993), Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press).
Rawls, J (1999), A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press).
Redden, J & Witschge, T. (2010), ‘A New News Order? Online News Content
Examined’, in N. Fenton (ed.) New Media, Old News (London: Sage).
Risse, T. (2000), ‘The Power of Norms versus the Norms of Power: Transnational
Civil Society and Human Rights’, in A. M. Florini (ed.) The Third Force: The Rise
of Transnational Civil Societyy (Tokyo and Washington, DC: Japan Center for
International Peace and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).
Sakr, N. (2001), Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalisation and the
Middle Eastt (London and New York: I. B. Taurus and Co.).
Salter, L. (2006), ‘Democracy and Online News: Indymedia and the Limits of
Participatory Media’, in Scan Journal, vol. 3, no. 1.
Sassoon, A. S. (2005), ‘Intimations of a Gramscian Approach to Global Civil
Society’, in M. Kenny & R. D. Germain (eds) The Idea of Global Civil Society
(London and New York: Routledge).
Saward, M. (2000), ‘A Critique of Held’, in B. Holden (ed.) Global Democracy: Key
Debates (London and New York: Routledge).
Schlesinger, P. (1978), Putting ‘Reality’ Togetherr (London and New York: Routledge).
Schlesinger, P. (1990), ‘Rethinking the Sociology of Journalism: Source Strategies
and the Limits of Media-centrism’, in M. Ferguson (ed.) Public Communication:
the new imperatives (London: Sage).
Scholte, J. A. (2002), ‘Civil Society and Governance in the Global Polity’, in
M. Ougaard & R. Higgott (eds) Towards a Global Polityy (London and New York:
Routledge).
Schudson, M. (1991), ‘The Sociology of News Production Revisited’, in J. Curran &
M. Gurevitch (eds) Mass Media & Societyy (London: Edward Arnold).
Schudson, M. (2005), ‘Four Approaches to the Sociology of News’, in J. Curran &
M. Gurevitch (eds) Mass Media and Societyy (London and New York: Hodder
Arnold).
202 Bibliography
Schudson, M. (2003), The Sociology of the News (New York and London:
W. W. Norton & Co.).
Selby, J. (2007), ‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance, and the
Limits of Foucauldian IR’, International Relations, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 324–45.
Shaw, M. (1996), Civil Society and Media in Global Crisis (London and New York:
Pinter).
Shaw, M. (1999), ‘Global Voices: Civil Society and the Media in Global Crisis’,
in T. Dunne & N. J. Wheeler (eds) Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Shaw, M. (2003), ‘The Global Transformation of the Social Sciences’, in M. Kaldor et
al. (eds) Global Civil Society 2003 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
Sigal, L. V. (1986), ‘Sources Make the News’, in R. K. Manoff & M. Schudson (eds)
Reading the News (New York: Pantheon Books).
Silverstone, R. (2006), Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge:
Polity Press).
Singer, P. (2009), The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Povertyy (London:
Picador).
Slaatta, T. (1998), ‘Media and Democracy in the Global Order’, Media, Culture &
Society, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 335–44.
Stanton, R. (2007), All News is Locall (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co.).
Thompson, J. B. (1995), The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media
(Cambridge: Polity Press).
Thussu, D. K. (2007), News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment
(London: Sage).
Thussu, D. K. (2007b), Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow w (London
and New York: Routledge).
Tuchman, G. (1978), Making News: A Study in the Construction of Realityy (New York:
The Free Press and London: Collier Macmillan).
Volkmer, I. (1999), News in a Global Sphere (Luton: University of Luton Press).
Volkmer, I. (2003), ‘The Global Network Society and the Global Public Sphere’,
in Development, t vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 9–16.
Wall, M. (2005), ‘“Blogs of War”: Weblogs as News’, in Journalism, vol. 6, no. 2,
pp. 153–72.
Wilkin, P. (2001), The Political Economy of Global Communication (Cambridge:
Pluto Press).
Wilkin, P. (2002), ‘Against Global Governance? Tracing the Lineage of the Anti-
Globalisation Movement’, Paper given at Politics Seminar Series, Lancaster
University.
Yang, S. -M. (2000), ‘Political Democratization and the News Media’, in
L. J. Diamond & T. Sin Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation in
Korea (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press).
Young, I. M. (2000), Inclusion and Democracyy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Yu, Y. -J. (2003), ‘OhmyNews Makes Every Citizen a Reporter’, in Japan Media
Review, 17 September.
Zayani, M. (ed.) (2005), The Al Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives on New
Arab Media (London: Pluto Press).
Zhao, Y. & Hackett, R. A. (2005), ‘Media Globalization, Media Democratization’,
in R. A. Hackett & Y. Zhao (eds) Democratizing Global Media: One World, Many
Struggles (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield).
Index
advertising, in news, 43–44, 47–8, see citizen journalism, 53, 81, 118, 124–6,
also Los Angeles Times advertising 132, 135–6, 140, 146–7, 155, 158,
Al-Jazeera,
- 38, 56 166, 169, 171
alternative news sites, 53, 117–8, 124, see also alternative news sites;
139–41, 144, 165, 177, see also OhmyNews; Groundreport
citizen journalism citizenship, 7, 20–2, 25, see also global
Anderson, Benedict, 22 citizenship
Arab Spring, see Arab uprisings civil society, 7–10, 12, 17, see also
Arab uprisings, 25, 81 global civil society
climate change, coverage of, 109–114
balance, in news, 41, 46–7, 74–5, 83, CNN, 36, 39–40, 56
87, 120, 158–9, 175 commercialization of news, 43–4, 47,
Beck, Ulrich, 9 150
BBC World News, 56–92 common sense, 18, 29, 31, 184
agenda, 57, 60, 63–8, 70, 74–81, 83, communicative reason, 12–3, 183
86, 88, 91 concentration of ownership, see
audience, 57, 60–2, 68, 70–83, 85, ownership
91 convergence, 42, 52, 102–3
bureaux, 58–9, 67, 79 consensus, 11, 15, 31, 65, 86, 185
communicative contexts, 75, cosmopolitan, cosmopolitanism,
86–7, 90 7–11, 14–5, 19, 35, 39, 51, 173,
culture, 57–8, 60, 64–6, 71, 74, 83, 179–81
91 crisis reporting, 53, 165
ethos, 64–5 cultural imperialism, see imperialism
financial structure of, see funding
funding of, 58, 67 deliberative democracy, 12–3, 17, 31,
geographical distribution of 50
content, 69, 85 deterritorialised, deterritorialisation,
history of, 58–60 5, 179, 185
lead stories, 69, 83–5 digitical divide, 52
newsgathering, 58, 66–8, 70, 78–9, digital democracy, 49
82, 91 direct democracy, 49
newsroom, 58, 62, 64–6, 76, 78
newsworthiness, 66, 70, 80, 87 e-democracy, 49
story-selection, 57, 65, 71, 78–9 eye-ball economy, 177
viewpoints on, 73–4, 82–6 ethos, 43, 46, see also BBC World
broadcasters, news, see satellite news News ethos
networks
Falk, Richard, 17
centralization of ownership, see financial crisis, coverage of, 88,
ownership 109–114
Chandler, David, 16, 30, 32, 183–5 Foucault, Michel, 31–2
Chicago Tribune, 96, 103–4 Fraser, Nancy, 15, 24, 31–3, 181
203
204 Index
global citizenship, 12, 21–2, 35, 37–9, Habermas, Habermasian, 12–5, 23–4,
56, 60, 90–2 29, 31, 50
global civil society, an overview of, 7–18 Hafez, Kai, 40
global consciousness, 10–11, 30, 37–9, Hall, Stuart, 46–7
56, 90, 174 Held, David, 9–16, 20–1, 181
global infotainment, 38 Huffington Post, 147
globalization, 6–11, 18 hyper-local, 118, 177
global moral order, 21, 29, 34–5, 39,
91–2, 167, 171, 174–5, 180 ICTs, see internet; alternative news
global polity, see global space sites
global public interest, 57, 65–6, 77, ideal speech situation, 14–5, 50
80, 137, 167 ideology, 41, 47–8
global public opinion, 16, 19, 25–7, impartiality, 14, 46, 74–5, 83, 140–1,
48, 52–55, 118, 126, 169–70, 174, 158–9, 171, 177
178, 180–2 imperialism, 37–9, 92
global public sphere, 26–7, 34–7, Indymedia, 53–4
91–2, 102, 116, 174, 176–7, information gap, 52
180 internet, 48–54, see also alternative
global space, 9–10, 15, 19, 31, 56, news sites, citizen journalism
173–5, 179, 184–5 Iran, coverage of, 80, 109–10, 112–4
global village, 35–6
Global Voices, 166 Jasmine revolution, see Arab uprisings
globality journalism, 36–8, 42, 53, 97, 102–3,
of politics, 10, 38–9, 87–90, 133, 117, 119, 120–1, 125, 128, 138,
173, 176–9 141, 151, 154, 158
of news, 34, 39–41, 87 see also citizen journalism
Gramsci, Gramscian, 10, 180 justice as impartiality, 14
Groundreport, t 146–169
business model, see financial Kaldor, Mary, 10–2, 16–7, 22–5
structure Kant, Kantian, 10, 13–4
code of ethics, see editorial Keane, John, 8, 10, 15–6, 19–22,
guidelines 25–7, 36
culture, 158
editorial guidelines, 152 liberal media history, liberal narrative,
editorial process, 151–3, 156 27–9, 33, 54, 156, 171, 182
financial structure of, 147–8, 150 localization of news, 105–7, 109, 115
geographical distribution of London G20 Summit, 87–90
content, 162 Los Angeles Times, 93–116
history of, 146–7 advertising in, 95–8
India, 163, 169 consolidation of, 102–5
mission, 147, 157, 166, 170 history of, 95–6
pay-structure, 161 newsgathering, 108
public interest, 167, 171 ownership of, 95–7, 100–3,
readership, 161, 168, see also 115, 176
visitors readers of, 98–9, 105–6
story-selection, 154 sources, 101, 108, 112
traffic, see readership, visitors
values, 152, 157–9 Marx, Karl, 32
visitors, 160–1, see also readership McLuhan, Marshall, 35–6
Index 205
media history, see also liberal media ownership, 35, 42–5, 91, 102
history
mediapolis, 21, 23 political economy, school of, 37, 42,
mediated worldliness, 20 45, 52
methodological nationalism, 9 post-national, 12, 99, 112
methodology, 55 power, 10–1, 17, 31–3, 179–185
Mouffe, Chantal, 31 PR, 46, 107
Mumbai attacks, 153, 165–6, 168 primary definers, 47
myth, of media globalization, 40 printing press, see US newspaper
industry
neoliberal, 30, 55, 174, 185 public reason, 13, 16, 31
new media, see internet public relations, see PR
news flows, 38, 136, 168, 172 public sphere, 7, 13, 15, 23–5, 29,
newspapers, 48, 94–6, 102–3, 105, 107, 31–5, 41, 49, 181
see alsoo US newspaper industry
news sources, 44–6, 52–3 reason, see communicative reason,
new technologies, see internet, user- public reason
generated content
non-state actors, see social movements satellite news networks, 36, 39–40, 56,
136, 175
objectivity, 41, 46, 74, 112, 156–7, 171 Scholte, Jan Aart, 17, 20, 25
Ofcom, 63, 75 search-engine optimization, 165
Oh Yean Ho, 118–9, 121, 123 Shaw, Martin, 10, 180
OhmyNews, 117–146 Silverstone, Roger, 21–3
business model, see financial social movements, 17–8, 26, 33, 52,
structure 141, 180
code of ethics, 120, 137 sources, see news sources
culture, 134, 136–7 Sterne, Rachel, 146–7
editorial process, 120–1, 126–8,
130, 126 technological determinism, 29, 174
financial structure of, 125, 130, 138 television, see satellite news networks,
geographical distribution of BBC World News
content, 135 territory, see deterritorialised
history of, 118–24 Times-Mirror Company, 95–6
Japan, 123 transnational, transnationalism, 9–10,
Korea, 118, 124 14–5, 18, 21, 24, 26, 181
public interest, 136–8, 140, 143 transnational public sphere, see global
readership, 122, 132–3, 135, see also public sphere
visitors Tribune Company, 96, 102–5, 115
story-selection, 127, 138, 140 truth, 31, 80, 146
traffic, see readership, visitors Twitter, 153, 155, 165–6
values, 120, 138, 140
viewpoints, 142, 144–5 user-generated content, 54, 118,
visitors, 132, see also OhmyNews 129–131, 142, 148–51, 156, 177
readership US newspaper industry, 94–97, 115
Opendemocracy, 53, 131, 181
open-source, 119, 121, 128, 137, Volkmer, Ingrid, 36
149–50
organizational ethos, see ethos Zapatista, 25

Lina Dencik (Auth.) - Media and Global Civil Society-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012) PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Lina Dencik (Auth.) - Media and Global Civil Society-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012) PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Lina Dencik (Auth.) - Media and Global Civil Society-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012) PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Media and Global Civil Society

This page intentionally left blank

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

List of Tables and Figures viii

3.1 Global 24/7 TV news networks 57

3.1 Broadcasting reach of BBC World News 61

5.2 Editorial process at OhmyNews International 126

There are a great number of people who have been instrumental in

understanding of the media, especially the news, as playing a central

the emergence of such conceptualisation, although often implicit, relies

discussions on public deliberation. This chapter therefore examines the

dominant literature.1 It is important to understand its genealogy and

Global civil society – a brief overview

It is important then to provide a brief overview of GCS – how it has

ideals with regards to the governance and democratisation of the global

legitimacy in the form of national representative democracy, IR scholars

more than just ‘beyond borders’: we refer to the ways in which

Thus, the shift to ‘global’ is significant precisely because it is – unlike

provides grounds for new ways of conceptualising democratic practice

formation allows for decision-making to be collectively binding through

of the role of GCS within his broader framework of a ‘cosmopolitan

The aim would be to establish a deliberative process whose structure

Although Held stresses the need for a ‘layered’ cosmopolitan perspective

political order of ‘democratic associations, cities and nations as well as of

GCS draws on the philosophical tradition of deliberative democracy in

The media in global civil society

the question of how exactly these technological developments have

(Trans)forming identities into global citizens

The globalisation of communications media has had several long-

The arguments adopted in the literature on GCS appear to follow the

conditions under which individuals exercise power. Individuals are

Hailed by media narratives that probe the wider world in tones of

centrality of the media in our definition of the political community, and

This was above all a global media happening, experienced by

It is important here not to overstate the extent to which advocates of

Providing resources for global public deliberation

They take place, it is implied, through developments in ICTs: ‘informa-

As Keane states: ‘it [the globalisation of media] has contributed to the

Representing global public opinion

What the concept of GCS relies on, therefore, is an understanding of

GCS itself. Public deliberation is a self-reflexive process and the media

Global civil society and the liberal media narrative

the nature of the media as it is presented in GCS literature has arguably

of information, for popular empowerment, and indeed for democratic

The concept of GCS, although widely appropriated in debates on civic

constituting a public sphere where deliberation can occur globally, and

This would arguably include any notion of the ‘reasonable’. As such,

In stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to

of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of

What advocates of GCS must face up to is a real and substantial

What needs to be examined specifically in light of the debate on how

The ‘globality’ of news

media globalisation in recent years by centring on notions of global

McLuhan’s approach was the first attempt to analyse the profound

Although McNair maintains some scepticism regarding this linking of

globalisation of news media allows for is ‘the replication throughout the

CNN remains a fundamentally US company, in terms of organisa-

dramatic journalistic successes have seen television news networks