Global Media Discourse

A Critical Introduction

David Machin, Theo Van Leeuwen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415359450
• eBook ISBN: 9781134240906
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Featuring a wide range of exercises, examples, and images, this textbook provides a practical way of analyzing the discourses of the global media industries. Building on a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of global media communication, specific case studies of lifestyle and entertainment media are explored with examples from films, global women's magazines, Vietnamese news reporting and computer war games. Finally, this book investigates how global media communication is produced, looking at the formats, languages and images used in creating media materials, both globally and in localized forms.

At a time when the media is becoming increasingly global, often with the same films, news and television programmes shown all over the world; Global Media Discourse provides an accessible, lively introduction into how globalization is changing the language and communicative practices of the media. Integrating a range of approaches, including political economy, discourse analysis and ethnography, this book will be of particular interest to students of media and communication studies, applied linguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis.

PART I
Contexts

In this first section we set up the context, presenting a short history of media globalisation and an overview of the main themes of globalisation theory.

Chapter 1 deals with the rise of global media. One of the major theoretical issues of globalisation is the homogenisation of world culture through Western media, and through the values and kinds of identity they promote. We look at examples of the earliest forms of global media and show how their rise to global dominance formed part of a US project that was at once economic and ideological. US news, movies, advertising and magazines created the template for today’s global media, its industrialised and standardised processes, and its use of local features in order to make global media products successful. We also show how, right from the beginning, politics, culture and economics came together in the entertainment products that were shipped around the planet.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the question of what media globalisation is, and with the different ways that global media and global media formats and styles find their way into societies. While there are as many different stories about globalisation as there are societies, there are, nevertheless, some notable patterns. The chapter looks at these complexities, using two case studies: Dutch women’s magazines and Arab comic strips. This allows us to avoid the kind of broad generalisations that often characterise theories of globalisation.

1 Histories of media globalisation

In this chapter we look at the history of media globalisation, singling out some key developments and exemplifying them with case histories. We start with the history of news agencies, the first truly global media enterprise.

The globalisation of news

Many of us tend to think of news as a natural phenomenon – a straightforward and self-evident process where professional journalists inform members of their societies about important issues. It seems natural that we should find newspapers all around the planet. Yet sociologists have shown us that what we call ‘news’ is quite an odd set of institutional practices that must be understood in terms of its social and historical development. And this context is a European and American one. News itself, and its associated practices, the organisations of its institutions, its formats and genre, have their origins particularly in European and American culture. And central to the global spread of news as a genre and also in terms of content has been the news agency – the first global medium.

Early nineteenth-century newspapers were an important vehicle of political communication. They did not yet separate ‘fact’ and ‘comment’. They openly took sides in political issues and carried editorials on the front page in which they conducted debates with ‘correspondents’ that could last for days. Today, editorials are sometimes still called ‘leading articles’, but they are no longer on the front page, and their writers no longer conduct debates with letter writers, while ‘correspondents’ are now professional journalists, rather than readers. News agencies started in the middle of the nineteenth century to supply these newspapers with news items from across the world. Information became a commodity, presented in a neutral style to be saleable to editors of different political persuasion. In developing such a neutral style, news agencies would pioneer a ‘journalism of information’ (Boyd-Barrett et al., 1998: 7) that would eventually take over from the earlier journalism of argument and political debate, although this happened much more slowly on the continent. They would also spearhead the importance of the urgency and topicality of the news, setting great store on speed of delivery. In this they were helped by the new technology of the telegraph.

The first agencies started in the late 1840s in Germany (Wolff), France (Havas) and the UK (Reuters). Other national agencies followed, but the three major agencies managed to monopolise the flow of news and form a cartel that divided up the world in the same way as empire-building nation states in that same period divided up the world to form their colonial empires. In this arrangement the big three agencies had monopoly access to the national agencies in their territories, and these national agencies in turn (and, therefore, also the newspapers that relied on them) could only buy news from the global agency that had the monopoly in their territory.

Three aspects in the development of news agencies are particularly important for understanding the development of global media communication generally:

• the close links they forged between news and the global financial market;
• the ‘journalism of information’ they developed, with its standardised formats and routine devices for guaranteeing facticity and credibility; and
• the way in which they catered both to national, often propagandistic, interests, and to international, often market-oriented interests.

We discuss these in turn.

News and the market

From the beginning the news agencies provided not only news to the press, but also business intelligence to financial brokers and businessmen. Reuters, Wolff and Havas had all worked in banking before they started their news agencies, and they established their agencies close to, or in, the stock exchanges of London, Berlin and Paris. They saw news as a commodity, supplying traders with the opening and closing prices of the stock exchanges as fast as they could, to provide them with the up-to-date information they needed to be ahead of their competitors.

Today’s news agencies have not changed in this respect. They operate on the principle that ‘almost anything that passes as news in print, broadcasting and electronic media is likely to have some financial implication for someone’ and that the best stories ‘move markets’ (Boyd-Barrett, 1998: 62). Boyd-Barrett (ibid., 72) quotes a Reuters quality controller praising a journalist: ‘Our story weakened the dollar and the Bank of Japan intervened in its support . . . Our competitors were left chasing reactions in support . . . We beat the competition hands down. Great stuff.’ Companies such as Reuters, now joined by newcomers like Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Knight Ridder, also provide ‘financial desktop products’ such as interactive dealing services, automated matching systems for futures contracts, and information management tools. More than 90 per cent of Reuters’ revenue now comes from financial services.

Many people still think of politics, culture and economics as separate domains. In global media communication they come together. We are now familiar with the ways in which marketing permeates culture and politics. The news agencies already pioneered this more than 150 years ago, in a different age.

Standardisation

To sell to editors of different political persuasion, news had to become politically neutral, pure information, pure fact. This approach, which today is common in newspapers the world over, was gradually developed and globally propagated by the major news agencies. In a 1915 jubilee brochure, Reuters already wrote of ‘compressing news into minute globules’ (Palmer, 1998: 184). These ‘globules’ condensed news stories to their absolute essence, and at the same time used standard devices to guarantee facticity, for instance an insistence on including specific times and places and on mentioning sources for anything even remotely open to interpretation. Michael Palmer (1998) has described how Reuters imposed its standards on early twentieth-century Russia, where it had started to work with a new local news agency, Vestnik, in 1904. Regularly, Reuters chided Vestnik for filing stories which consisted ‘mainly of argumentative statements which appear to have a semiofficial character and to be intended to influence public opinion in this country’ (ibid., 182). ‘We must not be judgemental or editorialise’, they wrote. ‘Stick to the facts.’ And: ‘One of your dispatches yesterday began with “The mess persists . . .”. If such be the case, mere factual reporting should suffice. Facts without comments please.’ (ibid., 182). Vestnik, on the other hand, felt that many of Reuters’ reports were not factual, but ‘speculated about events’. ‘We abstained from communicating to you these rumours until they found realisation’, they wrote. ‘If, however, you are willing to receive from us private and totally unconfirmed rumours, we are quite prepared to supply you with them just to please you’ (ibid., 182).

In the course of the twentieth century, standardisation increased further. In the 1980s the chief editors of news agencies began to publish voluminous handbooks to prescribe company style in minute detail and they also started quality control units to reinforce their prescriptions day by day, as in this quote, where a journalist is reminded of the principles of the ‘lead paragraph’:

Those first 20 or 30 words make or break the story . . . Many media subscribers scanning wire services directories on a computer screen will decide whether to use a Reuters’ story rather than an AP or AFP story on the basis solely of the headline and first paragraph . . . The lead paragraph should . . . stand as a selfcontained story, complete with source if the subject is contentious . . . .

(ibid., 187)

Today such standardisation is second nature to working journalists the world over. When we discuss a Vietnamese newspaper in Chapter 7, we see that what went on in Russia in 1904, the process of adapting local approaches to a global ‘journalism of information’, was still going on, just a few years ago, in Hanoi.

International and national aspects

The rise of the news agencies took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, the heyday of nationalism in Europe. Nation states all started their own news agencies, and the national interests these agencies sought to protect sometimes clashed with the interests of the international agencies on which they depended. Schulze-Schneider (1998) has documented the case of Spain, where the national agency Fabra had been controlled by Havas from its inception in 1865. When Spain fought its war in Cuba in 1898, the world press was on Cuba’s side and Havas ignored the news Fabra provided. Fabra then protested and Havas eventually compromised by agreeing to distribute official Spanish statements. Later, the propagandistic role of news agencies intensified. In 1939, after the Civil War, EFE, a new Spanish agency, was started, as an instrument of the Franco regime. It made no secret of its propagandistic intentions: ‘News agencies are a powerful instrument in the task of distribution of news and influence abroad’ (ibid., 120). The Nazis had already nationalised Wolff in 1933, merging it with its competitor Telegrafisches Union, and viewing it as a key tool of National-Socialist propaganda (Wilke, 1998). America and Britain also enlisted their media in the war effort.

In the 1960s, the newly independent African countries set up their own news agencies, as well as a pan-African TV exchange. Similar agencies and exchanges were established in other parts of the world: Eurovision, Arabvision, Asiavision, Caribvision. They adopted some of the values of the ‘journalism of information’, but had other interests as well. The charter of Arabvision, for instance, states that the material it will distribute ‘shall reflect the interests of the Arab man, deepen his belief in the unity of objectives and destiny of the Arab nation, develop common trends in the Arab homeland by disseminating information on its message and potentialities, while stressing and supporting the causes of the struggle’ (quoted in Hjarvard, 1998: 212). Western journalists constantly criticise these agencies and exchanges for being under the control of governments. The majority of the political news items supplied by Asiavision from any country, complained one journalist, ‘are about the activities of the government, with a heavy dose of official visits and ceremonies. Coverage of opposition activities is rare, and in the case of some members completely absent’ (ibid., 215).

Under Communism, the news agencies of Eastern European countries were also government-controlled. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the major Western agencies moved in, further diminishing the remaining influence of local agencies. A company like Reuters now derives 25 per cent of its revenue from the former Communist countries in Eastern Europe. The Baltic states and the new states of the former Yugoslavia, however, have founded new, fervently nationalistic state media.

On the surface, most countries’ news and information media are still national. They support their countries’ national ethos and protect national interests. But below that – invisible to most newspaper readers, radio listeners and television viewers – there has been a gradual increase in the influence of the global media producers and their market-driven interests. National news agencies had never found it easy to reach out beyond their own territory and today they are in decline in many parts of the world. The exchanges that seek to provide alternatives to the agenda of the global agencies also find it difficult to keep their heads above water. The view that only private ownership and an open market can guarantee free, unbiased information is gaining ground everywhere.

The cartel of European news agencies collapsed in 1934, when the United Press Association (UPA) refused to join the cartel and began its own global operations. The other major American agency, Associated Press (AP) followed. From this moment, the major news agencies began to compete with each other, and the USA, rather than Europe, became the major player. The new global agencies that started in the late twentieth century were all American: Bloomberg, Knight Ridder, Dow Jones.

It is sometimes said, particularly by ‘local’ broadcasters, that news agencies only supply ‘raw material’, which they then ‘localise’ and ‘domesticate’. Broadcasters often refer to agency material as ‘protection’ or ‘insurance policy’ and take credit for stories they have not themselves generated (Patterson, 1998: 85). Careful content research has shown, however, that agency video material is most often used in virtually unchanged form (ibid., 85). A famous case was the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, which the BBC claimed to have brought to the attention of the world when it had in fact been filmed by a Reuters’ correspondent: ‘The power of exchange systems and TV news agencies . . . is much greater than the public generally knows or feels’ (Malik, 1992: 88).

Newer news outlets in poorer countries will be set up to run directly from material provided from the big agencies. Many will not have the facilities for extra levels of editing or presentation. So giant media corporations like Reuters and Worldwide Television News will send packages of more or less identical clips and pre-prepared scripts around the world for easy, cheap, immediate use (Patterson, 1998; Machin and Niblock, 2006).

The globalisation of American media

From the 1920s onwards, America began to take the lead, not only in the provision of news, but also in other media, so much so that, in the 1970s, a study of the political economy of the mass media could be called The Media Are American (Tunstall, 1977). Hollywood was the first breakthrough. Until 1918, most movies and movie equipment were produced in Europe. France even exported a dozen films a week to the USA (Miller et al., 2000). But in 1918 Congress passed an Act that would allow the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA) to set export prices and impose conditions on overseas sales that were not allowed at home, such as blind bidding and block booking. As a result foreign sales soon became a significant part of the film industry’s revenue. After the Second World War, America was in a position to impose quotas in Europe and gradually push local production to the margins, especially now that the Hollywood giants have become part of large conglomerates that not only produce the films, but also own multiplex cinemas, video retail outlets and cable/satellite channels everywhere in the world. By the mid- 1990s America controlled about 85 per cent of the world’s film market and even in France, which has been the only European country to retain a strong home production industry, French-language films now account for only 30 per cent of their home box office revenue (Robinson, 1995: 245).

When television came along, the USA was already well ahead of the game. All of the main television formats – news, soaps, drama, game shows and advertising – were invented in America. After the Second World War, the state-controlled public service television channels that most other countries had established gradually weakened and, one by one, gave in to the pressure of establishing commercial broadcasting. The arrival of satellite broadcasting hastened the process. Satellite TV changed what audiences expected from television, and even the strictest government-controlled television channels had to shift towards more entertainmentbased programming, as for instance in India and Egypt.

In the 1980s, satellite broadcasters, like other global corporations, began to see profit in localisation. CNN established Spanish and Hindi services, for instance, and MTV established production centres in Italy, Germany, the UK, India, Taiwan and Singapore. Hong Kong’s STAR TV, which, in 1991, had launched a satellite covering 38 nations and capturing a potential audience of 2.7 billion, soon discovered that ‘Indians do not like watching serials in Mandarin and that the Chinese react equally negatively to South Indian Malayalam songs’ (Financial Times, 17 November 1995) and started diversifying its programming. For this reason, some media theorists have argued that globalisation leads to heterogenisation rather than homogenisation (for example, Sinclair et al., 1996), and that we now live in a world characterised by ‘regional realignments and fracturings, national and ethnic separatisms, and in parallel, a proliferation of overlapping and criss-crossing media vectors which undermine a unified and singular notion of the global’ (Ang, 1994: 325).

It is true that satellite TV allowed other exporters of television programmes to enter the market, for instance Brazil in Latin America and Egypt in the Middle East. But it is also true that local as well as global television producers everywhere use American genres and formats as their ‘best practice models’ and ‘adopt Western broadcasting structures (commercialisation, management hierarchies, broadcasting schedules, etc.’ (Butcher, 2003: 16), and, everywhere, depend on adverti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: Contexts
• PART II: Discourses
• PART III: Language and image
• Conclusion
• References