The Global News Challenge

Market Strategies of International Broadcasting Organizations in Developing Countries

Anne Geniets

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415640664
• eBook ISBN: 9781136180118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Global News Challenge tackles one of the timeliest topics in mass communication today—the challenges facing international broadcasters with universal branding strategies in developing countries. In these heavily government-controlled media environments with a scarcity of reliable information, international news providers traditionally had an influential position. With the ongoing media liberalization, however, commercial domestic providers have gained in strength to become strong competitors. Additionally, in a number of countries, pan-Arab broadcasting enterprises have widened their reach, contributing to the growing competition for traditional international providers such as the BBC or France 24.

This book employs a global perspective to explore the subject across the whole population and different media platforms in select developing markets of Africa and South Asia. It is unique in providing a theoretical framework by which to analyze demand and usage of and trust in news from international broadcasters across the whole population, not just opinion leaders. It outlines the strategic options for international broadcasters in these evolving market contexts.

1 International Broadcasting

A Strategic Challenge

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

—Quote attributed to Albert Einstein

1.1 FROM INFORMATION CRUSADE TO BUSINESS CHALLENGE: ARE WE IN AN INFORMATION WAR?

We are engaged in an information war. During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, “OK fine, enough of that, we did it, we’re done”. And, unfortunately we’re paying a big price for it. And, our private media cannot fill that gap. […] We are in an information war, and we are losing that war. I’ll be very blunt in my assessment. Al Jazeera is winning. The Chinese have opened up a global English-language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it’s quite instructive. We are cutting back. The BBC are cutting back. […] We are in an information war and we cannot assume that this youth bulge that exists not just in the Middle East but in so many parts of the world really knows much about us. I mean we think they know us and reject us. I would argue they really don’t know very much about who we are. (Hillary Clinton, Congressional Committee Hearing, 2 March 2011)

Amidst the political turmoil and popular uprisings sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East, and with severe cuts in the domestic budgets of European and American public broadcasting organizations,¹ a lively debate has unfolded about the role of international broadcasting services in developing countries and their engagement in what has been dubbed an ‘information war’. International news broadcasting organizations have traditionally enjoyed an influential position in these heavily government-controlled media environments that are characterized by a scarcity of reliable information. Against the backdrop of the social and political legacies left by imperial powers, the increasingly global dimension of trade (which has intensified since the end of the Cold War), and technological progress, some scholars have proposed that the new forces of globalization and informatization may help democratize authoritarian regimes, which must either allow a freer flow of information or risk forfeiting economic growth (Kluver 2000). Through these ongoing transformations and the liberalization of global media, commercial domestic media providers have gained in competitive strength, challenging the market dominance of state-controlled domestic broadcasters as well as international broadcasting organizations in these previously ‘closed’ markets. Additionally, in a number of countries, pan-Arab broadcasting enterprises have widened their reach and popularity, resulting in growing competition with traditional international providers such as the BBC World Service, and France 24 and Radio France Internationale. Meanwhile, new, powerful, and increasingly affluent middle classes are emerging in many developing countries, leading to changes in audience structures and demands, while simultaneously contributing to economic growth and shifts in the balance of global economic and political power. These emerging middle classes have highlighted the need for a better understanding of media consumption habits of lower and middle socioeconomic classes beyond the elites. Concurrent with the growth of these middle classes there has been an increase, in most of these markets, in the amount of young, well-educated people, who find it difficult to find employment in the current economic climate. These young people are familiar with increasingly affordable new media technologies such as the Internet and (particularly) mobile phones, which creates new patterns of media consumption. Through this improved infrastructure for and accessibility to media, audience structures and media consumption patterns in developing markets have changed profoundly over the past few decades, much like Western markets have: While in the 1970s and 1980s in the US, for example, more people watched the news than at any other time, simply because there was not much else available on TV (Prior 2007), today cable and satellite television, as well as Internet and mobile phones, offer audiences a much wider selection and more control over content than ever before, leading to increased audience expectations with regard to quality, access, and relevance (Cushion 2010). News can now be consumed around the clock and everywhere in the world where communications infrastructure permits—on TV, mobile phones, the Internet, and radio, as well as on many cross-platform applications, both at home and on-the-go, live and on-demand. As viewers and listeners across the world tune in to these different media platforms, switching between providers to get a fresh take on events, the question arises: How do changing audiences and increased competition in the developing world influence the strategies of international broadcasters?

The objective of this book is to present the findings of fieldwork I managed in 2010 in Kenya, Egypt, Senegal, India, and Pakistan in the context of the wider independent academic study International Broadcasting in Africa and South Asia: Provision, Consumption, and Trust in a Rapidly Changing Broadcasting Environment at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford,² in order to assess changes in international broadcast news consumption and audience trust, against the background of increasing competition between international broadcasting organizations and domestic providers.

The book elaborates on discussions of audience focus groups conducted in these five study countries, which represent partially free media environments that are characterized by an increasing variety of news content brought to the audiences by ever more international and domestic providers across a variety of media platforms. These findings are complemented by interviews with international broadcasting executives, as well as with additional information (e.g., annual reports) and academic research about these international broadcasting organizations. Details of the research process can be found in the Research Appendix. The study’s findings are analyzed here with regard to the business strategies of international broadcasting organizations in developing markets, media consumption patterns, and audience attitudes to trust in international broadcasters. This has been done from an entire-population standpoint, and by taking into account various political, social, economic, and technological developments globally. Questions that are examined include: Who are the main media providers in each country? What is the role of international providers (compared to domestic providers) in each market? When and why do citizens in developing countries turn to international broadcasting organizations for news? How is people’s access to news changing? And how do issues of trust affect the consumption of news from different providers? While the study upon which this book is based focused on eight specific international broadcasting organizations, namely BBC World Service and BBC World News, CNN International, Al Jazeera, CCTV News, RT (Russia Today), DW (Deutsche Welle), France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI), Voice of America (VOA) and Alhurra, the book elaborates strategic concepts that are applicable to broadcasting organizations more broadly. When these audience findings are compared to the interviews conducted with the media executives, a number of overarching themes emerge, reflecting cross-cultural consumption trends that seem to transcend local and national contexts. These include changing attitudes to trust in broadcasters; a new balance of power amongst domestic, international, and regional news providers; new forms of media consumption across platforms; and an increased consumption of news from new media platforms, particularly by new generations of media consumers. How should international broadcasting organizations respond to these trends? In particular, how should they position themselves in local contexts? Should they focus on consumer demands in specific market contexts or on the likely competition with other international providers? Should they adopt increasingly local or global strategies?

Taking a political viewpoint, some people (like Hillary Clinton in the quote above) perceive the ‘Global News Challenge’ as a ‘war of information’ between nation states; others take an economic viewpoint, understanding it simply as business competition between different broadcasters—a continuation of the tension between public and private, and domestic and international, providers.

It seems that in this increasingly crowded media environment, there has been a shift in scarcity from reliable, transparent news content provided by international broadcasters to scarcity of the attention of consumers. Yet besides these political and business dimensions, there is also a sociopolitical and cultural dimension to these changing patterns in news consumption and production. Who do media audiences trust in these increasingly competitive environments in government-controlled information ecologies? And when do people turn from domestic to international broadcasting organizations?

1.2 INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: HISTORIES AND DEFINITIONS

The necessity for international broadcasting, as well as the emergence of individual international broadcasting organizations, is deeply rooted in history and is closely linked to political circumstances and the changing balance of power. Price et al. (2008) defined international broadcasting as “a very complex combination of state-sponsored news, information, and entertainment directed at a population outside the sponsoring state’s boundaries. It has largely meant the use of electronic media by one society to shape the opinion of the people and leaders of another. It involves what was once with pride called ‘propaganda’ (Martin 1958). This function is situated within a somewhat wider rubric now known as ‘public diplomacy’” (pp. 152–153). While historical accounts of the beginning of organized international broadcasting vary, it has been suggested that its origins can be traced as far back as World War I.

International broadcasting was probably first used systematically around 1915 by the Germans, who developed a regular radio news service that was employed by several neutral countries in order to advance political and military objectives (Abshire 1976). However, because transmissions were largely confined to Morse code, it can be assumed that their impact on a wider public audience must have been very limited at that time. During the 1920s, short-wave transmissions started to grow rapidly (Headrick 1997; Berg 1999), and in 1925 the Dutch started shortwave radio transmissions to the Dutch West and East Indies,³ being the first colonial power to broadcast regularly to its colonies (McDaniel 1994). Other countries soon followed suit, including Russia, which started transmitting propaganda broadcasts to other countries in German, English, and French through Radio Moscow in 1929; France, which started broadcasting to its colonies in 1931; Belgium, which began broadcasting to the Congo in 1931; and the UK, which started broadcasting to its colonies on 19 December 1932⁴ (Wasburn 1992; Wood 1992, 1999; Briggs 1985). By the beginning of World War II, most of the imperial powers were broadcasting internationally, which helped them to maintain and strengthen their ties with their colonies. The number of international radio stations further increased during the war, and it has been suggested that the character of international radio broadcasting as we know it today developed during that time (Browne 1982). One factor that inherently shaped the original definition of ‘international broadcasting’, but which has not been assigned much significance historically, is the fact that one of the main rationales for the first international radio broadcasts was the transmission of information by colonial powers to their territories with the goal to contribute to the political integration of their empires.

The fact that not much importance has been attached to this is not surprising, as, for the most part, the histories of international broadcasting and individual international broadcasting organizations are told from a Western perspective—often by the broadcasters themselves—and thus, by the ‘senders’, but rarely by the ‘receivers’. This is where the story of this book begins. For, to understand today’s global news challenge and how it originated, we need to change the kind of thinking and the power paradigm within which the history of international broadcasting has traditionally been framed and which shaped (and still shapes) how many of us understand and define international broadcasting today. We need to take a fresh look at the historical beginnings and what followed, as well as the actors involved, from the point of view of today’s emerging balance of power, taking into account those audiences who previously have been forgotten or neglected.

In their seminal work Broadcasting in the Third World (1977), Katz and Wedell analyze the role of broadcasting for national development in developing countries. Based on field research in eleven developing countries and secondary source material from eighty others, the authors list three major goals of broadcasting: national integration, socioeconomic development, and cultural continuity and change. One of their overarching conclusions suggests that Western broadcasting—as it was in 1977—should be adapted to suit the specific political, economic, and social structures of each developing country to which it aims to broadcast. The study reflects the theoretical currents and mood of the 1970s and early 1980s in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. While the exact origins of the Cold War have been debated (Warner 1990), it had significant implications for the development of the so-called Third World. In fact, the very concept of the ‘Third World’ can be traced back to the Cold War era. Coined by the French demographer and historian of the French economy Alfred Sauvy in 1952, the term described those nations that had just emerged from the collapsed colonial empires after World War II and that were unaligned in the new division between Eastern and Western blocs (Thussu 2006). These nations stood in contrast to those of the First and the Second World, which included those nations characterized by capitalism, most notably the US, and by socialism, most notably the Soviet Union (Schiller 1991).

In this newly tiered world, concern grew among leaders of some developing nations about the Western-dominated global flow of information and the need to restructure their communication channels inherited from colonial times in order to restore a balance (Hachten 1987; Friedland 1992). These concerns about structural inequalities led to the first formal declaration expressing concerns about the global flow of communication at the Fourth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers in 1973 (Wasburn 1992; Samarajiwa 1984; Sreberny and Paterson 2004). Simultaneously, the Non-Aligned Movement, represented through the Group of 77, which had been established in 1964, began to demand greater economic representation in world institutions, leading to the formal approval of their demand for the creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 (Samarajiwa 1984). The approval of the creation of the NIEO also gave new support to the calls by the Non-Aligned Movement for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). Together with a number of other meetings, most notably in Tunis in 1976, in 1978 the UNESCO General Conference issued the Mass Media Declaration, which recognized the significance of mass media in development, and in December of the same year, the 33rd session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on the NWICO (Samarajiwa 1984; Thussu 2006). This resulted in the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems in 1979, chaired by the Irish Nobel Laureate Seán MacBride, which submitted its findings, known as the MacBride Report, to the UNESCO in 1980. The report, which voiced concern about the concentration of media ownership and the oneway flow of information, was met with considerable opposition by Western institutions and protagonists, who criticized the alleged bias of the report towards the private ownership of communication facilities and media networks (Singh and Gross 1981). While developing nations saw the report as an important milestone in the North-South dialogue, the US strongly opposed the report on grounds that it would give control over mass media to the Southern hemisphere (Harley 1984). However, as Thussu has argued (2006), it is more likely that it reflects a wider shift in policy of the time, having entered a new era of neoliberal governments under Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, that moved away from a public service view of the media, towards deregulation and privatization.

With the Eastern European uprising of 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the danger of an ideological East-West conflict on a world scale ceased to exist. Many saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower as the beginning of a new world order, dominated by Western military, political, and economical interests. Globalization, initiated by the West, became the driver of a world with increasingly strong economical interconnections (Friedland 1992). This development was supported by the rapid expansion of global satellite networks, and by the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phone networks and other technological innovations (Price et al. 2008). In this political climate, international broadcasting organizations were deployed as strategic instruments to further geopolitical nation state interests, but they also faced growing competition from private international media networks, such as CNN, as well as increasing pressure from political opponents who argued that the age of CNN and the changing balance of power had rendered international broadcasting organizations supported by governments obsolete (Price 2003). With the ideological division of the world gone, the West initially believed that the remaining centers of power, the US and the EU, now had a free hand to control world affairs. As Huntington (1993) famously argued, this resulted in a growing consciousness by many regions of the developing world of their own ethnic, cultural, and religious identity: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (Huntington 1993, p. 22).

While Huntington’s hypothesis attracted criticism within the academic community (see e.g., Fox 2005; Mungiu-Pippidi and Mindruta 2002) and a direct ‘clash of civilizations’ so far has been averted, it cannot be ignored that cultural and religious affiliations have become more pronounced in world politics, not least because of the growing numbers and sizes of diasporas worldwide. Muslim extremism and Al Qaeda’s Jihad against the US and the West have preoccupied the world since the 1990s. During the Balkan Wars, the West supported Christian Slovenia and Croatia; Arab states supplied arms and people to Bosnia; and Russia stood alongside the Slavic Serbs (Glenny 2000). For a long time, the West conceived its values as ‘universally valid’, but in reality, Western ideals, such as human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, or the separation of Church and State, differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations (Huntington 1993).

Traditionally, sharing similar editorial and organizational values, such as impartiality and press freedom, the Americans, British, Germans, Dutch, and French have dominated the international broadcasting scene, albeit while going about business in different ways. This Western ‘value hegemony’ has changed considerably with relatively ‘new’ international entrants, such as the Chinese CCTV International Channels or the Russia Today channel, which operate within different editorial value systems. The view of a cultural domination by the Western world has been further challenged by the steady rise and transformation of developing nations, such as China and India, into economic global superpowers, and by the relative economic decline of Western powers, including the US and nations of the EU, prompting leading Western political thinkers, like Ikenberry (2011) to suggest that in this new world order, former superpowers like the US are no longer in a position to succeed in pursuing an imperial project. In the light of the ascent of developing nations to being influential actors in this new emerging world order and the ever-increasing importance of information infrastructure for global trade, the concerns of information inequality of the 1970s and 1980s have gathered fresh momentum. In The New Asian Hemisphere, Mahbubani laments, “The distortions of Western power would be more widely debated, but for the fact that the West controls virtually all media organizations with a global reach. […] It is true that the individual editors and journalists working in the organizations hold themselves to high ethical and professional standards. […] Yet for all their ‘objective’ understanding and portrayal of the world, they are unable to see or understand how the rest of the world see them: as agents and instruments of Western power” (Mahbubani 2008, pp. 114–115). The creation and rapid expansion of Russian and Chinese internat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. International Broadcasting: A Strategic Challenge
• 2. Unlocking Developing Markets: Global Information and Communication Infrastructures as Gateways to Change
• 3. Strategic Environments and Media Audiences in Developing Countries: The Changing Face of Consumption of Information in Restricted Media Ecologies
• 4. Funding Streams and Missions of International Broadcasters Operating in Developing Markets
• 5. Audience Trust and Loyalties in Developing Markets: Transformations and Adaptations for International Broadcasting Organizations
• 6. International Broadcasters and National Crises—Lessons from the Arab Spring Illustrated through the Example of Egypt
• 7. Strategic Options for International Broadcasters in Developing Markets
• 8. The Global News Challenge and International Broadcasters in Developing Countries: From Surrogate Broadcasters to Global Platforms for Local Conversations
• Research Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index