Abstract
Given the ongoing scramble to restrict cross-border flows and proclivity to look inwards, it is encouraging to find a book that asks us to think about the global and that offers resources for doing so. Not only does this volume remind us of the value of researching communication at the global level, it also sets out to address the timely problem of accounting for technological change, promising that the impact on “all aspects of global journalism” of the explosive growth of new communication technologies is “interwoven throughout the book” (p. xi). While 15 of the 22 contributors are based in the United States, some have their roots in other places (they are referred to as “representing” 12 countries), and the 17 chapters draw on an exemplary number of illustrations from and research on a broad range of states. The book is replete with information and some of the chapters offer erudite syntheses of scholarly literature in the field. Each chapter ends with a boxed set of discussion questions, some of which are quite useful. For example, the questions at the end of Chapters 5, 10, and 11 stand out as suitable for honing student skills at reading critically and analytically. The volume is described at the outset as “an all-encompassing textbook” for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on global journalism, international communication, world media systems, foreign news reporting, global communication, and media and globalization. There are a few considerations to bear in mind when using it in such settings, however.
The title of this volume, Global Journalism: Understanding World Media Systems, does not fully reflect all of its contents, as it is really only in Chapter 5, by Patric Raemy and Lea Hellmueller, that there is a clear engagement with the concept of global journalism. That chapter, however, is focused on journalist cultures rather than “world media systems,” and references to systems in the other chapters are infrequent. (The word “system” does not even have an index entry.) Some chapters have little or nothing to do with journalism, global or otherwise. For example, Chapter 17 (“Public Diplomacy and International Communication”) and Chapter 3 (“Technology’s Role in Global Journalism and Communication”) mention news but are more about how other actors than journalists communicate. Related to the problem of misleading signals sent by the title is that of conceptual confusion. Throughout the book, the term “global journalism” is used interchangeably with “media development around the world” (p. 7), “world media” (p. 11), “international news” (Chapter 2, “International News Flow in the Digital Age”), “international communication” (Chapters 3 and 17), and “foreign correspondence” (Chapter 16, “Covering International Conflicts and Crises”). Chapter 6 has global journalism in its title but otherwise refers throughout to the “mass communication industry.” While all of these phenomena are relevant to an understanding of the conditions for journalism throughout the world, they are not the same things, and the fact that few contributors clarify how their chapter’s keywords relate to the book’s central concept is an important consideration to bear in mind when assigning it to students learning to be conceptually stringent.
The editor states in the introduction that global journalism is defined in the book as “journalism produced within a specific media system, which is typically a national-level media system, embedded within a regional and global network” (p. 1). It is easy to agree that nationally rooted journalism is today “linked to the borderless nature of media production and consumption in the era of globalization” and that (citing Berglez) global journalism is elusive and hard to define. But a more extensive and problematizing discussion of the concept, its definition and operationalization, would have been welcome. An opening for such problematization is offered by Raemy and Hellmueller, who argue the case for paying more attention to “country-specific journalistic roles and focus less on the question how journalists fit to globally defined journalistic roles” (p. 64). Granted, such an argument could be thought to undermine the premise of the book. But by engaging with it, instead of calling the rose by another name, the other authors could have contributed to a richer understanding and more helpful conceptualization of the centrifugal and centripedal forces at work in the global mediascape. As the editor writes, a good theory has to be complex enough to be fruitful.
In the Introduction, Dimitrova offers a framework for the study of world media. It would have been great to see it being applied in the rest of the book, for example with contributors structuring the exposition of their topics with reference to the political, economic, technological, cultural, and journalistic factors set out in Chapter 1. As there are two sets of developments in play—one in the world of news and communication, the other in academia—it would also have been helpful had there been a clearer account of how scholarship has evolved, with distinctions throughout between historical scholarship and what is being researched today. The chapters are rather uneven in that respect. How do we know what we know about global journalism, and how has our thinking been changed by the incorporation of perspectives from non-Western settings? The importance of such perspectives is highlighted at the outset, quite rightly, and yet the literature cited by the authors, however many countries they “represent,” is overwhelmingly in English. (Chapter 13, “Media in Latin America,” and Chapter 15, “International and National News Agencies,” are exceptions.) A quick fix to the problem of uneven structure would have been to make the summary sections at the end of each chapter more uniform in terms of content (some are summaries, some are not; some introduce new information, some do not; some are comprehensive, some are a few lines long) and by reminding the reader what the chapter has to do with global journalism. Still, by presenting conceptual and empirical resources suited to the job of unpacking the phenomenon, this book can be considered a well-filled toolbox.
