Resisting Peripheral Exports: Al Jazeera's War Images on us Television

Abstract

This paper describes work that is underway to develop a framework for the analysis of media flows from periphery to centre — the phenomenon known in globalisation studies as ‘contra-flow’. The framework proposed in this paper challenges the fundamentals of current studies of peripheral exports, which arguably fail to consider Western resistance involved in the representation of peripheral networks due to the presumption that ‘contra-flow’ single-handedly supports the cultural heterogenisation paradigm. The paper suggests that this presumption is outdated, particularly in light of growing tensions in the wake of 9/11, and that ‘contraflows’ which threaten the West can promote cross-cultural polarisation beside heterogenisation. The paper argues that researchers would be in a better position to identify the general tendency of media globalisation if they began to think of periphery–centre encounters more critically through the proposed framework. To illustrate this, the paper examines the case study of US media's re-presentation of Al Jazeera's so-called ‘counter-flowing’ war reports through the proposed framework.