Chinese walk past a newspaper featuring a photo of U.S. soldiers training in the desert in Kuwait, at a news stand in Beijing. The headline reads "Every side predicts the U.S. will start war against Iraq next week." (AP Photo/Greg Baker)
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No ‘Global Village’ for News
By Bryden McGrath
BBC: The Largest Global News Network
A woman enters the British Broadcasting Corporation's Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
By Abyaz Mahmud
BBC is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world. It operates under a Royal Charter issued by the British Crown. BBC has a Wartime Broadcasting Service network which will be used in case of war that might destroy regular BBC facilities. BBC operates 59 radio stations and 39 T.V. stations and many more with associated partners around the globe. BBC generates about $9,210 million dollars/year in revenues from license fees and commercial businesses.
As the world collectively watched a U.S.-led coalition invade Iraq in 2003, many proclaimed that the world has indeed become a global village where new communication technologies give people a sense of living in a single global community. In his article “Framing the Anti-War Protests in the Global Village,” published in The International Communication Gazette, Zengjun Peng tests this idea. He investigates if people “experienced the conception, the build-up, the climax and the finale of a war far away from home” as a collective experience -- a global village. Despite the rhetoric, Peng found in his study that the invasion of Iraq was seen differently throughout the world because of national media framing.
In comparing three different national newspapers, The New York Times, The Times of the U.K., and the state-run People’s Daily of China, Peng found major differences in how Iraq war protests were covered. For instance, Peng researched the sources used by each paper in their protest stories. Both The New York Times and The Times relied on western government sources, respectively 13 percent and 25 percent, as opposed to the People’s Daily, which did not cite any western officials and relied heavily on war protesters as sources.
Overall, Peng found that each nation’s government policies and views were maintained by the three national newspapers. In light of these findings, it is difficult to imagine how a global collective memory or a global consciousness would truly involve everyone in the world. Peng’s study of national media framing, in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, provides evidence that the world may have a long way to go before a true global village is achieved.