Communication and International Relations

Lisa Ling talks with Anderson Cooper on CNN during a vigil for her sister Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two American journalists who were detained by North Korean officials in March for illegal entry into North Korea. (AP Photo/David Zentz)

In 2003, professors Steven Livingston and Lance Bennett conducted a study to determine whether technology advancements had given journalists an opportunity to step out of traditional gatekeeping practices in the industry when it comes to reporting on international political affairs. The article, “Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News: Is Technology Altering the Construction of News?”, published in Political Communication, describes how the ‘new’ technologies of the 1990s, in such forms as live feeds and videophones, changed the way international political events had been previously covered. But the authors asked: Does technology change the government-media power dynamic?

The authors discuss how international political reporting has transformed significantly since the beginning of TV news in the 1950s, when networks relied on information direct from government officials to inform the public. Today’s technology, in theory, allows journalists to exert more control over the framing of issues, rather than relying on officials in “highly managed institutional settings.” Such is the case of Ashleigh Banfield, an MSNBC reporter who presented a nightly newscast live via videophone from Afghanistan. Rather than filming the formal goings-on of public officials concerning the war in Afghanistan, Banfield stood “inside the story” as she reported live from the war zone, showing the public exactly what was going on, rather than telling them.

To determine just how much more control of the media frame technology has given journalists, a sample of 1,200 transcripts, spanning eight years of CNN international affairs coverage from 1994 to 2001, was examined. Four variables were taken into account. Yet, despite an undoubted increase in reporter-driven live stories, results indicated that, overall, reporters still mostly rely on official sources for news cues and frames. While the new technologies of the past decase had changed the processes of new gathering and dissemination, they hadn’t done much to change the media-government relationship.

One must wonder, however, if this study were to be conducted today -- considering the dramatic rise of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube and explosion of citizen-journalist-provided stories — would the results be different?

Media as National Citizen

Covering International Politics in a Technological Era