MEDIATING GLOBAL IMAGINARY

Abstract

This article addresses the role of journalism in the construction and mediation of global imaginary. I suggest that the notion of global journalism helps us understand how the image of an interconnected world becomes embedded in the news. The operation of global journalism is illustrated with a qualitative content analysis of the coverage of President Obama's “Address to the Muslim World” in quality British, German and Spanish newspapers. The analysis examines how the newspapers make sense of the President's lecture in Cairo as a transnational news event by evaluating it against the political and historical background of the Middle East conflict and the contentious intercultural relations between “the Muslim world” and “the West”. Based on the analysis, I argue that the Western European newspapers craft a strikingly unified narrative of the Cairo event. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of transnational news narratives and on the relevance of global imaginary in journalism.

Keywords:

• domestication
• globalisation
• social imaginary
• transnational news event

Notes

1. Video and transcript of the speech is available at the White House website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09 (accessed 24 April 2011).

2. Only those online articles, which did not appear in the print version of the newspaper, were included in the material. Overall, 41 out of the 150 analysed articles were published online only.

3. The uncovered story elements have some similarities with the frames in frames analysis, when frames are understood as promoting a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and treatment recommendation (Entman, 1993, p. 52). However, whereas the concept of a frame refers to latent meaning structures and broad cultural discourses (Reese, 2007; Van Gorp, 2007), what I call the story elements in this analysis operate on a rather manifest and more precise level of description and argumentation. In this sense, the two general storylines found in the material—the Middle East conflict and the cultural conflict between the West and the Muslim world—could perhaps be called frames, and the rest of the story elements could be seen as the particular claims and interpretations made within those frames (i.e. arguments for instance about the US or Israel policies being the primary causes for the current conflicts). In this case study I concentrated more on the level of explicit arguments and less on the latent and partly unconscious level of framing.

4. Not all issues and themes in the coverage could be included within these story elements. For instance, some reports about Cairo preparing for Obama's visit, descriptions of the Egyptian national political situation, or accounts of the talks between Obama and Chancellor Merkel, did not fit the two main storylines about the intercultural relations and the Middle East conflict.

5. While Berglez focuses on individual news articles as examples of global journalism, in this case I address the coverage of the Cairo speech in each of the analysed newspapers as a whole.

6. This common European narrative may be interpreted as a counterpart to the shared perspective of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict found in the US press (Zelizer et al., 2002; see also Goldfarb, 2001).