The Diversified Nature of “Domesticated” News Discourse

Abstract

Several studies have concluded that foreign news in national media is characterized by a national logic largely caused by so-called “domestication,” i.e. the adaptation of news from “outside” to a perceived national audience. The domesticated news discourse counteracts discursive constructions of the global, reinforcing instead nation-state discourse and identity. However, this paper argues that we need to take the search for constructions of the transnational beyond the genre of foreign news. The deterritorialized nature of today's globalized risks and crises, such as climate change, blurs the boundaries between the domestic and foreign, and renders the distinction between domestic and foreign news more or less obsolete. This, in turn, requires us to revisit the concept and practice of “domestication” using context-sensitive analytical approaches to capture its discursive constitution. Guided by the theoretical and methodological framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper aims to analyze and de-construct news discourses of “domestication” by studying the reporting on climate change in Indian, Swedish, and US newspapers. It identifies three discursive modes of domestication: (1) introverted domestication, which disconnects the domestic from the global; (2) extroverted domestication, which interconnects the domestic and the global; and (3) counter-domestication, a deterritorialized mode of reporting that lacks any domestic epicenter.

KEYWORDS:

• climate change
• critical discourse analysis
• deterritorialization
• domestication
• global journalism
• global media
• media globalization

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank my research colleague, Peter Berglez, for his invaluable advice.

Notes

1. In Swedish: Earth Hour; klimatförändring; global uppvärmning; växthuseffekt.

2. It is noteworthy that the US newspapers included in the study did not report on Earth Hour during the studied time period. However, it is beyond the scope of this article, which does not have any quantitative nor comparative aims, to take this result further.

3. “The Globe,” or in Swedish nicknamed Globen, is the national indoor arena of Sweden and located in Stockholm.