Cultures of Restraint and Towards an Appraisal of Non-Western News Values

ABSTRACT

Research on Western European and North American news media continues to dominate scholarship in the field of journalism studies. The remedies sought to rectify this imbalance notably include comparative studies across non-Western and Western countries using large-scale surveys or content analyses. At an epistemological level, such studies adopt—often inherently—an Enlightenment-inspired normative frame that makes the comparisons and transpositions possible. On the one hand, these normative frames are necessary placeholders to make sense of the global field of journalism considering existing hierarchies of knowledge production. On the other, such frames are untenable because they conveniently force Enlightenment-based assumptions upon non-Western cultures, which fundamentally exist in tension with those normative assumptions. Departing from such comparative studies and approaches, this article proposes the concept of “cultures of restraint” to understand non-Western journalism practices and news values in a more context-sensitive manner. We demonstrate the utility of this concept by applying it to the case of vernacular language migrant journalists in the Middle East. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, we illuminate the cultural conditions that shape the journalistic task of redefining “normative” news values, in the process challenging conventional interpretations of news and journalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-Western news values
• Global South
• De-westernizing media studies
• vernacular news cultures
• cultures of restraint
• postcolonial communication

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is a growing body of literature using cross-national comparisons to study news. See, for example, the reports produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Worlds of Journalism study (Hanitzsch et al. 2019).

2 This is especially true for vernacular media cultures, which despite being the dominant form of media culture in the Global South, are typically excluded from cross-national studies at the expense of the English-language press.

3 Following George’s (2020) argument, we consider “authoritarian” as existing on a continuum rather than as a binary (democratic/authoritarian).

4 “Culture” carries a freight of meanings in different fields such as anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology (e.g., Geertz 1973; Parsons 1972). In this article, we mainly draw from cultural studies and “area studies” to define culture (“sanskāraṁ” in the Malayalam language) broadly as a way of life (Narayan 2017; Williams 1976).

5 This fieldwork was for a larger project on the Malayalam-language press in the Middle East, of which this article is a subset.

6 The freedom of expression frame also glosses over the extensive regime of secrecy that grew in the United States in the nuclear age (Masco 2013). And yet, as Rajagopal (2019) highlighted, for communication scholars it could become a “banal description, a given aspect of ‘information’ to be puzzled over” (414).

7 Importantly, a rejection of American liberalist ideas does not prohibit non-Western nations from participating in global trade and capitalism. To the contrary, countries ranging from China to the UAE are at the forefront of global capitalism having developed their own homegrown versions of “capitalism,” which co-exist with communist or authoritarian values.

8 In the remainder of this article, we use the term the “Middle East” and the six countries constituting the Gulf Corporation Council (including the UAE) somewhat interchangeably. This is not to reduce any cross-national differences; instead, it is mainly a result of Malayali migrants imagining the Middle East more as a “borderless” geo-political region—the “Gulf”—than a collection of individual nation-states.

 

Additional information

Funding

This study received financial support from the University of Iowa and Columbia University.