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JOURNALISM AND THE QUESTION OF CITIZENSHIP
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | Political citizenship gives the right to vote, to be represented in government, and to enjoy physical security. Democracy is conventionally said to arise and thrive in the interactions of governments and populations, with its model the French and US Revolutions. The polity is bounded by countries whose inhabitants recognize one another as political citizens, and use that status to invoke the greater good. The journalistic corollaries of political citizenship are regular reportage of domestic political affairs, with a focus on lawmakers' deliberations and judicial review; theassociated notion that representative government depends on an open press that explains social-policy issues as defined by social movements and parliamentary parties; election coverage; and a concentration on international relations in terms of local and global security. The intent is to draw citizens into a vital part of the policy process – informed public comment, dissent, and consent. I focus here on the declining US television and print coverage of foreign affairs, which I suggest has been trumped by an emphasis on economic and cultural questions. Given the expansion of US power over the last quarter of a century, it is noteworthy that TV coverage of governmental, military, and international affairs dropped from 70% of network news1 in 1977, to 60% in 1987, and 40% in 1997. In 1988, each network dedicated about 2000 minutes to international news. A decade later, the figure had halved, with about 9% of the average newscast covering anything “foreign.” Between May 2000 and August 2001, just 22% of network news was international – ten points below, for example, British and South African equivalents, and 20 points below Germany. Just 3% of US coverage addressed foreign policy. In 2000, three stories from beyond the US (apart from the Olympics) made it into the networks' 20 most-covered items. And all three were tightly linked with domestic issues: the Miami-Cuba custody dispute over Élian Gonzales, the second Intifada, and the bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen. The main broadcast networks have closed most investigative sections and foreign bureaux, other than in Israel. ABC News once maintained 17 ofces overseas. Now it has seven. CBS has one journalist covering Asia, and seven others for the rest of the world (Miller, 2006). The reaction to September 11, 2001 temporarily reversed this autotelic trend, but that catastrophe's news impact was short-lived, despite the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. And extensive content analysis discloses that September 11 saw coverage of terrorism differ very minimally from existing, narrowly-focused news norms. There was no signicant documentary investigation. A study of articles carried in US News and World Report indicates that in the seven months after September 11, explanations for the attacks focused entirely on Al Qaeda and domestic security failings, avoiding US foreign policy as an element. The New York Times was intellectually unprepared to report on the phenomenon. Because terrorism mostly occurred outside the US prior to 2001, it was not rated as newsworthy. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reportage of overseas terror took up less than 0.5% of the paper (Gerges 2003: 79, 87 n. 9; Love 2003: 248). It should come as no surprise, then, that from September 2001 to December 2002, network-news coverage of the attacks and their aftermath basically ignored a stream of relevant topics: Zionism, Afghanistan after the invasion, and US foreign policy and business interests in the Middle East (McDonald and Lawrence 2004: 336-37; Traugott and Brader 2003: 183-84, 186-87; Tyndall Report 2003). And that corporate influence pushed hard to distort the US public's knowledge of the geopolitical situation. Viacom, CNN, Fox, and Comedy Central refused to feature paid billboards and commercials against the invasion of Iraq, and UN activities in the region, including weapons inspections, were the least-covered items on network news (Hastings 2003; Huff 2003). During the occupation, General Motors – the country'sbiggest advertiser at the time – and other major corporations announced that they 'would not advertise on a TV program about atrocities in Iraq' (quoted in McCarthy 2004). And when US authorities finally admitted in January 2005 that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, only ABC made it a lead story. Fox News barely touched on the topic, and CBS and NBC relegated it to a minor item – fewer than 60 words on the nightly news. The New York Times cravenly claimed that the admission was “little noted” around the world (Whiten 2005). Clearly, US journalism has turned away from a central element of political citizenship. The country that has the greatest global impact of any nation in world history is simply not committed to informing its residents of basic geopolitical facts. |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203869468-46&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 450 |
| Page Count | 10 |
| Starting Page | 441 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780203869468-46 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2009-10-20 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism Cultural Studies New York Times Foreign Policy Network News Covered Items |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
