Research on international media and journalism

Research on international media and journalism can approach the topic from a variety of angles. Class, nationalism and news: The BBC’s reporting of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution, (by Dave Weltman and Lee Salter in International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2011) looked at how a specific form of liberal nationalism affected ten years of the BBC’s reporting of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

In a similar way, research on international media and journalism can show how international scandals can be changed by national context. While the British media often report on the USA in a critical manner, when it reflects back to British national security, the tone can change. This research shows how in the case of the Wikileaks NSA scandal, the BBC was more concerned with an inflated fear for national security than issues of liberty and state surveillance Framing Glenn Greenwald: Hegemony and the NSA/GCHQ surveillance scandal in a news interview, International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2015.

Sometimes international media and journalism make little sense at all. In this paper the BBCs’ representation of the invasion of Iraq was analysed, showing how global news topics are interpreted on the basis of liberal nationalism in the first instance. However, sometimes the very framework of understanding means that it is almost impossible to get to the truth of the matter. As the common saying goes, truth is the first casualty of war, but what is there was not truth to begin with: Problems of news culture and truth: The BBC’s representation of the invasion of Iraq in Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2013