
прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - News Analysis
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news production directly relevant for this case study and for the qualitative analysis of the structures of foreign news in general.
Constraints on Foreign News Prodeetion
Newspaper production of foreign news has three main sources: (1) national and especially transnational news agencies; (2) foreign correspondents or special envoys; and (3) self-produced background articles by editors or staff writers. Sometimes these sources are combined, either in severa! articles about the same issue or event, or integrated finto one news article written by a member of the editorial staff of the foreign desk. As we shall see in more detail later, foreign news occupies a valying proportion of the editorial space and may reach 40% to 50% of all news, depending on world region and type of newspaper. Even for those newspapers predominantly in First World countries that can afford their own correspondents in the major news centers of the world, the majority of spot news comes from the transnational news agencies. The result of the case studies reported in this chapter also confirm the well-known fact that Third World newspapers must rely nearly entirely on the transnational agencies for their foreign coverage. Since even the major newspapers of the world can afford only a- limited number of foreign correspondents and because these are located in only a few news centers, predominantly in Western countries (North America and Europe), the production of news from other parts of the world is nearly completely dominated by the news agencies. Moreover, the input of agency wires is continuous, 24 hours a day, unlike reports from the newspapers' own correspondents. This means that the agencies have a far bigger chance of capturing spot news and, thus, may beat correspondents if dispatches come in just before deadline Correspondents and editors therefore usually provide backgrounds and news analysis. Yet, even then they are constrained by the accounts of recent events provided by the agencies. Newspapers send special envoys to places of intemational news interest for major events only (typically elections, civil wars, and disasters) where they must again compete with the agencies.
This is roughly the organizational setup of foreign news production for newspapers. Rather than detailing this process, the chapter will enumerate the constraints of this framework for the contents or style of foreign news.
of Format and Content. Dependence on agency news directly implies that the only events, issues, regions, countries, or actors that are covered are those by the news agencies. This is especially true for small and regional newspapers (Hester, 1971). Agency stories, even when they provide quantitatively much more than any newspaper could publish (Schramm & Atwood, 1981; see also below), are also limited by the

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location, constraints, and points of view of their own correspondents. Moreover, because agencies must sell to many clients all over the world, their products on the one hand must be more or less standardized and on the other hand be tailor made to the wishes of their best clients, namely the Western news media. Due to a lack of competition, both format and contents of this standard product will tend to become conventionalized. Once used to this definition of international or foreign news, the client media will in turn tune their news definition to it, expect precisely such news, reproduce it, and thus confirm the dominant definition (see also, Robinson, 1981).
The Secondary Role of Writers and Correspondents. Most background articles and features of correspondents and staff writers need a spot news peg to be hung onto, and this type of news is precisely the kind supplied by the agencies. Special envoys tend to be sent primarily to "hot - spots also extensively covered by the agencies, whereas correspondents located at a few important capitals are expected to provide routine backgrounds, especially to important events, not systematic, more structural and developmental coverage of countries or world regions. Thus, correspondents' reports may fill in some details or feature interviews with local news actors, but these are only marginal in the total picture of foreign news. Their major function is opinion and comment rather than strict news production. Moreover, only the larger newspapers have enough correspondents and editorial staff to produce self-made foreign news stories about several topics each day (Batscha, 1975; Pollock, 1982).
Selection Constraints. Given the large amount of agency material coming in each day, editors must make fast choices about which stories to print and which ones to throw in the waste basket. It is well known that even across national boundaries and across different newspapers, these choices are very similar (Hirsch, 1977; Schramm & Atwood, 1981). This homogeneous nature of foreign news selection is due to a number of well-known factors. First, agency stories themselves signal which ones are important by urgency markers, length, frequency of coverage of the same event or issue, repetition among different takes of the same story, and so on. Second, newspapers editors have acquired implica values, norms, beliefs, and attitude schemata that underlie their professional routines of news selection and production. Given the same standard input data and similar organizational constraints (deadlines, budget limitations, on the job training, etc.), these cognitive schemata are very similar, even when there are variations in personal or social attitudes and ideologies. Once specific topics, issues, regions, countries or news persons are defined as important, such a definition will be selfconfirming, a well-known property of social cognition and social information

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processing (Snyder, 1981). In other words, after the news agencies, the newspapers are the major sources for the self-defined newsworthiness of events.
News Values and Foreign News Schemata. The implicit definition of the
.notion of foreign news, and especially of important foreign news, appears to be sustained also by well-known news values (Galtung & Ruge, • 1965) such as negativity, ideological and local proximity, elite countries and actors, periodicity, and so on. The assassination of Gemayel satisfies several of the§e values and is therefore widely reported. They are mentioned here because their acquisition is part of the organizational processes being discussed: They are derived from the input of agency news that is routinely dealt with by newspapers and newsmalcers. Hence, these values are not metaphysical, abstract norms, but fundamental social and cognitive constraints upon the interpretability of incoming foreign news and the selection processes of agency news, which are produced on the basis of the same set of values. Routinized, and hence effective, accomplishment of journalistic practices is not possible without such a value framework.
Of course, this does not mean that the existing framework is necessary. Others could be developed, and there are historical and social changes in prevailing frameworks. Yet, often such changes require controversy and fight, or they are brought about by sociopolitical forces from outside the media world. The discussion about the new international information order, which, among other things, stresses the importante of development news, is an example of such a political fight that may give rise to changes in fundamental news value frameworks.
Journalistic World Modela. Finally, closely related to this news value framework, are more general sociocognitive frameworks that determine the observation, the understanding, and the selection of foreign news events. For instance, as suggested earlier, comprehension by both the journalist and the reader requires the retrieval and construction of situation models and more general social scripts. This means that events that fit into well-lmown models and are instances of general knowledge scripts (e.g., about civil wars) or attitude schemata (e.g., about Communist or Arab countries) tend to be preferred. This also explains why, independent of agency or correspondent reports, editors tend to select stories about situations that are relatively well known and familiar and also why, internationally for severa] years now, the news focus has been on a limited number of "hot spots'' such as the Middle East, Central America, Poland, or South Africa. That these particular regions are focused upon during a given period is explained by the news values, e.g., negativity (civil war, violente), elite nations (the close involvement of the United States), ideological proximity (fights against com-

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munism, terrorism, or leftist organizations) and economic interests of Western countries (oil). It would be interesting to further analyze, for example, why the Western media at present pay so much attention to South Africa. Certainly it is not merely the continuing horror of apartheid, which has existed for decades without extensive international media attention. Rather, it is the violence (preferred word since "black resistance" is hardly the conceptual and stylistic form in which such actions are defined), the threat of civil war, and similar news media values that underlie the present attention.
Important is the fact that independent of the specific regions involved, there is a general cognitive framework that favors foreign news about situations that are both familiar and different from peaceful, everyday events. This framework defines the criteria of prominence (e.g., Central American news is more important than Brazilian news) and the routine selections of news: The latest news from a newsworthy region is selected nearly automatically, even when this news is hardly newsworthy according to other news values. This is one of the reasons why we keep reading about the latest events in Lebanon rather than those in Chaad, which was also a conflict region some time ago. Hence, the cognitive framework has several functions in the production of foreign news: It supplies criteria for (1) a permanently valid agenda; (2) selection and amount of coverage; and (3) intelligibility of foreign events, which may otherwise be difficult to understand because of sociocultural, geographical, or ideological distances. Finally, a limited number of topics and regions allows newspapers to send correspondents only to a few places, which happen to meet an organizational (financial) constraint.
From these few points we may conclude provisionally that the production of foreign news in the press involves a number of institutional, organizational, social, and cognitive factors, which sometimes independently, sometimes concurrently, explain the homogeneous nature of foreign news in the press. It is truly a product for mass consumption, and only a few newspapers can afford individual flavoring of this mass product. Yet, it should be remembered that this mass product of the mass media is neither produced for the masses of everyday newspaper readers nor tailor-made to the interests of world majorities. On the contrary, the same factors previously enumerated as well as sociological analysis suggest that foreign news products are basically selected according to the interests of political, military, and business elites. Indeed, most foreign news is about political, military, and economic events, and not about social and cultural events.
Journalists tend to reject such analyses with force and may provide counterexamples because many of them ignore the unconscious operation of cognitive and social control systems in their everyday activities. That is, they unintentionally underestimate the power of prevailing schemata, criteria, or

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frameworks of foreign news coverage: Occasional exceptions confirm the rules rather than debilitate them. They produce the web in which they are themselves caught. This is not necessarily a value judgment, although the analysis may be used as a foundation for further ideological and critical analysis. At this point, we only want to identify the various constraints on production processes and on the kinds, topics, amount, or style of foreign news.
Sources and Distribution of Foreign News
That international news flow is unbalanced is both true and a truism. We need only recall the well-known basic facts and then transiate these into constraints upon the structures of foreign news. The lack of balance pertains to a network of structural relations between developed, industrialized northern countries and developing southern countries: (1) news production takes place predominantly, and is controlled nearly exclusively, by organizations in a few northwestern countries; (2) this is also true of the technological and financial infrastructures of news production (satellites, communication networks, computers, cables, paper, and printing mochines); (3) foreign news is predominantly for and about the developed countries; (4) topics and interests implied by news selection and contents are predominantly western ;
(5) the same is also true for the point of view, the style, and the details of event descriptions when events in developing countries are involved; (6) the basic news values underlying news production are established and maintained by journalists of developed countries and reluctantly shared by those in developing countries since there are as yet no fundamental alternatives that can be implemented independently; (7) news about Third World events is often incomplete, biased, stereotypical, ethnocentric, and generally scarce in comparison to news about events in elite developed countries; and (8) even when news about Third World events is locally produced by Third World journalists, its final selection, distribution, and editing takes place in the news centers in the developed countries. (For details and further referentes on these points, see Schiller, 1973; Mattelart, 1979; Hamelink, 1983a).
This is merely a pardal list of various dimensions of the same overall unbalanced relationship between the North and the South, which comes clown to a fundamental imbalance in political, economic, financial, and cultural power. The transnational news agencies are the most obvious and visible agents in this international imbalance of power. They are the direct producers and distributors of international news, and we have suggested that dependence from them is most direct. Yet, the picture is much more complex. Economically speaking, the agencies are small compared to the transnational corporations that control information and communication

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hardware and software (Hamelink, 1938b). Yet, whether govemment controlled (AFP), whether controlled by national media (Reuter, AP), or whether privately owned (UPI), the transnational agencies must have objectives that are consistent with the interests of the prevailing political and economic power centers in their own countries and regions of the North. As the principal brokers of the news, they can survive only when they serve their best clients with the products that are expected from thern. The results on the nature of foreign news are obvious and already have been partly suggested.
Research Results
Empirical quantitative research abounds that supports these points. Besides the studies previously mentioned, Schramm & Atwood (1981) found that for a single day in 1977 the combined Asian wires of the Big Four agencies carry nearly a quarter vi all stories about Third World-only events (another quarter about relations between First and Third Worlds). A quarter of the total news volume (measured in amount of stories) about three quarters of the world's population is indeed, as the authers suggest, "an enormous amount of news"; but the ratio of the distribution is nevertheless 16 to 3 if stories are measured by size of population. Even this proportion says nothing about the length of the news, the prominente of the news as presented by the wires, and the kinds of news, any of each may produce further imbalances. The same holds for the nations portrayed in the news. The United States leads on all accounts, with 22%, which is more than Latin America and Africa combined.
Next on the list are the other industrialized, northem nations, such as the United Kingdom, Japan, West Germany, the USSR, and France. The United States, the most powerful country in the world both militarily and economically, gets most attention in the wires of the agencies, two of which are American. In this way U. S. domestic news (most typically statements by the president), extensively covered by the agencies, becomes international news, even when the events do not have direct relevante for other countries (Hester, 1971, 1973, 1974; Gerbner & Marvanyi, 1977). Conversely, most foreign news in the U. S. media is limited to events that involve the United States, such as Vietnam in the 1960s and Central America and the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s (Hart, 1966; Casey & Copeland, 1958; Hicks Gordon, 1974; Lent, 1977; Graber, 1984). The study by Schramm & Atwood (1981) of the various news categories as covered by the agencies on the same day in 1977, reveals the top ten categories shown in Table 2.1.
Of course, there are variations among the different agencies, variations per day or period, and especially variations in the selections made from
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TABLE 2.1 |
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Percentages of News Categories in One Day of International News of |
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the News Agencies (Asian Wires) |
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News Categories |
Total % |
Third World % |
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1. |
Foreign relations |
22.5 |
29.0 |
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2. Economic affairs |
21.0 |
18.8 |
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3. |
Domestic political |
10.4 |
43.8 |
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4. |
Military and political violence |
8.1 |
28.4 |
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5. |
Sports |
16.0 |
9.5 |
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6. |
Crime |
5.9 |
24.1 |
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7. |
Accidents and disasters |
4.6 |
31.0 |
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8. |
Science, health, education, culture |
3.9 |
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9. |
Human interest |
2.5 |
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10. Other |
5.1 |
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Source: Schramm and Atwood, 1981, p. 59-60.
stories by newspapers. But the general distribution of interest for different content categories in the wires and, for instance, 17 Asian newspapers is rather similar (see also Lent, 1976). That is, what are prominent news categories for the agencies are also prominent for the néwspapers, although newspapers will have more national and regional news. The major categories are foreign and national politics, economic affairs, sports, and political or military violence. In addition, crime and disasters account for about 10% of the news. These few categories account for inore than 85% of all news. Together, the four categories of health, science, education, and culture and arts account for only 3.9%. From this difference in news categories, both for the agencies and for the newspapers, we may make sound guesses regarding about what and for whom the news is written, and what stories have the highest chance of reaching the newspaper in the first place. From these figures the authors also conclude that Third World news as supplied by the agencies is not predominantly about "coups and earthqualces" (Rosenblum, 1981), although it is as frequent as foreign politics or economics alone (20%), and may well become relevant only in situations of crisis or civil war.
If we compare the role of the Third World in these news categories with the role of First World (or First World and Third World) news, we see that the Third World generally carries about a quarter of the stories, although economic stories are much more often about First World countries and disaster stories account for more than the quarter share. Note also that 70% of both crime and sports news is First World news. Also, 13% of the stories seem to be about First World countries only, which suggests that the Asian wires of the press agencies are selective in their news coverage: They tend to pay more attention to Asian stories, i.e., Third World stories. Indeed,

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58.2% of all Third World stories are about Asia, 7% about Latin America, 11.3% about Africa, and 23.5% about the Middle East. Thus, we may assume that the Latin America wires have more Latin American news. Yet, whatever the region, the general distribution of news categories (or story types) is very similar (see Boyd-Barret, 1980).
Contenta, Values, and Ideologies
The dependence of foreign news as supplied by the agencies and as preferred by the North-Western press is more complex than the quantitative research results previously mentioned. What cannot be read from the statistics is the way events are covered and described and how actors are qualified Ethnocentrism is more than just having more stories about one's own region or stories consistent with one's own interests.
Crucial are the subtleties of the picture sketched of developing countries and Third World actors and events. Before we begin with our study of how the world press covers a single event, let us try to enumerate a few frequently mentioned content characteristics of the ideological picture emerging from the description of Third World countries in large part of the Western press. (Apart from the studies mentioned earlier, see Mankekar, 1978, 1985).
1. Third World countries tend to be seen and described as a homogeneous block, despite vast cultural, regional, political, and ideological differences among different countries.
2.Politically, Third World countries tend to be considered primarily in terms of their deviance from Western parliamentary democracies and hence mostly as undemocratic. Possible advantages of different forms of political organization for the majority of the people in such countries are seldom recognized. Nor are the specific historical, economical, or regional causes for political deviance acknowledged, such as colonial history and its consequences, the difficulties in the build-up of new nations, levels of development, economic and cultural dependence on the West, if not the support of local political elites by Western governments and business. Comparisons with our own societies would be more just if made with our societies at a similar stage of political and economic development (e.g., in the 17th through 19th centuries).
3.Economic problems in Third World countries are primarily described as being problems for us. For example, if international debts in Third World countries have become astronomic, this news will overshadow news about other economic problems because it directly affects the rmancial position of banks. As long as they were building up these debts and our banks made fortunes, this was not news. Similarly, starvation and poverty are dealt with

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primarily in terms of what it would cost us, or how we can help instead of creating the conditions for structural change. The lack of interest for economic successes cannot be attributed simply to the general news value that prefers negative news. The economic revival in the Western world in the 1980s, especially in the United States, is practically daily front-page news.
4.Many events in the developing countries become news only when there is a First World (mostly United States) occasion, such as the visit of one of our politicians or other elite actors, the role of our business interests, or the threat to our natural resources (oil) in the early 1970s. In the 1980s this has become particularly framed in terms of threats to our people, typically in taking hostages or terrorist attacks, such as the massive news coverage about the hostages of the American embassy in Teheran, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, the attacks on U. S. embassies in Beirut and elsewhere and revenge in the form of the air strike against Libya in 1986.
5.The statistics mentioned aboye show that there is practically no interest for cultural phenomena in the Third World such as arts, science, education, and language. Cultural activities, when covered, tend to be stereotypical. A large country such as Brazil, for instance, is culturally portrayed primarily as the country of samba and carneval. Scientific progress is payed attention to when a Third World country like India appeairs to be able to join the exclusive club of nuclear weapons owners.
6.Political violence and terrorism in our own countries are often attributed to support from politically opposed Third World countries or orga-
nizations such as Libya or the PLO. The converse, political violence and terrorism in Third World countries, is not generally linked with activities or support from our own governments or organizations, even when this is the case (as with the CIA actions in Chile a decade ago and in Central America now).
7. The general interest for political unrest or coups in Third World countries, even when only in about 20% of the total agency stories, created a very special picture of developing countries. A single coup or other violent , political action in a single Third World country is described as another one of those coups in "those" countries, that is, attributed to the Third World as a whole (which have three quarters of the world population). Also, coups that are ideologically favorable for "us", i.e., those that are anticommunist, are given less and more positive attention than leftist coups, especially when they are successful revolutions (Nicaragua). Similarly, continuous oppression of whole populations is given less attention if the governments of those countries are pro-Western.
These are only a few major points of the characteristics of the news about the Third World in Western agency wires and newspaper columns

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(UNESCO, 1980; Richstad & Anderson, 1981; Righter, 1978). Although negative news about Western countries does exist, it tends to be presented as exceptional. Moreover, readers have much more neutral or positive information to construct a more balanced oyeran picture of Western countries. That is, the negativity or stereotypical nature of news about many Third World countries are not incidental but structural and, therefore, ideologically ethnocentric. The general points previously summarized also do not focus on the subtleties of ethnocentric descriptions, such as the tendency to describe Third World leaders in terms of their appearance or environment (e.g., the luxuly they live in, typically in Arab or African countries) or to disqualify their statements as rhetoric. (See Downing, 1980, for comparisons with media descriptions of minority leaders in our own countries).
Which "Freedom" of the Press? A Critical Evaluation. I have detailed some of the general characteristics of foreign news in the western press as they emerge from critical academic research of the past decade Some of these have been formulated in critical terms, meant to explicate some of the grounds for the accusation of groups of Third World countries against the imbalances in the control, distribution, and contents of world news. Such a critique, and especially the proposals that have been made to redress the inequities, have been met by much of the Western news media with a defense of the "freedom of the press." This notion is no longer primarily a defense of a basic civil right but has become an ideological banner for the defense of self-interest, lack of social responsibility, the freedom to write ethnocentrically without interference from even self-imposed and formulated codes of professional organizations, and especially of economic and cultural power. This notion of freedom is part of the heritage of 19th century economic liberalism, and implies a cultural laissez-faire, in which journalists assume they are the test judges of the social implications of their craft. No other professional group has complete control over its own media portrayal.
We have seen earlier that the analyses of the imbalance in the international flow of news reached the readers in the Western world in highly negative terms: The freedom of the press was reportedly threatened. The reasons and the facts underlying the critique leveled against the Western media was ignored, played down, or trivialized. Indeed, the very work of UNESCO was primarily identified with such attacks on the freedom of the Western press and, hence, with attacks on Western countries in general. This means that there is no informed public opinion about the backgrounds or the goals of the UNESCO debate and, hence, no effective control of the Western governments that want to regain political control in this UN body by financial blackmail. Several decades ago, when the American news agencies tried to enter the news market then controlled by British and French