This article charts key developments and cross-national variations in the coverage of foreign culture (i.e., classical and popular music, dance, film, literature, theater, television, and visual arts) in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. elite newspapers between 1955 and2005. Such coverage signals the awareness of foreign culture among national elites and the degree and direction of "globalization from within. " Using content analysis, we examine the degree, direction, and diversity of the international orientation of arts journalism for each country and cultural genre. Results denote how international arts and culture coverage has increased in Europe but not in the United States. Moreover, the centrality of a country in the cultural "world-system" offers a better explanation for cross-national differences in international orientation than do other country-level characteristics, such as size and cultural policy framework. Recorded and performance-based genres differ markedly in their levels of internationalization, but the effect of other genre-level characteristics, such as language dependency and capital intensiveness, is not clear. In each country, international coverage remains concentrated on a few countries, of which the United States has become the most prominent. Although the global diversity of coverage has increased, non-Western countries are still underrepresented.

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This article analyses the Danish ‘cartoon crisis’ as a transnational ‘humour scandal’. While most studies conceptualize this crisis as a controversy about free speech or international relations, this article addresses the question why the crisis was sparked by cartoons. First, the article discusses the culturally specific ‘humour regime’ in which the cartoons were embedded. Second, it analyses the power dynamics of humour.Thirdly, it discusses how the cartoon crisis added a new element to the image of Muslims as completely Other and lacking in modernity: they have no sense of humour. Analysis of this controversy as humor scandal allows us, first, to identify its ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Next, it underscores the emergence of a transnational public sphere. Finally, and most importantly, it highlights the politics of humour — a slippery, often exclusive mode of communication — in national and transnational public spheres.