Foreign Nation Visibility in U.S. News Coverage

Abstract

Previous scholarship has neglected to fully explore the dynamic nature of international news flow over time. This study uses content analysis to track foreign nation visibility on a yearly basis in two major U.S. news outlets: the New York Times and NBC Nightly News . Time-series analysis is used to evaluate the influence of five contextual factors on foreign nation visibility in the news: (a) geographic proximity, (b) bilateral trade flow, (c) U.S. troop deployment, (d) GDP per capita, and (e) population. The research findings build on earlier news flow studies by adding a longitudinal dimension that has been absent from previous news "flow" scholarship.

‘I’d be proud to spend the sacred foreign aid budget on our poor pensioners’: Representations of macro aid resourcing in the Irish, UK and US print-media during the economic crisis, 2008–2011

“…This may reflect a wider trend whereby the US news-media seems to attaching a lower priority to news on 'foreign' nations (Jones et al, 2013).…”

“…With the possible exception of military importance, aid recipient countries tend to score low in the key factors enhancing visibility in US news -in a broader context where the overall visibility of foreign nations in US news-media seems to be diminishing (Jones et al, 2013).…”

“…Jones et al (2013) suggest that the following factors influence the visibility of a foreign nation in US news-media: the country's proximity and/or economic significant to America, its position within the international hierarchy of nations, and US troop deployment.…”

An Unworthy Social Movement? An Evaluation of the Media Dependence Model and the News Media Performance of theNew York Timeson Vieques

“…Important past studies have found that the "social disorder" theme tends to dominate news coverage, where themes are inter woven with chaotic and out-of-control depictions (McLeod & Hertog, 1999); that a "protest paradigm" negatively portrays and/or personalizes protesters (Schultz, 2000); strong support for the status quo and government intervention (Donohue, Tichenor, & Olien, 1995), as evidenced in the deference toward globalization policy makers and officials over that of protestors, in a way that favored elites over citizen-activists (Bennett et al, 2004); and lastly, a skirting of substantive issues that the movement is trying to bring to attention (Gitlin, 1980). Recent scholarship has also demonstrated a continuing trend of the increased importance of social movements and related news media coverage, including case-studies involving NGOs (Hunter et al, 2013); an important late-1990s and post-Cold War UPS strike (Kumar, 2007); and the long-running importance of political-economic variables on related and subsequent news coverage (Jones et al, 2013;Major, 2015).…”

Coverage of Foreign Events on US Local Television News: The 2006 Lebanon War

“…The effect of the special characteristics of a media source has generated some work on the differences among network, cable, and print news coverage of foreign events (e.g., Bennett et al 2007;Entman 2004;Iyengar et al 2009;Jones et al 2013;Mermin 1999). However, we are not aware of any study that specifically examines how local news covers foreign events and how that coverage compares to other news sources.…”