Moving people: Proper distance and global news coverage of migration in 2019

Abstract

Moving people comprise both a subject of news reports (of refugees, migrants and other people-on-the-move) and a way of reporting on the issues involved. Viewers can be moved and placed in a discursive relation to the displaced when news stories construct what Arendt called ‘proper distance’. This possibility is explored in the article, which compares coverage of migration issues in 2019 on four global television news channels: Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International and RT. The results provide evidence of approaches that differ in striking and thought-provoking ways, giving global television news consumers different resources for making sense of a complicated global crisis.

Reporting civilizational collapse: Research notes from a world-in-crisis

“…A quick summary review, for example, of seven of the field's leading journals' article titles and abstracts (Media, Culture and Society, European Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Global Media and Communication, Journalism Studies, Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism and Journalism Practice) found that of 2633 articles published across 3 years and 4 months (January 2019-April 2022), only 13 (0.4%) raised the compound nature of global crises or made reference to these at world or planetary level. Articles about single issues/crises, (COVID (35, 1.3%), asylum seeking and migrancy (35, 1.3%), climate change (19, 0.7%), and weather-related disasters (11, 0.4%)), invariably focused on media framing or media affordances and processes of media production in specific countries, but did not situate or seek to theorize these in global, world or planetary context (exceptionally, see : Atanasova, 2022;Borth et al, 2022;Cottle, 2019;Gutsche Jr and Pinto, 2022;Robertson and Schaetz, 2022). Studies of media and food, water and energy insecurity, biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, population growth as well as weapons of mass annihilation were notable by their complete absence.…”

“…The explanations for this generally disaggregating and dissimulating news response to planetary emergencies, even when focussing on three of its most prominent expressions, are fathomable. We know that mainstream news providers are corporate entities shaped by political economy determinants and that they operate in a field of strategic power and vested interests, and that they enact culturally prevailing world-views (Bennett, 2021; Cottle, 2006; Schudson, 2019). In more institutionally and professionally proximate terms, news agendas, story selections and framing can also be understood in relation to the operation of basic news values (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017), elite source dependencies and elite indexing (Bennett et al, 2006), and the enactments of objectivity, impartiality and balance (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007) as well as competing news epistemologies of scientific and social rationality (Cottle, 2000).…”

“…As in earlier historical times of ‘total war’, it is possible to anticipate and indeed to collectively demand that journalism better orients itself, and us, to the world and its existential demise. Journalism need not always be assumed to be historically static or intransigent to change (Carey, 1996; Schudson, 2019; Zelizer, 2017). The runaway juggernaut of late modernity (Giddens, 1990) can also give birth to its nemesis.…”