Assessing the potential of Channel NewsAsia as the next ‘Al Jazeera’: A comparative discourse analysis of Channel NewsAsia and the BBC

Abstract

In the last decade, Western news organizations such as CNN and the BBC have been increasingly upstaged by satellite news services from the global South. The Qatari news network, Al Jazeera, has emerged as a prime example of a global media contra-flow that has been able to give its region a voice in the international news arena. At a time when developments like the global economic crisis have called for greater checks and balances on Western governments and corporations, this paper takes a critical look at an increasingly prominent news player in the fast-growing developing region of East Asia, Channel NewsAsia, to ascertain if it is likely to rise up the ranks to the level of Al Jazeera. A critical discourse analysis comparing the coverage of Channel NewsAsia and the BBC’s most salient stories, however, shows that the Singapore-based station falls short in its claim to ‘provide Asian perspectives’ because it is constrained by political-economic factors to operate within an authoritarian developmental news model.

Keywords

Al Jazeera Asian perspectives authoritarian developmental model Channel NewsAsia global media contra-flows global South Singapore

Introduction

With an economic crisis in the US and Europe and the rapid rise of China, we are living in an age when global power relations are clearly in flux. Developments in the last few years have resulted in a call for greater checks and balances on the actions of Western governments and corporations, particularly following the collapse of Wall Street in 2008, the result of a grievous lack of financial regulation in the American banking sector, which plunged the world into the worst recession since the Great Depression (Detrixhe, 2011). Notably, as the world becomes increasingly interlinked, more attention has been placed on news agencies in the global South to play the role of critical observer and watchdog on the West. In particular, Qatar’s Al Jazeera news network has been hailed as a prime example of a global media contra-flow that has been able to ‘break the Western hegemony on news coverage’ (Lynch, 2006: 57) and ‘rival CNN as a recognized international source of information’ (Bahry, 2001: 91), providing perspectives that counter those of news networks in the developed West. With the trend towards the deregulation and privatization of broadcasting and telecommunication networks continuing worldwide, more such regional news networks, such as Channel NewsAsia based in Singapore, Telesur based in Venezuela and CCTV News based in China, have mushroomed in the developing world in the last decade.

While much research has been conducted on Al Jazeera’s ability to rival the Western monopoly on news, little has been done on the other stations in the global South that profess to do what Al Jazeera does for the Arab region: broadcast global events from the unique perspective of its region to the rest of the world. Having come from a broadcast journalism background in Singapore, I find it apt to base my analysis on an up-and-coming regional news station based in Singapore, Channel NewsAsia.

This station is an increasingly prominent player in the global arena – it is a news network with one of the most extensive satellite footprints in the Asian region, described by Rai and Cottle (2007: 59) as being ‘particularly noteworthy’ as it is fast gaining audiences within East Asia and beyond. It is also based in a region that has proven itself to be a significant force to be reckoned with globally, with the rise of economic powerhouses such as China and India. Interestingly, Channel NewsAsia was first set up with an organizational tagline similar to Al Jazeera’s: ‘Providing Asian Perspectives’. It will be insightful then to discover if this station is able to assert the voice of its region strongly onto the world stage as it becomes more global in reach, offering perspectives on issues that might differ from dominant Western narratives and news agendas.

I will begin this paper by highlighting the debate that has accompanied the mushrooming of regional news centres in the developing world – that is, whether these networks do form significant challenges to the Western domination of news or whether they merely sustain the status quo that privileges the West. I will then examine the reasons for Al Jazeera’s success as a global media contra-flow before detailing the setting up of its East Asian counterpart, Channel NewsAsia. To discover if Channel NewsAsia is able to rise up the ranks to become the ‘Al Jazeera’ of the East Asian region, I have chosen to conduct a critical discourse analysis, comparing the coverage of the most prominent news events broadcast on Channel NewsAsia and the British network BBC in recent years, based on four research questions. The goal is to discover if Channel NewsAsia has demonstrated its ability to challenge Western news agendas and perspectives, as Al Jazeera has, and to provide the unique ‘Asian perspective’ that it highlights in its organizational mission.

A changing global media landscape: Al Jazeera as a success story

The global media landscape has been in a state of flux since the start of the 21st century. While the West has been asserting its cultural dominance on the rest of the world through the media for decades, the debate has shifted in recent years to focus on efforts by the developing world to counter these dominant media flows from the West, thanks to the proliferation of satellite and cable television, digital technology, and the deregulation and privatization of broadcasting and telecommunication networks (Thussu, 2007). These developments have prompted the growth of more television networks that are transnational in nature, reaching out to diasporic communities that crave for homeland media content, in a bid to grow their markets and advertising revenues (Sinclair et al., 1996; Thussu, 2000). These developments have led to the establishment of regional creative centres of cultural production based in the global South that target audiences within their own regions and in the developed West (Banerjee, 2002).

This has prompted some scholars to conclude that the global media environment is no longer susceptible to Western media domination, given the increasing plurality of media players and information flows. With countries such as India, Brazil and Mexico producing and exporting their own media products worldwide, the traditional one-way flow of information from the West has been increasingly undermined, calling into question the continued relevance of the media imperialism thesis (Chadha and Kavoori, 2000; Reeves, 1993; Tracey, 1988). Since the 1960s and 1970s, proponents of this thesis have maintained that the imbalance of media flows has extended the hegemony of Western cultures and expanded the reach of corporate capitalism, subordinating the indigenous cultures of developing countries and threatening their cultural sovereignty and identity (Banerjee, 2002; Friedman, 1994; Richards and French, 2000; Schiller, 1992). The rise of global media contra-flows, therefore, may signal a buck in this trend, marking the creation of a new media landscape capable of supporting a genuine ‘global public sphere’ (Volkmer, 2003: 15).

Al Jazeera stands out as a shining example of a successful global media contra-flow. Launched in November 1996, Al Jazeera was the brainchild of the Emir of Qatar, Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, who came to power in June 1995 (Bahry, 2001). As an Arab leader open to the political and social ideas of the West, Sheikh Hamad’s ascension brought major political, economic and social reforms to the country, including a crucial development that influenced the establishment of Al Jazeera – the abolition of media censorship in Qatar in 1998 (Bahry, 2001).

Al Jazeera was established with several objectives in mind, including the desire to modernize Qatari television, to compete with London’s BBC broadcast in Arabic in the Middle East, and to project a new modern image of Qatar to the world (Bahry, 2001; Seib, 2005). Al Jazeera was primed for success for two key reasons. It was set up in a region that exercised iron-fisted controls on its media, and frustrated audiences were hungry for a station that could stand up to authoritarian Arab governments and provide a platform for dissidence and resistance. Al Jazeera was also located in a region that had become all too familiar with crises, conflicts and wars over the last few decades, with conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan keeping the region in the public eye (Zayani, 2005). Furthermore, the international impact of the political strife in the Middle East was greatly amplified because of the direct connection of these events to the world’s only superpower, the US, as witnessed by the 11 September 2001 bombings, the US’s call for a war on terror, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (Lynch, 2006). These put Al Jazeera in a unique position to directly counter assertions made by Western officials and news networks, and to present its side of the story from an opposing perspective.

Indeed, Al Jazeera has been lauded for reports that are critical of Western news agendas and perspectives which have been perpetuated by news networks such as CNN and the BBC. Al Jazeera’s editorial policy has served it well: ‘the opinion and the other opinion’. Senior editor for Al Jazeera’s website Faisal Bodi (2003) has himself said that Al Jazeera’s role is to act as ‘a corrective’ to the points of view advocated in the Western media when they ‘report propaganda as fact’, such as in their initial coverage of the Iraq war. Miles (2005: 359) describes Al Jazeera as being ‘probably less biased’ than any of the mainstream American news networks because ‘knowing it is scrutinized more rigorously than any other news station, Al Jazeera is fastidious in presenting both sides of the story’. In more recent reports of the Arab Spring, its coverage included stinging reports on the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in imposing austerity measures that continued to benefit the Western powerhouses while badly neglecting the interests of the local Arabs, resulting in massive problems in terms of unemployment, justice and security (LeVine, 2011). Similarly, on the granting of statehood to Palestine, Al Jazeera gave a critical commentary that described the opposition of the US and Israel to Palestine’s United Nations bid as ‘not just immoral’, but also ‘myopic’ (Hill, 2011).

At the same time, Al Jazeera stands out in its insistence on fostering debate about sensitive political, social, economic and even religious topics, including inter-Arab conflicts, competence of governments, sanctions on Iraq, terrorism and political scandals. In fact, it has been touted as the only satellite television service in the Arab world that covers issues related to corruption and polygamy (Hafez, 1999). The station also brings to the global arena a plethora of Arab voices. Guests on Al Jazeera’s talk shows range from Arab politicians and opposition members to communists and Islamic fundamentalists. Many of its live shows also take calls, emails and faxes from audiences to encourage open debate on issues (Bahry, 2001; Miles, 2005).

The success of Al Jazeera in countering the Western domination of news has not come without much debate, however. Scholars such as Thussu (2007) warn of the tendency to celebrate the rise of non-Western media uncritically. He argues that it is often through such organizations that Western media continue to assert their ideological frameworks through the localization of largely American content to suit local languages and cultures. This process of ‘glocalization’ co-opts the local into the dominant flows, creating cultural hybrids that are, to a large extent, still determined by and dependent on the West (Kraidy, 2005; Martín-Barbero, 1993; Robertson, 1992). An increased diversity in media flows does not necessarily signal greater democracy in choice and expression, according to Zhao and Schiller (2001). Often, it is still the interests of dominant groups that are served (Galtung, 1971). In fact, glocalization of the media may also be seen as a form of media imperialism – with the circulation of cultural hybrids, global dominant flows may be becoming more powerful as these negotiated cultural products are legitimized by unsuspecting audiences as being a more ‘acceptable outcome of globalization’, even as they reproduce Western ideologies and genres (Thussu, 2007: 28). Nematt (2004) describes this as a double bluff – that a news organization may on the surface allow for the expression of anti-Western sentiments or create an impression that it is offering a product that refutes the West, while at the same time sustaining the status quo that privileges the West, undermining the cultural sovereignty of the countries in its own region and placing them in a position of weakness.

Notably, with regard to the news content of media agencies in the global South, studies have shown that Asian news editors have traditionally relied heavily on international news agencies based in the West for their supply of news on other developing countries in Asia and beyond (Scheller, 1983; Schramm and Atwood, 1981; Szende, 1986), adopting the same standards of newsworthiness, such as the event’s novelty, credibility, visual appeal and ability to be packaged. In particular, Haentzschel and Markschies (2007: 225) note that editors and media journalists in Singapore might still be greatly influenced by news produced by foreign sources because the city-state is such an ‘industrialized information society and importer of news … [where] the inflow of news is much larger than the outflow’. To cater to a wider audience, the reporting of foreign news is considerably heavy on its radio and television stations, including Channel NewsAsia, where almost 80 per cent of its foreign news content comes from Western news agencies such as London’s Reuters and New York’s Associated Press (Haentzschel and Markschies, 2007). This calls into question the extent to which a news organization such as Channel NewsAsia might be able to act as a contra-flow to dominant news flows from the West.

With that in mind, it becomes interesting to discover what Channel NewsAsia has to offer the global audience and whether it is capable of becoming a news network like Al Jazeera, which highlights the voices and perspectives of the East Asian region. I will detail the context for the station’s establishment in the next section.

Channel NewsAsia as another ‘Al Jazeera’?: Establishing the context

Channel NewsAsia has been touted as an increasingly prominent player in the global arena – it is a news network with one of the most extensive satellite footprints in the Asian region. Fast gaining audiences within East Asia and beyond, Channel NewsAsia has been described as being ‘particularly noteworthy’, having originated from an otherwise minor Asian player in the arena of news provision, Singapore (Rai and Cottle, 2007: 59).

With the rise of economic powerhouses such as China and India, Channel NewsAsia has found itself in an enviable position. Asia as a geopolitical region in the global South has become a significant force to be reckoned with globally, be it in the political or the economic arena. Despite still being categorized as a ‘developing region’ (with the exception of Japan) by the United Nations (United Nations Statistics Division, 2012), Asia has been pinpointed as the region in the global South with the ‘greatest global diversity in patterns of social communication – from Australia to China, from North Korea to Singapore’ and has demonstrated ‘continuous progress in terms of participation in [global] communication’ (Pasquali, 2005: 297).

Set up in March 1999, Channel NewsAsia has become an increasingly prominent player in the East Asian region. It provides English-language news from Singapore to the rest of the world. Since the launch of its international satellite feed in September 2000, Channel NewsAsia has spread its reach to 24 territories across Asia, from South Asia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia to the Middle East and Australia (Channel NewsAsia, 2012). While there are plans to extend its market reach globally and expand its satellite signal to Europe and North America in the near future (Han, 2008), Channel NewsAsia still remains a predominantly regional initiative at this time, and is not as ‘global’ in its reach as the handful of dominant Western players, such as CNN, BBC, CNBC and Bloomberg TV (Rai and Cottle, 2007).

This television station is currently housed under Singapore’s largest commercial broadcaster and one of the two major media organizations in the country, the Media Corporation of Singapore, or Mediacorp. While there are plans to get this corporation publicly listed on the Singapore stock exchange (Natarajan and Hao, 2003), it is currently fully owned by Temasek Holdings, the investment arm of the Singapore government. Decisions on the editorial content and finances of the organization are made by the News Division of Mediacorp, and the organization is answerable to a board of directors who have a say in the governance of the business and its well-being (Han, 2008). Currently, the Managing Director of Channel NewsAsia runs the business and general editorial direction of the channel, while daily editorial decisions come under the purview of Channel NewsAsia’s Chief Editor. Channel NewsAsia has some 500 staff, of whom around 150 are journalists directly producing news content for the station (Han, 2008). Channel NewsAsia has correspondents based in more than a dozen countries, including China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka. The station also works with stringers or freelance journalists in the Middle East.

The company was first set up with the organizational tagline, ‘Providing Asian Perspectives’, setting out its mission to become an international voice of authority from within Asia and to present its news from an Asian perspective to the rest of the world (Channel NewsAsia, 2012). In January 2013, the station re-launched with a new organizational tagline, ‘Understand Asia’, continuing its promise to offer ‘insights from the inside’ and ‘Asian perspectives on global developments’ (Channel NewsAsia, 2013). Interestingly, the station’s top management has been cited as having difficulties defining what constitutes an ‘Asian perspective’, offering only that it is a perspective that comes from ‘knowing Asia intimately’ (Natarajan and Hao, 2003). Given the heterogeneity of the region and the diversity of the media systems present within it (Tay and George, 1996), it is hard, even among Asian countries, to reach a consensus on what this ‘Asian perspective’ might be. About a decade after its establishment, Channel NewsAsia spokesperson Han Chuan Quee (2008) attempted to sum up the definition of this concept, pointing out that Channel NewsAsia has been able to provide ‘Asian points of view to global developments’ by featuring, for example, the responses of different Asian countries to the US presidential elections in its newscasts. Aided by ‘one of the biggest networks of correspondents in Asia among television outfits’, Han (2008) states that Channel NewsAsia ultimately seeks to provide news that is ‘authoritative and relevant’ to its Asian audiences.

Hence, to discover whether Channel NewsAsia lives up to its vision of ‘providing Asian perspectives’ and offering ‘insights from the inside’, I have chosen to critically analyse the most prominent stories covered by the station in recent years, against the coverage of these same stories on a Western news network. The goal is to find out if its coverage differs significantly from the way Western news media covered the events, thereby ascertaining if Channel NewsAsia has the makings of an effective global media contra-flow that can challenge Western news narratives. Here, I will refer to the key characteristics of Al Jazeera’s news stories and use them as the basis for my research questions.

Methodology: A comparative discourse analysis

To discover the extent to which Channel NewsAsia displays the characteristics of a media contra-flow like Al Jazeera, I chose to conduct a comparative discourse analysis on the news coverage of the most salient stories broadcast on the World News bulletins of Channel NewsAsia and the British network BBC from 2009 to 2010. Two events were selected for analysis from the first half of 2009, based on the news items that were featured most prominently on both stations, that is, as top stories in the bulletins and with the highest frequency: (1) North Korea’s ballistic long-range missile test, and (2) Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

The BBC was chosen as the Western news network for comparison, as opposed to the popular CNN, since Singapore was a former British colony and would have adopted numerous journalistic best practices as part of its colonial experience. Channel NewsAsia’s spokesperson also explicitly cited the BBC as a station that the network was modelling itself after – BBC World News is the news channel with the highest audience numbers worldwide, reaching 330 million homes compared to CNN International’s 265 million (BBC Media Centre, 2012; CNN Press Room, 2011).

For my framework of analysis, I adapted Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analytical framework to examine the news discourse through elements such as the framing of the story, the language used, and the ideologies and assumptions embedded in the text (Fairclough, 1992). Here, I chose to guide my analysis with four broad research questions, using the characteristics of Al Jazeera’s news stories as my points of reference:

RQ1: Does Channel NewsAsia provide alternative perspectives to the news frames or agendas presented by the BBC?

RQ2: Does Channel NewsAsia bring up more regional (i.e. Asian) issues for discussion than the BBC?

RQ3: Does Channel NewsAsia air more Asian voices than the BBC?

RQ4: Does Channel NewsAsia have more correspondents reporting on location in Asia than the BBC?

I placed emphasis on four key aspects in my analysis: (1) story frames used, (2) issues raised, (3) voices injected, and (4) journalist locations. In particular, I noted whether Channel NewsAsia and the BBC used different frames for a story or offered different viewpoints or angles on an event. I also looked at the framing of causality in the news coverage – whether the situation in the story was defined as a problem and who was responsible for the problem, and whether the voices that asserted this were implicitly supporting dominant perspectives or certain social groups. If the story was a critical one, was the level of criticism in the story superficial or in-depth and what was it critical of? If opposing viewpoints were present within the story itself, I studied whom these voices belonged to, how much time they were given in the newscast and in which part of the story they were placed. I also scrutinized the language used in the text to see if the journalist was highlighting particular perspectives on issues over others, and from which sources these perspectives could have stemmed, through the journalist’s use of subtle rhetorical tactics in the story such as exaggeration, dramatic contrast, emotional intensity, and repetition.

Results

Story frames used

Looking first at RQ1 on story frames, it can be noted that both Channel NewsAsia and the BBC had a tendency to base their coverage on events or developments sparked off by government news conferences or announcements. For example, both stations would begin their stories with updates from the Sri Lankan government on the progress of the battle against the Tamil Tigers, or the US’s calls for North Korea to cease its nuclear programme.

On 4 February, for instance, both Channel NewsAsia and the BBC led with concerns raised by the US about North Korea’s plans to conduct a missile launch. Channel NewsAsia led with a call from the US for North Korea to ‘stop raising tensions on the peninsula’, stating that ‘both the US and Seoul are prepared for any provocation’, while the BBC led with the US’s ‘concern that North Korea could be about to carry out another missile test’ and that ‘the [US] state department says any such move would be unhelpful and provocative’.

However, Channel NewsAsia appeared more rigid than the BBC in presenting its news as straight reports of uncontentious events or issues, as laid out by official sources such as the government or well-known international organizations. For example, Channel NewsAsia’s story on the Sri Lankan conflict on 4 February was reported entirely from the point of view of the official sources, leading in first with a call from the Western powerhouses, the US and the UK, for the fighting to stop, ‘The United States and Britain are urging a temporary ceasefire between the government troops and Tamil Tiger separatists in Sri Lanka … ’, before moving on to highlight the call of the US and the UK for the Tamil Tigers to ‘surrender or risk more deaths’.

The BBC, however, while noting the role of the US and the UK as peacemakers in the Sri Lankan conflict, did not raise this point in the introduction to its piece. Instead, the BBC led with the bigger picture, ‘25 years of on–off civil war in Sri Lanka could be over in a matter of days’, before playing a reporter’s pre-packaged story on the conflict, which included a sound bite from the Sri Lankan President reiterating his confidence that they would defeat the Tamil Tigers. This was the only official source or mention of an official source used in the reporter’s package. This story took an interesting shift thereafter to focus on a call from the Sri Lankan people living in India for the Indian government to help their countrymen; Sri Lankan lawyers were staging a demonstration to urge the Indian authorities to intervene. A well-dressed lawyer in the protest was interviewed and said, ‘We request that the state government … take immediate steps to stop the genocide by the Sri Lankan government, especially by the Sri Lankan army against the Tamil people’.

The reporter then finished the packaged story by suggesting that audiences needed to be more critical of any assertions made by the Sri Lankan government that they were not harming innocent Tamil civilians, ending the story with ‘ … the President insisted that the battle was being waged with great care so as not to cause harassment to innocent Tamils, but the latest report from the UN of casualties and the use of cluster bombs, though it is not clear by whom, will do nothing to allay the growing international concern’.

Hence, while no party was blamed specifically for the plight of the Tamil civilians, this BBC story did question the dominant viewpoint asserted by the ruling group, that is, the Sri Lankan government. Unlike Channel NewsAsia’s straightforward coverage, which acted as a mouthpiece for powerful players in the West, the BBC reported from the ground and showed a rarely seen side of the conflict, gave the local people a voice, and provided insights into elements beyond the actual conflict.

Issues raised

Relating to RQ2, issues covered on Channel NewsAsia were found to be lacking in breadth and depth compared to the BBC. Fewer issues were brought into the fold for discussion, with the station steering clear of issues that had not been set out within the official parameters. Two examples clearly depicted this.

Channel NewsAsia began its story on North Korea on 27 March by stating how Japan was readying itself for the missile launch: ‘Japan has ordered its military to prepare to intercept a North Korean missile … ’ and ‘the US also deployed warships to the sea of Japan in readiness for the launch’. It included a sound bite from White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs on the US’s continued efforts at denuclearizing North Korea and ended the story by citing an upcoming meeting between senior US, Japanese and South Korean officials in Washington, DC, on this issue. Evidently then, Channel NewsAsia raised points that fell squarely within the official news line.

The BBC’s coverage on the same day, however, sought to question assertions that were made by the officials. While the story also focused on Japan’s plans to deploy missile interceptors to destroy any parts of the North Korean rocket that might land in its country and said that the ‘Japanese government is urging people here to remain calm, saying that it is unlikely that the North Korean rocket would land on its country’, the reporter noted that ‘despite the reassurance, some doubts remain, at least whether any attempt to shoot down debris would even succeed, given the difficulty of tracking its trajectory’. The story also noted that Japan, South Korea and the US were merely ‘convinced’ that North Korea would actually be testing a ballistic missile, rather than asserting more strongly that these countries had verified this information to be true – this indirectly suggested to audiences that the official news line that North Korea was about to go on a nuclear offensive was in fact still speculative. This demonstrated the BBC’s penchant for critically examining issues and concerns that might be linked to a news event, rather than regurgitating the story as dictated by the authorities.

On the Sri Lankan conflict, Channel NewsAsia’s story on 4 February was less than a minute long and was basically a straight report of the viewpoints of official sources such as the US, the UK, the European Union and the Sri Lankan President on the need to stop the conflict to prevent more civilian deaths. No analysis was given on this issue.

The BBC, however, after a packaged story on the conflict, continued its coverage by giving audiences in-depth background information on the tensions between Sri Lanka’s Tamil people and the country’s Sinhalese majority, which had been ‘simmering for centuries’. Following this overview, the BBC presented audiences with a critical debate on the responsibility of the Sri Lankan state towards the Tamil civilians, that is, it presented two completely opposing viewpoints on who was to blame for the increasing number of civilian casualties in the Sri Lankan conflict.

Its two interviewees were the Permanent Secretary of Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr Palitha Kohanna, who repeatedly made the point that the battle of the Sri Lankan government was not against the Tamil civilians, but the Tamil Tiger rebels. This assertion took the form of phrases such as ‘ … we have asked all the civilians to assemble in the no-fire zone and this is not the area into which we are firing’, and ‘ … we have had statements calling on the Tamil Tigers to let the people go but they have not heeded that call’. On whether the government was responsible for the recent bombing of a civilian hospital and for the use of cluster bombs, Kohanna kept to his line of argument, ‘I have checked with our procurement authorities … they have not procured cluster bombs, they do not have cluster bombs, and if they do not have them, they cannot use them’.

This interview was followed by another that raised the opposing viewpoint to the same issue. Interviewee Amuthu Arasan, from the British Association of Tamil Schools, asserted that the Sri Lankan government was telling a ‘blatant lie’. He pointed out that the Sri Lankan government, in 1995, had caused a mass displacement of civilians from their homes after they opened fire within the Jaffna peninsula. He added that the ‘people never wanted to move out of the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] controlled area because they felt purely very safe there’. He added that there ‘is no sign of any sort of brutality [that the Tamil Tigers were harming their own Tamil civilians], no evidence whatsoever’ and that ‘it is a blatant lie [that the Sri Lankan government is using] just to cover up, kind of to divert the attention of the international community’.

While Arasan’s assertions were not as strong and well articulated – the points in brackets in the quotes above were not included in his actual interview and had to be inferred from the transcript – the BBC’s coverage was laudable for its attempt to put forth more issues for debate, questioning the perspectives issued by official government sources. This meant that audiences could become more politically aware and better informed to generate their own questions and conclusions. This was a far cry from the report that Channel NewsAsia produced.

Voices injected

With regard to RQ3, contrary to its claims, Channel NewsAsia did not stand out in its provision of the Asian perspective in its stories, at least not based on the two most salient stories about North Korea and Sri Lanka. Channel NewsAsia’s dedication to presenting a diversity of regional voices in its broadcasts fell short of the BBC’s, which made notable attempts at presenting voices from the ground through interviews with locals, including those participating in protests and demonstrations, and brought in points of view from officials and analysts. Channel NewsAsia, however, featured little to no non-official Asian voices in its broadcasts. Only sound bites from official newsmakers were used and, even then, it is important to note that the Asian official voices were not given priority over Western ones.

For instance, on 27 March, both stations featured a story on Japan’s preparation for North Korea’s missile launch. Interestingly, while both stations focused on Japan, Channel NewsAsia chose to use an American sound bite from White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs, while the BBC used an Asian sound bite from Japan’s Defence Minister. On Channel NewsAsia, Gibbs reiterated that ‘such a launch [by North Korea] would be provocative’ and that the US ‘maintains the goal of a de-nuclearized North Korea and look[s] to working with their allies to ensure that happens’. Japan’s actions were simply paraphrased at the start of the story thus: ‘Japan has ordered its military to prepare to intercept a North Korean missile … ’. While it seemed logical that an American sound bite could be used in this story to set the stage for a later meeting that would take place in Washington, DC, on this issue, it was baffling that Channel NewsAsia did not use any Asian sound bite for the story, especially as the piece revolved largely around the response of Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The BBC, on the other hand, had its correspondent file a packaged piece straight from Tokyo. Here, the reporter gave an update on new satellite images showing progress on North Korea’s imminent launch before using a sound bite from the Japanese Defence Minister, who stated that he had ‘issued an order … to prepare to destroy any object that might fall on Japan as a result of an accident involving a flying object from North Korea’. Notably, this sound bite was worded in a non-confrontational or non-provocative manner, using words such as ‘accident’ to imply that it would not be North Korea’s intention to attack Japan, and ‘flying object’, so as not to assume that North Korea would be firing a missile, rather than a satellite, as it had claimed earlier. The use of this sound bite was important in providing insights into Japan’s stance on this matter – that it was not seeking to intimidate or challenge North Korea’s impending launch, but, rather, it wanted to protect itself and its people if something went wrong, a point that would not have been gleaned from a paraphrased version of the quote.

In addition, despite having correspondents in Japan and South Korea who had the ability to conduct first-hand interviews with citizens on the ground and gather new images from the country, Channel NewsAsia did not assign them that task.

The BBC’s coverage of North Korea’s nuclear programme on 4 February, filed by a correspondent in Seoul, featured an anti-North protest that was taking place in Seoul. It included a short interview with a well-dressed protestor who gave his take on the North’s nuclear ambitions: ‘Kim Jong Il is not satisfied with simply making threats. Now he is totally ignoring international agreements and preparing a long-range missile!’ The BBC also filmed the arrival of an American media delegation in Pyongyang, rumoured to be representatives of the new US administration, with a delegate giving a short sound bite to the camera that said, ‘No, we are not carrying any messages’.

Channel NewsAsia, on the other hand, did not include any non-official sound bites in its coverage on 4 February. Besides a sound bite from an official news conference featuring US State Department’s Deputy Spokesperson Robert Wood, it did not conduct any first-hand interviews or gather any new images from North or South Korea. Library images were used, showing North Korea’s previous missile launch, military parades and government buildings that flew the North Korean flag.

Similarly, for coverage on the Sri Lankan conflict, while the BBC opened its 4 February story with a sound bite from the Sri Lankan President reiterating his confidence that they would defeat the Tamil Tigers, it went on to show images of a demonstration by Sri Lankan lawyers in Chennai, who were calling on the authorities in India to intervene in the conflict. Here, the BBC interviewed a lawyer in the protest who was critical of the Sri Lankan authorities; he requested the Indian government to take steps to ‘stop the genocide by the Sri Lankan government’. Channel NewsAsia, on the other hand, reported the story solely from the point of the view of the official sources, the US and the UK, by highlighting their call for the Tamil Tigers to ‘surrender or risk more deaths’. No sound bites were used in this story.

Journalist locations

Looking at RQ4, despite priding itself on its extensive network of correspondents in Asia who are able to report events on location and provide unique insights, Channel NewsAsia fell short in its coverage of the North Korea and Sri Lanka stories. Of the two sets of coverage, Channel NewsAsia reported on location only once in its coverage of North Korea, conducting a short phone interview with its correspondent in Seoul. This was compared to the BBC who had correspondents reporting from Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing!

In the stations’ coverage of North Korea on 20 February, for instance, while both Channel NewsAsia and the BBC adopted the story frame of the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Asia and her concerns on North Korea, Channel NewsAsia focused purely on Clinton’s trip to South Korea and the issues that she raised there, while the BBC featured updates from her visit to South Korea in a packaged story, and on the next leg of her visit, to China, filed by a correspondent from Beijing.

As before, Channel NewsAsia took the angle of the official source, showing Clinton’s warning that ‘North Korea’s relations with the United States will not improve until it engages in dialogue with South Korea and ends its nuclear ambitions’. After an overview of the story, the anchor went on to speak to Channel NewsAsia’s Korean Bureau Chief, based in Seoul, for her assessment of the news conference involving Clinton and the South Korean Foreign Minister. The anchor’s first question was a surprisingly unfocused one, literally asking, ‘What did both of them [Clinton and the South Korean Foreign Minister] say?’ The correspondent gave more details on what was already mentioned in the lead-in, though much of it was paraphrased material from the story’s introduction. The anchor’s next question was more detailed and insightful, asking for details about an issue raised many times during the news conference by journalists – North Korea’s ‘looming leadership change’ – to which the correspondent responded, citing Clinton’s comment that it was North Korea’s current government that ‘the US would have to deal with’.

The BBC’s coverage, on the other hand, featured a pre-packaged story from its correspondent in South Korea, which led off with images of an anti-North protest held in Seoul, offering an insight into the South Korean public’s point of view before cutting to sound bites from the South Korean Foreign Minister and Clinton at the Seoul news conference. Here, the BBC correspondent, present on location, took the opportunity to weave into the story the view of the South Korean public and to collect new images from the ground, rather than just convey information about the official event.

The BBC then followed up with an interview with the station’s Beijing correspondent on Clinton’s upcoming visit to China. Here, the anchor asked questions about how the US and China might be working to alleviate the global economic crisis and Clinton’s attitude towards North Korea. In response, the Beijing correspondent offered some insightful background on China’s stance towards North Korea, stating that ‘China, over the last year and a half or so, has hardened its language; it’s been an indication that the leadership is losing patience somewhat with Pyongyang’. The correspondent was able to offer up this important insight thanks to his knowledge of the country in which he was based, for this was information that one could not have gleaned from the official news conference itself.

Thus, while Channel NewsAsia presented a relatively straight report on Clinton’s news conference in South Korea, following the official news line and using images from the conference, the BBC made better use of its reporters, using its on-location correspondents to produce a more holistic report that went beyond official sound bites to include protest images and the voices of South Koreans on their Northern neighbours, and to provide more in-depth information on Clinton’s visit to China.

Conclusion

In sum, Channel NewsAsia fell short of its promise to deliver a unique ‘Asian perspective’ on global developments, allowing a Western-based network like the BBC to outshine it even for stories that originated from its own region. Despite having correspondents in all the major cities in East Asia, Channel NewsAsia’s reports on the North Korean and Sri Lankan conflicts involved fewer Asian correspondents and fewer non-official Asian voices than the BBC’s coverage. Channel NewsAsia’s correspondents were not fully utilized to provide insights into issues of critical concern, such as the tensions between North and South Korea and the role of China in this conflict, or the possibility that the Sri Lankan government might be inflicting harm on Tamil civilians. Neither did Channel NewsAsia gather new images and opinions from people on the ground, especially when it came to protests and demonstrations. Instead, there was an over-reliance on official sources, even when correspondents were present on location to give information beyond that doled out by the authorities. These findings strongly suggest that Channel NewsAsia is adopting a more statist discourse in its news coverage, while the BBC moves beyond the official news line to include more voices of the people.

This could relate to a fundamental difference in the news models adopted by Channel NewsAsia and the BBC. The BBC, operating within a democratic capitalist framework, adopts a news model similar to the ‘Libertarian Model’ coined by Siebert et al. (1956: 3), where the media acts as a ‘partner in the search for truth’, presenting different perspectives and arguments to audiences in a free marketplace of ideas, so they may come to their own conclusions. Since the BBC is a public broadcaster in the UK, Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) ‘Democratic Corporatist Model’ is also relevant here, where the state takes on the role of promoting a free flow of information and intervenes to ensure the autonomy of the media. Channel NewsAsia’s news model, on the other hand, resembles Siebert et al.’s (1956) ‘Authoritarian Model’, where the media is used as a mouthpiece for the leadership to convey information and policies to the people. Here the media functions from the top down and the government has the right to license and censor it. This is in line with the work of other scholars such as Means (1996), Rodan (2003) and Harvey (2005), who have noted the Singapore government’s establishment of an ‘authoritarian regime’ (Rodan, 2003: 519), which views the freedom of the news media as secondary to the purposes of the elected government (Bokhorst-Heng, 2002: 560).

It is my view, however, that Channel NewsAsia’s news model could be more appropriately labelled as the ‘Authoritarian Developmental Model’ because of the government’s control over the media for the purposes of nation-building. After the city-state gained independence from the British in 1965, the Singapore government took steps to mould a ‘symbolic collective identity’ and to ultimately ‘produce and construct a nation’ (Banerjee, 2002: 525), advocating a form of development journalism that could help the government achieve its goals of social stability within its multiracial population and high economic growth for the country (Bokhorst-Heng, 2002; Latif, 1996; Richstad, 2000). To this end, laws like the Newspapers and Printing Press Act, Undesirable Publications Ordinance, and Internal Security Act were put in place to censor or ban publications that might cause misunderstandings between the people and the Singapore government and disrupt the state’s nation-building project (Bokhorst-Heng, 2002; Lee, 2005; Means, 1996).

Indeed, this has had a direct impact on the type of news stories broadcast on Channel NewsAsia. The media’s role as an apparatus of the state to disseminate information means that the station is more likely to rely on official sources for its reports than to focus on voices on the ground. In addition, the media’s role in helping the government achieve higher economic growth also means that Channel NewsAsia is unlikely to counter the perspectives of Western governments that are powerful players in the global economy. Finally, political, social and economic issues that might be deemed as ‘sensitive’ and detrimental to the Singapore government’s nation-building project are unlikely to be tabled for discussion because of the media’s need to ensure social stability and growth in the city-state. All these factors point to Channel NewsAsia’s inclination towards a statist discourse in its news coverage.

That said, I believe that an area that Channel NewsAsia could better leverage is its airing of Asian voices in its stories. For stories within the Asian region, Channel NewsAsia can aim to stand out by accessing more local voices, being the first on the scene of any developments or conflicts happening in Asia, and utilizing its Asian correspondents for more in-depth reports, leveraging their better grasp of local sensitivities and concerns. This is accomplishable, even within the political-economic framework that currently governs the workings of the station. This move might not be sufficient to mould Channel NewsAsia into East Asia’s ‘Al Jazeera’, but it will certainly help move the station one step closer to providing truly unique ‘Asian perspectives’ on global developments. For future research, a comparative study could be conducted between Channel NewsAsia and Al Jazeera on their coverage of the same events to discover if there are region-specific factors that shape their broadcasts. Additionally, research could be conducted on other emerging news organizations in East Asia to assess their ability to represent the region in the global arena, such that an ‘Al Jazeera’ might emerge in this part of the world as well.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her heartfelt gratitude to Yuezhi Zhao for her invaluable suggestions and support as the senior supervisor for her Master’s thesis at Simon Fraser University, from which this article is derived. Zhao played an integral role in guiding the organization and framing of this article. The author also thanks her supervisory committee member, Robert Hackett, and Mary Lynn Young from the University of British Columbia for their very constructive feedback on her work, and Xiaoming Hao from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University for graciously sharing his previous research. Finally, the author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions and recommendations.

Author biography

Shangyuan Wu is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, from where she also obtained her Master’s degree. Her research interests include the international political economy of communication, global journalism studies, international news flows, and comparative media analysis. Her current dissertation research critically examines the emergence of a global journalistic culture in major and emerging international news networks. She is trained in journalism and worked previously as a senior broadcast journalist in Singapore, covering the areas of politics, defence and education.

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