Abstract
Two core concepts in contemporary studies of communication intersect in Alexa Robertson’s Mediated Cosmopolitanism. The author uses the television news as a ‘venue’ for exploring how broadcasting mediates societal understanding of diversity and complexity in a globalizing world; to what extent and under what conditions, she asks, does the everyday world of television news present a more cosmopolitan rather than a series of repetitive parochial takes on contemporary world issues?
Robertson, a student of Ulf Hannerz, recognizes the importance of Hannerz’s role in her work, both as a personal mentor, and as a researcher anxious to build an empirical corpus in which ideas of globalization and cosmopolitanism could be tested. Cosmopolitanism is presented as a series of contesting conceptualizations, vitally implicated in current debates about the global world and the relationships between its peoples, yet also as likely to obfuscate as to illuminate the nature of the underlying dynamics.
It is not simply the ambiguity of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ that confuses audiences (Jakubowicz, 2011), but rather the political punch it has pulled and does now pull in underpinning a programmatic response to national and international crises. To what extent, we may well ask, does the debate about cosmopolitanism focus on the sentiments of European and North American protagonists seeking to ‘organize the diversity’, as Hannerz would have it (1990: 239), of contemporary Western modernity? How does it deal with the ‘global South’, and the multiple other modernities generated in the regions outside the dominant hegemons and their once colonized offspring?
Robertson identifies similar problems with the core idea, and then seeks to provide an integrated synthesis in which the cultural and the political coalesce. She opts for ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’, in which the individual’s vision of the world is transformed and her location in space moves from the absolute to the relative, dependent for insight on interaction with a diverse range of Others. Here television becomes the medium through which the relations of local and global are mediated for audiences; the ‘talent’ to whom events happen and on whom they impact have little, if any, role to play, and their lives (and more often deaths) appear momentarily, then pass on.
The book then focuses effectively on three case studies (the eastern expansion of the European Union, the 2004 tsunami and the 60-year anniversary of the Normandy landings), each of which has been a major ‘cause célèbre’ in global affairs, and has therefore invaded the domestic viewing space of millions. Yet whose world is to be reported, and on what terms, using what reference frames and to what effect? The reporting of the world sets the framework for the later interpretation of the cases, through an examination of six European/global news services – including those of Germany, the UK and Sweden. Robertson argues that the mode of address differs from service to service: the British talked down to their audiences from the position of the decision-taking elites; the Germans spoke to their audiences seeking to explain and elucidate the issues in a pedagogical form; while the Swedes, she suggests, positioned themselves beside their audiences, often asking the same sort of ‘stupid questions’ that the person in the street might pose.
However, when the question of the ‘cosmopolitan-ness’ of the broadcaster was interrogated in relation to the European Union issue, through examining the two elements of non-national news and the importance or intersect of non-national news with national interest, the BBC World News was ranked far ahead of the others, with Swedish domestic programming being the most parochial. As Europe prepared for the entry of the former Soviet-bloc states in May 2004, journalists were asked to reflect on what they said and how they said it in relation to these events. Foreign correspondents emerged as key supporters of ‘expansion’ and globalization, whose central role in mediating world events took place through a process of ‘cosmopolitan imagination’. That is, the shared narratives of journalists in all services played a key role in framing for audiences the responses they should take to major international events, such as a ‘growing Europe’.
The second case study concerns the 2004 tsunami that struck Asian coasts and had immediate ramifications for Europe – thousands of European tourists were killed, the largest group from Sweden, one of the research foci of the book. How do the maps of tragedy relate to the maps of meaning in different countries? As Galtung and Ruge (1965) demonstrated in their study of international news in the 1960s, the reporting of global events reflects the salience of events for the domestic audiences – criteria include whether same-country nationals were involved, how distant is the country, and the importance of the country to the audience. This fairly crude barometer retains its importance, as the tsunami case study reveals that metropolitan countries tended to focus more on places where their nationals were in danger, as against locations where the greatest damage or loss of life took place to non-nationals, especially Asians (except once more BBC World News – which could be seen as not having a domestic audience).
War remains a staple of international news, its gritty images of conflict and violence an apparently irresistible lure for audiences drawn to and simultaneously repulsed by the emotions of arousal and fear. The third case study focuses on the ‘mediated memory’ of the Normandy landings of 1944, and the relations of Germans and French then and now. There is more than a suggestion that the national narratives of the celebration time (2004) had specific relevance to the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East. British TV told of the liberation of Europe by invading heroes. German TV saw the D-Day moment as the ‘beginning of modern Germany’ and its place in the new Europe.
Robertson argues that the most important capacities of TV relate to its ability to sustain and reinforce communal ‘memory’, thus keeping alive the past, and its capacity to engage with the immediate, thus opening up a sense of participatory empathy. In part, then, the likelihood of a cosmopolitan orientation to the world, the opening up to the Other, depends on access to particular avenues of information, offered through quite specific narrative structures. Journalists appear to be ‘somewhat’ aware of this dynamic, though defending their choices that appear to ignore it by adopting a rationale of professional disengagement.
At its heart Robertson’s argument comes to this: the globalization of news takes place within broad national histories of reporting and responding to issues; these pre-date the appearance of any individual journalist on the scene. Such pathways may be pre-set, but do not finally determine how effectively stories may communicate across time and space; this last hurdle reflects the news culture of the broadcaster, the self-reflective awareness of the journalist, and the willingness of the journalist to recognize that they ‘see what they see’, and for their audiences what is known is what they are shown.
While the book captures in its empirical detail many of the nuances of the struggle over meaning-making that emerge in a brief and transient flare on television screens in European homes, its value more generally lies in the testing it gives to the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’. We emerge with a clearer sense of the use and limitations of the term as part of a theoretical framework, and a political orientation for engaging with contemporary concerns.