Media globalization and the journalism that goes with it—if stated in media-centric, global village terms—can be easily debunked. We will continue to find strong resilience in world communities favoring the local and familiar against the external and unusual.
Transnational media and programs will be slow to develop and international journalism resistant to cosmopolitanism. But the seeming sameness of these familiar patterns, preferences, and institutions conceals the changes surely underway in the face of the globalization process. The same goes for the national containers, making it important to get below the level of these traditional systems to find out what is going on in subnational and subcultural spaces. Thus, on the institutional surface, perhaps,
it may seem that globalization has not yielded much systemic change for journalism. Taking the network level of analysis, however, encompasses the burgeoning connections to media, among media, and among the people involved with them to better account for life in a globalized world.
Journalism has been deeply affected by the process of cultural globalization, in a far more complicated way than the early simplistic predictions would indicate. From citizen-based to corporate mainstream journalism, a proliferation of local projects has taken place around the world, even while forces of homogenization have provoked overblown and dark projections of capitalist media domination. But it is not enough to simply go country-by-country to observe the interesting ways journalism has adapted to change; the whole interest in globalization for many lies in its possibilities for adding some new transnational logic to existing cultural and national communities, and we hope that when applied to journalism this will be a more emancipatory than repressive impulse. We still need empirical work to examine these changes, but that will be a multilayered project.
Under the globalization suite, the media role often seems like an afterthought, a residual category of social change, or a self-evident symbol of the global era. It should act justified like its alpha-numeric structure.
To bargain wrong, isn’t respect!
