Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Chapter 15
Lecture Builders
World Front Pages
Read today’s front page news from around the world:
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/
NOTES: The Newseum, a news museum run by the Freedom Forum, has a daily exhibit of 270 front
pages from 36 countries around the world. The pages can be accessed by a set of thumbnail images, a
list of the papers, or a map of the world.
SLIDE HINTS: This is the place to go for examples of international coverage of any issue.
BBC Africa
Get the latest news from Africa from the BBC:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world/africa
NOTES: This is the website that accompanies the BBC program discussed in the chapter. This site has a
wealth of stories you won’t see anywhere else in Western media. The Newseum front pages site also
has two newspapers from Tunisia in North Africa.
Simulating Covering the Iranian Revolution
The videogame 1979 Revolution: Black Friday lets you try making some of the tough choices a young
photographer might have had to make during the revolution from 1979 that overthrew the shah’s rule.
The developer of the game, who has worked on the games Max Payne and the Grand Theft Auto series,
was a young boy in Iran at the time of the revolution.
http://time.com/4364947/youre-a-photographer-covering-the-iranian-revolution-now-what-would-you-
do/
Attacks on Journalists
You can get news about freedom of the press and attacks on journalists around the world at two
main locations:
The Committee to Protect Journalists:
http://cpj.org/
Reporters Without Borders (mentioned in the Media Literacy exercise):
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
www.rsf.org/
(The organization is French, and the actual name of the group is Reporters Sans Frontieres, hence the
rsf.org website address.)
As an example of violence against journalists, Mexican newspaper editor Misael Tamayo
Hernandez was found dead in a motel room, nearly naked, his hands tied behind his back. The Chicago
Tribune’s foreign editor Hugh Dellios tells the story of how Tamayo refused to back down from writing
about corruption and drug violence, and how that refusal to censor himself probably cost him his life.
Reporters Without Borders says that nine journalists were killed in Mexico in 2006, making it the second
most dangerous country for journalists, after Iraq:
http://ralphehanson.com/blog/archive_07_01.html#011007_obits
Fighting Wars with Social Media
In the section on media in the Middle East, I write about the importance of small and social
media there. I was reminded about this in November of 2012 when I saw that Israel and Hamas were
both making extensive use of social media during their fighting then. You can read more about that
propaganda battle here:
http://www.ralphehanson.com/2012/11/18/fighting-wars-with-social-media-israel-v-hamas/
Arab Spring
When I arrived at my office on the morning of January 28, 2011, I logged into my Twitter
account. The news there was flowing fast and furious about the antigovernment rioting taking place in
Egypt—protests that would eventually lead to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.
1
American cable news networks were giving spot coverage to the story that was dominated by
commentary from American pundits.
2
National media news reporters, such as the New York Times’s
Brian Stelter (now at CNN) and NPR’s David Folkenflik, were pointing their followers to the Al Jazeera
English (AJE) website for continuous live coverage of the ongoing protests.
I immediately fired up my browser and was greeted by stunning images. AJE was showing
protesters throwing tear gas canisters back at police and hurling gasoline bombs at armored personnel
carriers, Egyptian national police being knocked down by objects thrown from the crowd, and praying
protesters being attacked with spewing fire hoses. The best Western media could do was rebroadcast Al
Jazeera’s video.
1
“Egypt’s Mubarak: End of the Great Survivor,” BBC News, February 11, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world–
middle-east-12416154.
2
Steven L. Taylor, “The Coverage of Egypt and the Fundamental Deficiencies of News in the US,” January 30,
2011, www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-coverage-of-egypt-and-the-fundamental-deficiencies-of-news-in-the-us/.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
At a time when Western networks had virtually no one available to cover Egypt, AJE had
multiple reporters on the ground and numerous video feeds coming in.
3
One of the most fascinating
discrepancies was that between an Egyptian television broadcast showing a section of Cairo at peace
and AJE video that showed sections of the city in flames. What’s more, AJE’s access was not limited to
Egypt’s capital city of Cairo. The network also had reporters on the ground in the Egyptian cities of Suez
and Alexandria.
As the protests continued, it became difficult for even Al Jazeera to report the news, as the
Egyptian government revoked the network’s license to broadcast from Egypt and pulled the
accreditation of its reporters.
4
Along with Al Jazeera, two other major sources of news about the
protests were SMS text messages and social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. Some
commentators in Western media emphasized the role of social media in the uprising, calling the protests
the “Facebook Revolt.” But it’s important to remember, as journalist Philip N. Howard points out, that
while social networks certainly helped the protesters organize and share information, it was the
protesters themselves who put their lives on the line. He wrote: “Overemphasizing the role of
information technology diminishes the personal risks that individual protesters took in heading out onto
the streets to face tear gas and rubber bullets.”
5
In his book Three Blind Mice, which is about the
American broadcast networks in transition during the 1980s and 1990s, media journalist Ken Auletta
talks about how the first Gulf War brought CNN to prominence:
It wasn’t until the war in the Persian Gulf began in January 1991 that the cable
revolution became dramatically apparent. Viewers realized that CNN, not the three
networks, was a primary source of up-to–the-minute news. And they were getting the
news the way they wanted it—instantly and without interruption from soap operas. For
as long as the war held their interest, viewers could choose for themselves when to
watch the news as easily as they could flick to an HBO movie, an ESPN basketball game,
or a Disney cartoon.
6
Unfortunately for Al Jazeera English, even the 2011 riots and protests in Egypt and the
subsequent Arab Spring protest movement were unable to bring permanent increases to the number of
American viewers. In 2013, Al Jazeera purchased former vice president Al Gore’s Current cable network
and rebranded it as Al Jazeera America, thus giving the network access to about 60% of American
households. But when that happened, cable providers carrying the new channel insisted that Al Jazeera
stop making its English-language video feed available for free online. So, although Al Jazeera America
now had more cable availability, many of the young, digitally literate viewers who viewed the channel
online were lost to the network. Ratings from the summer of 2014 showed Al Jazeera America as having
3
Alex Pareene, “Al Jazeera’s Egypt Coverage Embarrasses U.S. Cable News Channels,” Salon, January 28, 2011,
www.salon.com/2011/01/28/cable_news_egypt/.
4
“Egypt Shuts Down Al Jazeera Bureau,” Al Jazeera, January 30, 2011,
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/01/201113085252994161.html.
5
Philip N. Howard, “The Arab Spring’s Cascading Effects,” Pacific Standard, February 23, 2011,
www.psmag.com/politics/the-cascading-effects-of-the-arab-spring-28575/.
6
Ken Auletta, Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Random House, 1991), 4.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
a miniscule 17,000 viewers a night.
7
Al Jazeera America shut down in the spring of 2016, though the
news service is still active on English-language social media as AJ+
https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/?fref=ts
Tony Burman, who was the managing director of AJE in 2009, told NPR that part of the challenge
has been the lack of awareness within the United States of Al Jazeera English. Obviously, another aspect
has been the political stigma that has been attached to Al Jazeera Arabic, and a kind of assumption on
the part of some people that what they’ve heard about Al Jazeera Arabic (a) is true and (b) applies to Al
Jazeera’s English service.
8
The notion of being able to print or broadcast almost any kind of news is central to the ideal of
free speech in the United States and the democracies of the West. But just because it is legally available
doesn’t mean that a given channel will actually be available. Controls on the marketplace of ideas can
come from private industry, as well as the government. Different countries and cultures have differing
ideas as to what constitutes the proper form for the media to take. In this chapter, we look at ideals of
how the media ought to behave and how the media function in different societies around the world.
Finally, we consider what it means to live in a world with such a wide range of media.
You can see video from Al Jazeera here:
http://www.ralphehanson.com/2011/02/03/al-jazeera-arabic-carrying-video-of-police-running-over-
protesters/
7
Dean Starkman, “Al Jazeera America Struggles to Get Off the Margins,” Columbia Journalism Review, August 20,
2014, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/al_jazeera_america_struggles_t.php?page=all.