BBC World News and Global Civil Society

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Lina Dencik, whose focus is on BBC World News and its implications for global civil society. Global civil society has grown out of a cosmopolitan notion that privileges public deliberation and involves non-state actors as key transformative agents, resisting and overcoming the attempt at imposing a state-based international order. In this context, the media have three main functions: providing the basis for global citizenship, global public deliberation, and global public opinion and governance. This follows a globalised liberal narrative of media.

But how does this correspond with actual developments in news narratives. BBC World News provides a useful case study here: it is one of a handful of major global news broadcasters, with a substantial audience reach and a mission to provide a global news perspective to a global audience (and yet, compared to CNN and Al Jazeera it has been underresearched so far).

Practices at BBC World News are shaped not merely by economic considerations, but by a continuous nation state-defined worldview that rests on dominant political rhetoric; it remains structured around strategically located global news bureaux, and focussed on traditional news values. This necessarily reinforces conventional political and power structures – as is demonstrated for example by the geographic coverage of BBC World News (some 20% of stories focus on continental Europe, and another 18% on the UK). Views represented on BBC World News remain mainly those of established state actors, too.

So, journalistic practices remain structured in conventional ways around established hierarchies, and global issues are framed through that lens as well. The appeal to global civil society disregards the considerable part that such power relations and territorial hegemonies still play, then; the combination of such power structures with a vision to build a global civil society perpetuates and legitimises such power imbalances. Is the answer simply a matter of ‘fixing’ the news, then, or do we need alternative conceptions of democracy and resistance?