Reassessing the Landscape of Transnational News Broadcasting

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Jasmin Surm, whose interest is in recent changes to global television news. The transnational TV news landscape has changed profoundly in recent times – with more highly ideological content and more overt alignment with political agendas.

Networks have transcended traditional national boundaries and are now delivering content to global audiences; this gives audiences immediate access to global events worldwide. More recent networks such as RT or CGTN are engaged in an intense struggle for ideological supremacy, pursuing explicit public diplomacy objectives, while domestic networks like Fox News are pursuing similarly ideological motives within their countries; further, regional networks like the Qatari Al Jazeera and and the Venezuelan TeleSur pursue self-declared anti-colonial and anti-imperial motives for specific regions of the world and seek to establish a distinctly regional public sphere.

There have also been Western responses to some of these networks, including for example the banning of RT and Sputnik in Europe after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, or the registration of CGTN employees as foreign agents in the US. Channels like CNN, BBC World, and Euronews have also pushed back against this new competition by highlighting their journalistic values.

There has thus been a widespread politicisation of transnational broadcasting, and am embrace of Fox News-style ideological punditry by some channels; this creates a need to reassess the landscape of transnational news broadcasting.