مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد شهروندان جهانی و دستور اخلاقی جهانی – Sage 2013

Abstract

This article provides a critical assessment of the popular notion that we are moving towards an increasingly global understanding of political community and citizenship. At the centre of this debate is a specific, although often implicit, account of media developments. Drawing on original research done on the global news network, BBC World News, this article makes the case that news practices are developing in a far more complex and contradictory way than is often implied in discourses on the global ‘turn’ in politics. Globality as understood and represented at BBC World News is a question of not only certain culturally and institutionally informed assumptions about what constitutes public interest, but also, increasingly, a question of resources and dominant political rhetoric from a few institutions of power. What is more, developments in news practices do not necessarily lead to new and challenging communicative contexts in our understanding of the world, but rather may entrench and reinforce existing power relations. These empirically informed assessments of media developments need to form a much bigger part of discussions on the ‘global shift’.

Introduction

The past two decades has seen the emergence of a central debate across different fields of inquiry on the changing nature of political space and scale in the contemporary system. No longer appropriately understood as simply an international order made up of nation-states, seemingly ubiquitous processes of globalization are changing the nature of democratization and governance that increasingly speak to a global ‘space’ of politics, not territorially defined or necessarily concerned with political representation as traditionally perceived. Rather, ‘progressive’ theories of contemporary politics have sought to find alternative understandings of political practice and legitimacy and, crucially, new definitions of political community and citizenship that encapsulate the ‘global turn’ (Chandler, 2009). These concerns are now being integrated into media and journalism studies in numerous ways by exploring not only the media’s role in this spatial shift, but also how media practices are or should be changing in response to these developments (Berglez, 2008; Castells, 2009; Chouliaraki, 2008; Cottle, 2009, 2011; Flew, 2007; Hackett and Zhao, 2005; Hafez, 2007, 2011; Robertson, 2010; Thussu, 2007; Volkmer, 2003; Wu, 2007). Recently, some of these explorations have focused on the development of ‘global journalism’ (Berglez, 2008; Cottle, 2009, 2011; Hafez, 2011; Reese, 2008), which provides a privileged position for global news broadcasters in particular. They do so because global news broadcasters are seen to be not only central to the global turn in our understanding of political space by providing resources for common images and repertoires of shared memories, but also by somehow representing the manifestation of an emerging ‘global moral order’ that can bind us as ‘global citizens’.