A global media informed by U.S. political interests

In "Google Earth and the nation state: Sovereignty in the age of new media," Sangeet Kumar contends that new media entities pose a threat to national sovereignty because of their "borderless" nature and resistance to state regulation. Though he focuses his analysis on Google, I can see how his concerns can be extended to Twitter and Facebook in the future. With Last Moyo's analysis of CNN and Xinhua's coverage of the Tibetan crisis as an example, I argue that global new media entities do pose a challenge to national sovereignty but only to the extent that they spread the economic and social norms of a neoliberal world order.

Moyo's case study shows how media entities inevitably reflect the values and interests of their targeted national audiences. He shows how CNN constructed the Tibetan crisis as a struggle for cultural autonomy from an authoritarian Chinese regime. In portraying the Tibetan protests as "legitimate dissent," CNN examined China's human rights abuses against western notions of freedom and human rights. In selectively approaching this conflict rather than the Palestinian or other US-involved conflicts from a human rights angle, CNN failed to point out the hypocrisy of the United States' condemnation of China. The resulting news product also failed to bring out the complexities of the situation, including the plurality of Tibetans' demands and the historical context of Chinese and Tibetan views. Chinese-sponsored Xinhua, on the other hand, delegitimized the Tibetan protesters by portraying them as a western-backed threat to Chinese unity and economic dominance.

The CNN narrative, Moyo says, was the inevitable result of neoliberal policies and discourse that allow for western dominance of the global financial and political landscape. The Xinhua narrative, however, was the result of the Chinese seeing international narratives as unfair and threatening to national unity.

While media entities like CNN and Google do pose a threat to national sovereignty through their resistance to national regulatory bodies, when countries like China and India recognize the threat they pose to imagined national unity, they either develop a counter narrative--like Xinhua--or coerce the media into cooperation--like India. The power a nation has to do this will largely depend on the whether the market forces at work can effectively persuade media entities to oblige. China's response to international media through Xinhua reflects a strong resistance to becoming a subject of the new global media.

As media entities gain momentum, the nation state may have to decide whether to develop a counter narrative and risk being seen as a stubborn "rogue" state in the growing cultural and political consensus, or to negotiate with these forces.

References

Kumar, Sangeet. “Google Earth and the Nation State — Global Media and Communication.” Global Media and Communication. SAGE, Aug. 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2011. .

Moyo, Last. “The Global Citizen and the International Media : A Comparative Analysis of CNN and Xinhua’s Coverage of the Tibetan Crisis.” International Communication Gazette. SAGE, Mar. 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2011. .