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Global Cities, Print News and Globalization
By CHRIS EBERHARDT		      

 

Chris Eberhardt is a second year graduate student in Sociology from Tacoma, Washington, focusing on comparative-historical and political sociology.

  


“After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last year, American newspaper editors acknowledged their responsibility for some of the shock the attacks caused. They, along with magazine editors and broadcast executives, had failed to provide coverage that might have forewarned Americans of the intense hostility the country faced from militant Islamic extremists and of the threats posed by international terrorism.
They had failed as well, many editors agreed, in meeting a broader journalistic responsibility – persuading people to read what they needed to know and understand about the world even as globalization tightened the ties Americans have with countries once regarded as remote and foreign.” (Parks 2002).

Today there is a great deal of discussion about the world becoming more interconnected through globalization. As the opening quote indicates, since the hijackings of September 11th, 2001 the steady decline of international news coverage has begun to reverse course (Shanor 2003, 6). In some respects the U.S. is returning to the kind of worldview held during the Cold War when attention was constantly directed towards the world outside. After World War II and through the beginning of the Cold War international news coverage was strong. But since the Cold War began to wane and corporate belt-tightening increased, international coverage had been in steady decline - until September 2001. This brings us to the end of the quote, looking at globalization and the United States. This brief project is a continuation of earlier research looking at the current landscape of international news coverage in U.S. newspapers. My earlier research looked at coverage in the different regions of the country examining the San Diego Union Tribune, Seattle Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and New York Times. It was clearly demonstrated that the New York Times had the greatest quantity and level of diversity in international news of the five newspapers studied. The current project was to take a different approach, to focus on the three global cities, and to see if, as opposed to the earlier papers examined, all three of the global cities’ primary newspapers worked as solid resources for international news. In the United States there are three global cities, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, that have their similarities and differences (Abu-Lughod 1999, 1). In part influenced by the work of Manuel Castells and his concept of network society, this project explored if all three of the U.S.’s global nodes can connect a person with the global community, through the level of coverage of international news in each city's respective primary newspaper.


But why examine the amount of international news coverage in newspapers, a news source with consistently declining readership (Newspaper Association of America Readership Statistics)? Many definitions of globalization include a perspective of a world that is more interconnected, and that is thus seen as smaller than before. From this perspective, in order for the individual to feel interconnected in some way to all regions of the world, it is necessary for the individual to know about the world. The newspaper examinations were conducted to see if someone in the United States can consistently learn about all regions of the world, a step necessary for seeing the world as one interconnected place, through these particular sources. In this way this project is examining the global in a local context, i.e. from a local perspective, because all news articles were in a tangible paper form to be locally obtained and read. The papers examined were the Los Angeles Times (Monday Nov.8 - Sunday Nov.14), the Chicago Tribune (Monday Nov.15-Saturday Nov.20) and the New York Times (Thursday Nov. 18- Nov. 24). Physical newspapers were referenced in the public libraries of Tacoma and Seattle, Washington and New York University’s Bobst Library. An attempt was made to look at seven issues of each paper, to see how many countries are covered in the span of a week. I was able to successfully look at seven copies of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, but only six for the Chicago Tribune, due to library limitations. Although I was looking at these newspapers in Washington and New York, the bulk of readers for these newspapers are in their respective metropolitan areas, situating them within a specific locale in the United States. Although some variation does exist. According to Patty Wetli, the Communications contact for the Chicago Tribune, 90% of readership is within a nine county Chicagoland metropolitan area for the Tribune (Wetli, 2004). Similarly ninety-five percent of the Los Angeles Times’ daily circulation is within the six county Los Angeles DMA (“Los Angeles Times Media Kit”, 2005). But in the case of the New York Times, only 55% of daily readership is within the New York DMA ( “New York Times Media Kit” 2005).


Briefly I’ll touch on my methodology. Notes were compiled about articles that had an international dateline that did not directly have to do with the U.S. led military action in Iraq or Afghanistan and Pakistan. It became a bit grey at times, which to include and which to exclude, when it came to Iraq. This was particularly the case in terms of articles datelined in Europe discussing the forgiveness of Iraqi debts and the future of Iraq. Such an omission of a particular group of articles is not unusual for studies of international news because of the distorted spike that can be caused by certain stories. By avoiding the U.S.-led military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it becomes somewhat easier to look at articles where the U.S. connection is not so blatant. The use of the dateline for classifying the subject of articles has its limitations, one example being Chile in the New York Times [see below]. But the dateline can also reflect the operation of a given newspaper. Scanning over the headlines from the articles examined, brief content analysis was also performed, dividing the articles into the following five categories: war/genocide, economic, cultural/scientific, political, crime. The sources of the articles were also taken into consideration when available, i.e. L.A. Times wire, AP, or Reuters. Following is a brief synopsis on the findings of the three newspaper examinations and a discussion of relevant material.

 

Findings


For one reason or another there is often an association between the size of a city or metropolitan area and the scope of its newspaper coverage. In the case of Chicago, the smallest city of the three, the Chicago Tribune clearly had the least international news coverage of the three newspapers. I wanted to quickly remind the reader that only six days of coverage were included, a Sunday edition being unavailable. All together there was a total of thirty-four articles in the six copies. If I were to go by an average of articles per day, I would assume that even if I had included a Sunday edition, the number of international news articles would have been no more than forty or forty-one. Looking at the sources of the articles, unlike with the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the majority of the Tribune articles are not by staff writers. The primary source for articles was the AP, followed by Tribune news services. Of the thirty Tribune articles, staff members wrote ten, with some writers producing more than one story.

 

Chicago Tribune Countries/Continents Covered
Monday Nov. 15 - Saturday Nov. 20
North America
2
South America
5
Europe
9
Asia
12
Africa
 4
Mexico 2 Chile 2 UK 4 Israel 6 Ivory Coast 1
Ecuador 1 Austria 2 India 3 Egypt 1
Brazil 1 France 2 Japan 2 Kenya 1
Venezuela 1 Spain 1 Russia 1 Equatorial Guinea 1

Figure 1

 

Above in figure 1 is a breakdown of the articles that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, listed by dateline. Of the thirty-four articles, two-thirds come from either Asia or Europe. Half of the articles from Asia have to do with either Israel or the Palestinian Territories. If Israel were to be excluded, Europe would have been the number one source of articles for the Tribune. Related to this is that, unlike the two Times, the Tribune lacks datelines from either the West Bank or Gaza. Any articles pertaining to the Palestinian Territories have an Israeli dateline. A couple of examples of headlines of articles with Israeli datelines to illustrate the point include: “Bullets fly around PLO’s new leader”(11/15/04, A1), “Palestinian groups bow out of vote” (11/17/04, A3), “Arafat left mystery on PLO’s holdings” (11/16/04, A3). The lack of Gaza or West Bank datelines likely shows the more limited resources of the Chicago Tribune in terms of foreign correspondents. It should be noted, though, that two of the articles from Jerusalem are both by the Tribune’s own Tom Hundley, who for one reason or another did not cross the border into the Palestinian territories. In all, nineteen countries were listed in the datelines of international news articles in the Chicago Tribune, with the top ten sources of articles represented below in figure 2. Looking at the content categories of the articles from each continent respectively, the largest category - solely or in a tie - for North America, South America, Europe and Asia is politics. In the case of Africa, the two categories with the most articles were war/genocide and cultural/scientific.

Figure 2

 

 
The second newspaper studied was the Los Angeles Times, a paper often ignored in news comparisons for its larger competitor the New York Times. In 1992 it was noted that the New York Times had thirty-seven foreign correspondents while the Los Angles Times had thirty-two, not far behind (Hess 1996). Although current figures are not available, a clear difference can be seen between the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune in terms of articles written by staff members. In the case of the Los Angeles Times, forty-two articles were written by staff members, the next closest source being the Los Angeles Times wire with twenty-six. As touched on before, one way the difference is demonstrated is in the coverage of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Articles by staff are datelined from the Palestinian Territories, in fact more than from Israel, in large measure because of Yasser Arafat’s death during the week examined. In looking at the coverage by international staff writers, it was hard to see numbers close to the thirty-two of 1992. Often all articles from a region or continent could be associated with one staff writer, one example being Robyn Dixon who wrote all staff articles reported from Africa. Below, in figure 3, is a listing of articles by the source of their dateline, demonstrating my categorization of certain countries. It should be noted that the Los Angeles Times, with sixteen articles, had the greatest number of articles with datelines from Africa, but did not include the greatest number of different countries within Africa. Exceptions to the one writer one region trend were seen particularly with stories related to the death of Yasser Arafat, which sometimes included up to three writers per article.
L.A. Times Countries/Continents Monday Nov. 8 - Sunday Nov. 14
North America 3 South America 6 Europe 16 Asia 39 Africa 16 Australia/Pacific 2
Nicaragua 2 Brazil 2 UK 2 Gaza/West Bank 9 Egypt 4 New Zealand 1
Mexico 1 Argentina 1 Turkey 2 China 6 South Africa 3 Australia 1
Venezuela 1 Netherlands 2 Japan 5 Ivory Coast 3
Peru 1 Germany 1 Israel 4 Sudan 2
Grenada 1 Belarus 1 Russia 3 Nigeria 2
Macedonia 1 India 3 Senegal 1
Austria 1 Philippines 2 Namibia 1
Bosnia 1 Iran 1
Ukraine 1 Mongolia 1
Belgium 1 Indonesia 1
France 3 Lebanon 1
North Korea 1
Thailand 1
Saudi Arabia 1

Figure 3

The areas most often covered in the Los Angeles Times were: Asia, followed by Africa and Europe in a tie. Unlike the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, if Israel and the Palestinian Territories are excluded, Asia is still the number one source of articles for the Los Angeles Times. The eighty-two articles in all with international datelines touch on stories from forty-one countries, more than twice as many countries as appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Below, in figure 4, are listed the top ten sources of articles, with the number included. The number one source of articles was the Palestinian Territories, mentioned before, followed by China. Concerns are often raised about the content of stories from underdeveloped countries. In the case of China some variety can be seen by this sampling of headlines: “You can’t get a bad rap here” (11/12/04, A1), “China, Taiwan wooing Vanuatu in dollar dance” (11/12/04, A5), and “Taiwan’s Leader Calls on Beijing to Give up Weapons” (11/11/04, A3). Looking at the content of the articles by region, somewhat similar to the Chicago Tribune, for North America, Europe, and Asia most articles were placed on the political category. For South America, most articles were classified as crime related. For Africa, nine articles (as opposed to only three articles for the next closest category) were on war/genocide. The Los Angeles Times necessitated the creation of the new category Australia/Pacific, which was split between cultural/scientific and political.

Figure 4

 

For the purpose of this project the New York Times was selected as the New York paper. Interesting results could also come from the Wall Street Journal, considered one of the four best papers in the country for international news (Shanor 2003, 8). In academic reference material examined, which looked at international news coverage in the United States, the New York Times is often targeted, being considered the premier source for print news in the United States. Examining this paper recently and earlier, when looking at papers from across the country, it was quite clear that the coverage of the New York Times is quite extensive. Like the Los Angeles Times, articles were datelined from forty-one different countries, but in this case the number of articles was ninety-five, eclipsing the Los Angeles Times by thirteen articles and the Chicago Tribune by fifty-one articles. Also similar to the Los Angeles Times, most articles were written by New York Times staff, with a total of sixty-two; the AP was the second largest source. The breakdown of the articles can be seen below, in figure 5, and in figure 6 the top ten sources of articles. All three of the newspapers had a small world briefs section. One thing that was unique about the New York Times’ briefs section was a much greater frequency of listing an author. In addition, there was an attempt to break down articles by region of the world, although in some cases regions were missing from the summary.

North America 3 South America 13 Europe 32 Asia 33 Africa 13 Australia/Pacific 1
Canada 2 Chile 8 UK 8 Israel 7 Egypt 2 Australia 1
Dominican Republic 1 Colombia 2 France 5 Russia 6 Ivory Coast 2    
Venezuela 2 Germany 5 Japan 3 Kenya 2
Argentina 1 Italy 4 Thailand 3 South Africa 2
    Ukraine 3 Afghanistan 2 Algeria 1
Belgium 2 China 2 Congo 1
Belarus 1 Gaza/West Bank 2 Ethiopia 1
Ireland 1 India 2 Sudan 1
Slovenia 1 Bahrain 1 Tanzania 1
Spain 1 Iran 1
Turkey 1 Mongolia 1
Myanmar 1
Nepal 1
Pakistan 1

Figure 5


In the case of the New York Times, like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, the largest number of articles came from Asia. Similar to the Chicago Tribune, the country most covered in Asia was Israel, and if Israel had been excluded, Europe would be first. North and South America and Africa lagged behind Asia and Europe. South America did have its best showing, in large part because of the APEC conference in Chile that led to eight articles. The case of Chile shows the limitations of going by the datelines of the articles because most of the articles did not have to do with Chile per se, examples being “Bush says Iran Spreads Output of a-Bomb Fuel” (11/21/04, A1) and “Powell Presses for Nuclear Talks with North Korea” (11/19/04, A10). The United Kingdom and Chile were tied for most articles with eight each. The following is a sampling of articles' headings from the United Kingdom: “Santa cuffs himself to Buckingham Palace” (11/24/04, A6), “Prince Charles says he knows his place and yours, too” (11/19/04, A14), and “Citing terror issues, Britain plans national ID cards” (11/24/04, A3). Similar to the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, the articles, when broken down by region, most often fell under the category of politics. Two exceptions were Africa and Australia/Pacific. In the case of Africa, the coverage was more balanced than the Los Angeles Times, with five for war/genocide followed by four for cultural/scientific and three for politics.

 

Figure 6
 

 

Discussion
Although Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York are all considered global cities for the purposes of this examination, only Los Angeles and New York have papers with a global picture. The Chicago Tribune lagged far behind both Times papers in terms of articles and countries covered. While the Tribune touched on nineteen countries, both Times each touched on forty-one countries. Numbers are not everything, but it is felt that the greater the number of countries represented, the greater the opportunity for an interconnected worldview. From this examination, sixty-one countries in all were mentioned in datelines, giving an eye onto roughly one third of the world's recognized countries. A new situation arose when compiling and categorizing the articles from the newspapers, with the introduction of the Australia/Pacific region. In my previous study, there was no mention of Australia or Pacific nations. In this study the Los Angeles Times had articles from Australia and New Zealand, and the New York Times had one article from Australia. Compiling the stories of the three newspapers together, or even excluding the Chicago Tribune, one is offered a fairly good view of what is going on in the world over the span of a week. The two primary sources of articles were Asia and Europe among the three newspapers. Africa and South America were somewhat more distant, and North America barely registered. Below is a brief discussion of how this study can fit into other work that has been done.
 
One study done in the 1980’s concluded that there are basically four factors that determine the inclusion or exclusion of international news: normative deviance of an event, relevance to the United States, potential for social change, and geographical distance (Chang et al, 1987). By excluding War on Terror and Iraq War articles, the relevance to the United States was to some extent deconstructed. When considering the geographical distance, that also comes into question, when looking at the three newspapers together. The accompanying maps, below, demonstrate that the reach of the three newspapers combined is quite far. In terms of normative deviance, a connection to this theme can be seen in many of the articles, particularly from underdeveloped parts of the world that focus on crime and war/genocide. But the majority of the articles were classified as political, and politics is not necessarily deviant. Social change could be tied into politics, and in that respect it was quite strong. In a study done by Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi also in the 1980’s for UNESCO, politics was found to be the most common classification for articles, but contrary to this examination, she found that international news was most often about neighbors of the audience (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1985). If this were to hold true for this examination, then the most news should have been about Mexico and Canada, but the results show this was clearly not the case. This leads me into a brief discussion of content. More recently in 1994 Stephen Hess examined stories in twenty-four papers and found that newspapers were not using the stories that were available to them (Hess 1996). This can be seen in looking at the Chicago Tribune at least. The Tribune listed articles written by Los Angeles Times writers as Tribune news services articles in two instances. This demonstrates that the Chicago Tribune among other sources has the resources of Los Angeles Times articles at its deposal but does not use them. This leads me into a brief discussion of the content of the news
 

 

As was pointed out earlier, articles that had to do with Israel or the Palestinian Territories were the most common in all three newspapers. Below, in figure 7, are the cumulative top fifteen sources of international news, with Israel at number one and the Palestinian Territories at number 3. A likely explanation for this strong showing aside from the death of Yasser Arafat is the strong Judeo-Christian history of the United States. With the important place of Jerusalem in Islam, the fastest growing religion in the United States, it is probably safe to assume that the Israel/Palestinian Territories will continue to maintain a prominent position in the news for some time to come. A study was done in the mid-1990’s looking at coverage of elections in Israel and India in the New York Times. The authors felt that coverage reflected a tendency by the newspaper to support the foreign policy stance of the United States government (Jayaker and Jayaker 2000). What that study failed to take into consideration was the political orientation of the newspaper. As Habermas points out, when newspapers were first coming into existence they were a way for readers to get news from sources not under government control (Habermas 1989). In that vein, the Los Angeles Times and New York Times could be labeled closer to liberal than conservative, while the opposite is true for the Chicago Tribune. This demonstrates that a conflict between the newspaper and government ideology exists. Does this come into play in terms of selecting the news? Unfortunately, that remains a question for further exploration. In terms of agenda of the newspaper, two things are to be touched on: the portrayal of continents or countries, and the sources of the articles. In terms of portrayal, the majority of the articles pertaining to Africa were in some way related to war and genocide, the New York Times being the most balanced. One exception to war and genocide in Africa was the following, “AIDS Fund Agrees to New Grants” (NYT 11/19/04, A8) coming from Tanzania. One can seriously argue that the picture of Africa is not completely distorted with the violent portrayal it receives. The majority of the world’s wars are currently taking place in Africa (The World at War). In the Congo alone, since 1998 over three million people have been killed (Congo Civil War). Quickly looking at the front page of an online South African newspaper, three of the six articles on Africa have to do with fighting and war (Mail and Guardian Online). The second question to explore is sources. Is it better or worse to have staff reporters as opposed to articles from the AP, Reuters, or AFP? In Deniz Tunaoglu’s article [also in this issue of 'Immediacy'], her findings showed that all international news articles selected came from AP, Reuters, UPI, or AFP. Since the selling of UPI to a religious organization in the 1990’s, UPI has fallen away in U.S. media, but the other three were present. In Deniz’s piece it is seen as a problem that all articles come from the major organizations. But the question remains, is it better or worse to use agency articles written for the world market, or articles written by staff that may demonstrate the partisan persuasion of the publication?

Figure 7

 

Conclusion
In my earlier study, it was shown that taking newspapers from metropolitan areas of the country provided unbalanced and inconsistent coverage of international news. This project was an attempt to see if it was necessary to view news from major newspapers of the three global cities in the United States -- Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York-- in order to obtain sufficiently balanced and consistent international news coverage. The brief analysis and accompanying graphs and illustrations show that a third of the world’s countries are covered through the news coverage of these three newspapers. The Chicago Tribune lagged far behind the other two newspapers, as illustrated below, in figure 8. Many studies examining U.S. newspapers revolve around just the New York Times, but this analysis has shown that one can have a much better idea of the world when the Los Angles Times is also included. Looking at my previous study, and that of Deniz, the two Times are almost an anomaly, relying primarily on their own reporters instead of international news agencies that lead to no shortage of international news (Hess 1996).

 

Figure 8

But the presence or lack of international news does not by itself contribute to a conception of globalization or a world that is interconnected. What remains to be examined, is what readers do with the international news they are offered. Does the greater prevalence of international news in New York and Los Angeles create or reflect a more global vision for or of its readers? The material, primarily from staff reporters is available roughly equally in the Los Angeles and New York papers, but not so in the case of the Chicago paper. Sweeping generalizations cannot be taken too seriously either, because as the opening quote noted, international news coverage in the United States is going through a little soul searching after the hijackings of September 11th, 2001. Taking into consideration the findings from my first study, it can be said that opportunities do exist for getting a sense of what is going on vast and close distances from the United States. From work so far, two publications have the potential to create worldviews of an interconnected world through globalization, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

 

 

 


CITATIONS, SOURCES, LINKS, NOTES:Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1999. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's global cities.
University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.


Chang, Tsan-Kuo, Pamela J. Shoemaker, and Nancy Brendlinger. “Determinants of International News Coverage in the U.S.Media.”Communication Research. Vol. 14 No. 4, August 1987 396-414. Sage Publications, Inc. 1987.


“Congo Civil War.” HYPERLINK "http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/congo.htm" http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/congo.htm. 12/18/04.


Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society. Translated by Thomas Burger; with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.


Hess, Stephen. 1996. “Media Mavens.” Society. Vol. 33 Issue 3, Mar/Apr p.70.


Jayakar, Rita K. and Krishna P. Jayakar. 2000. “Hegemonic Frames and International News Reporting: A Comparative Study of the New York Times Coverage of the 1996 Indian and Israeli Elections.” The Global Dynamics of News: Studies in International News Coverage and News Agenda. Edited by Abbas Malek and Anandam P. Kavoori. Series: Contemporary Studies in International Political Communication. Series Editor Abbas Malek. Ablex Publishing Corporation: Stamford, Connecticut.


“Los Angeles Times Media Kit.” HYPERLINK "http://www.latimes.com/extras/ads/circulation01.html. 1/27/05" http://www.latimes.com/extras/ads/circulation01.html. 1/27/05.


Mail and Guardian Online. HYPERLINK "http://www.mg.co.za/" http://www.mg.co.za/. 12/19/04


“Newspaper Association of America Readership Statistics.” HYPERLINK "http://www.naa.org/artpage.cfm?AID=1468&SID=1113" http://www.naa.org/artpage.cfm?AID=1468&SID=1113. 12/18/04.


”New York Times Media Kit.” 2005. HYPERLINK "http://www.nytadvertising.com/was/circulation/pages/contentCirculation/0,1013,,00.html?l1Id=5&l2Id=52" http://www.nytadvertising.com/was/circulation/pages/contentCirculation/0,1013,,00.html?l1Id=5&l2Id=52 . 28 January.


Parks, Michael. 2002. “The Future of Foreign News.” The American Editor. September-October. The American Society of Newspaper Editors.


Shanor, Donald R. 2003. News From Abroad. Columbia University Press: New York.


Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle. 1985. “The ‘World of the News’ Study Results of International Cooperation.” MASS COMMUNICATION REVIEW YEARBOOK. VOL. 5. Sage Publication: United Kingdom.


“The World at War.” HYPERLINK "http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/" http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/ . 12/18/04.


Wetli, Patty. 2004 “RE: location of Tribune readers.” E-mail to Chris Eberhardt. 16 December.