Book Review: <i>Foreign News on Television: Where in the World Is the Global Village?</i> , edited by Akiba A. Cohen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foreign News on Television: Where in the World Is the Global Village? Akiba A. Cohen, ed. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 391 pp. $169.95 hbk. $42.95 pbk.This is a significant, large-scale study, by a team of thirty international communication scholars, of the television news provided by thirty-three stations in seventeen coun- tries, based on content analysis of content, a survey of audiences in thirteen of those countries, and in-depth interviews with gatekeepers in twelve of the countries. The study yields helpful data that support an argument that there is more variety in televi- sion news worldwide than what a global village model of the world might indicate. The countries were Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States. The exclusion of India is particularly unfortunate.The study determined that in the majority of countries, foreign news receives less coverage and less emphasis than domestic, although absolute volumes varied signifi- cantly between countries. Highly specific local factors tended to drive topic choices even of foreign news items. Hard news predominated over soft and sensational news in all countries, and levels of sensationalism in the news were remarkably similar. In terms of topic, the only difference between domestic and foreign was that foreign news was slightly less sensational. The country that was featured most frequently (in all but six of the countries) was the United States; across all countries, more than one- fifth of all the foreign news was located in the United States. Other top-ranking coun- tries included the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Russia, and Germany. Europe was the most covered region (33%), followed by North America (24%), the Middle East (20%), Asia (19%), South America (12%), and Australia/Oceania and Africa (3% each). With the exception of North America, foreign news focuses primarily on the continent in which a given country is located.Three determining features of news selection were superpower status (USA), the neighboring region, and coverage of regions embroiled in conflict. A high proportion of foreign coverage, up to 70% in the United States, was news that involved the local country's national interest in some way. The study confirms that news is a form of representation of authority identifying who the authorities are and presenting their ver- sions of reality. Domestic news is more personalized than foreign. Almost half of actors in the news have high status, whereas the second most important category is of members of the general public, often anonymous. In thirteen of the seventeen coun- tries, the presence of politicians and other high-status actors was greater in foreign than in domestic news. In terms of the formal features of news broadcasts the authors identified five country clusters. These ranged from those that were quite playful, (including the USA)-using many different tools of presentation-to a sober group at the other extreme that used rather few. Both public service and commercial stations were found in each group. Indeed, the study as a whole found far fewer than expected differences between public service and commercial. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.102 | 0.083 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".