After September 11: TV News and Transnational Audiences

One year on from these horrific events, a group of academic researchers, media and racism monitoring groups, media professionals and policy makers gathered together at the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London for the 3-day symposium After September 11th: TV News and Transnational Audiences. Organised by the British Film Institute, the symposium aimed to provide a forum in which to analyse and evaluate the successes and failures of an array of television news services in mediating and narrating the events of September 11, the war in/on Afghanistan, and ensuing conflicts.

From the perspective of increasing migratory flows and the proliferation of satellite news channels which are creating global and transnational cultures of news production and consumption, the conference also sought to examine how different social, linguistic, religious and ethnic diaspora groups use news media at times of political crises. New kinds of production practices and audience configurations afford both opportunities and challenges to states and supra-national organisations (such as the EU), as well as to different language communities and diaspora groups. These developments are likely to have unpredictable consequences for news cultures, participation in political processes, forms of governance, citizenship and collective identities.

The first day and a half of the symposium focused on the political management of news agenda and multicultural audiences, the techniques, ethics and aesthetics of representing conflict, terror and war and self and other in TV narratives of the conflict. People as diverse as Robert Fisk, veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent, Tony Maddox, International Senior Vice President for Europe, Africa and the Middle East for CNN, London and Annabelle Sreberny, Professor of Communication at Leicester University gave presentations which were followed by question and answer sessions, often resulting in heated debate!

The afternoon of the second day saw the exchange of results from several news research projects on news media coverage of September 11 and after, and its reception. One such report was that of the findings of collaborative research on transnational news agenda and audiences, carried out by a team of some 30 multi-lingual researchers, commissioned jointly by the ESRC Transnational Communities Programme, the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission, the British Film Institute and the Open University's Pavis Centre. The news agenda research included terrestrial and satellite TV news agenda from around the world and the audience research was carried out in households and families in the UK and elsewhere, including Arabic, Bengali, English, Farsi, Hindi, Kurdish, Pashto, Turkish and Urdu speaking viewers.

The final day of the symposium moved away from both theory and research towards a more practice-orientated approach. Various NGOs with experience of media monitoring presented examples of ‘good practice’ and it was here that the WACC Women’s Programme played a key role. Together, the Director and the Programme Officer of the WACC Women’s Programme gave a presentation and answered questions on the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2000. Whilst GMMP 2000 was concerned specifically with the presence and representation of women in the news media, the lessons learned from the project can play an important role in informing new monitoring efforts concerned with diversity of representation and it was for this reason that WACC was asked to participate in the symposium. Based on these models of good practice, Online/More Colour in the Media, the European network which organised the final day of the symposium, hopes to launch a two-year ‘media watch’ project empowering refugee and migrant organisations in their efforts to press for media practices that do justice to the multicultural diversity of present-day society. The project will culminate in a European Day of Monitoring, based on WACC’s experience with GMMP 2000 and it is hoped that WACC will therefore become a vital partner in the development of a joint framework of methodology for such an event.

The symposium was an opportunity to promote fresh dialogue and co-operation between different actors in the news media industry and migrant and refugee organisations across Europe. The alliances forged there and the commitment expressed by various organisations and individuals to new initiatives aimed at enhancing intercultural understanding and dialogue will make a considerable contribution to the development of innovative multicultural praxis in news and current affairs in ways that contribute to the promotion of cosmopolitan citizenship.

For more information on the symposium and the papers and research presented there see:

http://www.afterseptember11.tv