The mediation of suffering and the vision of a cosmopolitan public

In this article, the author argues that if researchers wish to move toward a "global village" with cosmopolitan values, then they need to examine critically the discourses and practices by which global information flows invite the individual spectator to be a public actor in the contexts of her or his everyday life. In the light of empirical analysis, the author presents a hierarchical typology of news stories on distant suffering that consists of adventure, emergency, and ecstatic news, and she examines the two broad ethical norms that inform these types of news: communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. The possibility for cosmopolitanism, the author concludes, lies importantly (but not exclusively) in the ways in which television tells the stories of suffering, inviting audiences to care for and act on conditions of human existence that go beyond their own communities of belonging

Quality Evaluations and the Media

The aim of this chapter is to analyse how results from the 2011 to 2014 national evaluation and quality assurance (EQA) system were communicated to and via the media. First, the analysis focuses on the attempted media framing, as manifested in press releases of national evaluations from the responsible national agencies. Second, the higher education institution-media interactions, in the context of two national quality evaluations from two subject areas (education and specialist nursing), are analysed from the perspective of how four higher education institutions’ attempted framings were (re)presented by the media. The chapter concludes with a discussion pointing to interdependence and possible reinforcement of the media-quality assurance relationship and points to some possible implications for education governing. The chapter also discusses the silences and articulations that could not be detected in the studied data, as situated within the context of reputation management and media display in the contemporary "evaluation society"