Dead Ground Fallacies of Understanding Global Divides, Policy-Making and Communication

This chapter addresses cultural production and global divides from a media geographer’s point of view by introducing ‘dead ground’ as its central concept. This concept is borrowed from strategic thinking, originally a military term, and refers to ground that cannot be observed or experienced empirically – but (in this case) is often subjected to inference based on conventional thinking, ‘common knowledge’ based on experiences from other systems, or other epistemological environments that do not necessarily bear the required truth value. ‘Dead ground’ is explored as an ontological and epistemological concept, related to fallacies that are present in the globalisation discussion. It will particularly analyse three different fallacies: the single trajectory fallacy, the single rationality fallacy, and the single moral fallacy. The chapter raises the question as to whether these fallacies have been inherent in Western media studies, and if they have, if they might have facilitated cognitive colonisation of the analysis of changing cultures

Crime, foreigners and hard news: A cross-national comparison of reporting and public perception

The Finnish media devote more attention to hard news than the British media, yet Finns are less interested in politics than the British. The principal reason for this difference in news values is that Finnish TV is more subject to public service influence than British TV, and the Finnish press is more strongly influenced by a professional journalistic culture than its British counterpart. While a number of national differences contribute to different levels of public knowledge, the Finns are better informed about hard news topics partly because they are better briefed in these areas by their media

Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy: A Comparative Study

This article addresses the implications of the movement towards entertainment-centred, market-driven media by comparing what is reported and what the public knows in four countries with different media systems. The different systems are public service (Denmark and Finland), a `dual' model (UK) and the market model (US). The comparison shows that public service television devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas, than the market model. Public service television also gives greater prominence to news, encourages higher levels of news consumption and contributes to a smaller within-nation knowledge gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. But wider processes in society take precedence over the organization of the media in determining how much people know about public life

Cross‐National versus individual‐level differences in political information: a media systems perspective

We propose a context-dependent approach to the study of political information. Combining a content analysis of broadcast news with a national survey measuring public awareness of various events, issues, and individuals in the news, we show that properties of national media systems influence both the supply of news and citizens’ awareness of events in the news. Public service-oriented media systems deliver hard news more frequently than market-based systems. It follows that for citizens living under public service regimes, the opportunity costs of exposure to hard news are significantly lowered. Lowered costs allow less interested citizens to acquire political knowledge. Our analyses demonstrate that the knowledge gap between the more and less interested is widest in the US and smallest in Scandinavia