It is not only the economy that is undergoing a process of globalization, but also the media. For a long time the American TV station CNN was the symbol of this development. Meanwhile other players have arrived on the market, such as BBC World and Al Jazeera. This Arab television network has its headquarters in Qatar, and in its own words, is the only politically independent television channel in the Middle East. It began broadcasting in 1996, the year in which BBC World’s Arabic programmes were subjected to Saudi censorship. At the time of the Second Gulf War, Al Jazeera was an important news source because it had a reporter in Iraq. The channel became known worldwide when it broadcasted several video messages from Bin Laden. This did not go down well with the American government, but Al Jazeera viewed it as neutral journalism.
Until the arrival of Al Jazeera, the international media landscape was dominated by Western television networks. The Arab station meant that citizens in the Middle East and in other parts of the world were no longer exclusively dependent for their gathering of news on information brought (inevitably) from a Western perspective. Moreover, people in the Middle East gained access to an Arabic news channel that was not under government control.
The media play a decisive role in people’s image-forming. Because it is far too expensive for newspapers and radio and television stations to have a correspondent in every country, they employ news agencies. Consequently, large Western news agencies like Reuters, AP and AFP traditionally had a substantial influence on conceptualization. Since the rise of the Internet, the media landscape has become a lot more varied. Young people in particular make increasing use of the Internet to find out more about the world. Weblogs of citizens from all over the world give us the opportunity of looking directly into other living-rooms. In countries with a restricted freedom of the press such as China, citizens explore and utilize the farthest limits of the Internet. In this way, the new media provide opportunities for citizen journalism and for the international exchange of pictures, observations and opinions on a scale that is unprecedented in history.
