Case Study: Irish Print media coverage of Third World crises

A great deal of what we know about what is happening elsewhere in the world is as a result of mass-mediatization. The latter determines what people are informed about, how they are informed and indeed when they are informed. The following case study of how one broadsheet newspaper (The Irish Times) examines how a global issue is interpreted and dealt with at a local level: how a famine in Sudan is viewed from Ireland. Both Sudan and Ireland exhibit a high level of dependence on the global media industries; they rely on foreign news agencies in order to frame the ‘story’ of famine crises. Nevertheless, the local media appropriate these global issues through their own routines of news production (see Devereux, 2000; Devereux and Haynes, 2000).

The 1998 Sudanese famine crisis

In the middle of 1998 it was estimated that between 350,000 and 700,000 people were at starvation point in the war zone in Bahr el Ghazal province in southern Sudan. The Sudanese crisis presented an interesting challenge to the Irish media, not least because of the complexities involved in the 15-year-old civil war raging between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. The Irish Times provided detailed and analytical coverage of the story. Its commitment to covering such issues was evident at editorial and at resource level. A range of ideological positions is evident in the newspaper’s coverage of the issues involved. While dominant understandings of Third World famine – drought, crop failure, food shortages, civil war and local political corruption – can be easily identified in The Irish Times’ coverage, there is also in evidence a range of explanations which either counter the accepted reasons for the Sudanese crisis or are at the very least critical in their orientation.

The cycle of the Sudanese story in The Irish Times began on 6 April 1998 with the initial warnings from aid agencies about the need for assistance in the form of food, seeds and tools. From the beginning it was stated that the Sudanese crisis could be resolved only through a combination of humanitarian aid and the political pressure needed to resolve the civil war. By 18 April the newspaper warned that people were beginning to die from famine in southern Sudan; 350,000 people were said to be at risk. The report noted the logistical problems caused by the refusal of the Khartoum government to give permission for humanitarian flights to drop food and supplies to southern Sudan. The civil war was cited as the key reason for the famine.

Bob Geldof’s appearance on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News served to guarantee further coverage of the Sudanese crisis by the Irish print media. The follow-up report in The Irish Times (25 April 1998) conformed to the argument that much of what we learn about the Third World is in terms of the activities or utterances of elite white Western figures. The fact that a heroic (and Irish) figure had made a statement about the potential crisis in Sudan increased the possibility that the BBC story would be picked up by the Irish print media. As a piece of journalism, it is illustrative of the dependence of the Irish media on others in reporting on the Third World. The story is of interest in that it both draws upon the BBC report of the previous evening and uses additional material from the Guardian Service news agency.

The month of May witnessed a number of shifts in terms of how the story was being told to The Irish Times’ readership. On 4 May the original estimation of those at risk from famine was doubled to 700,000. The international pressure being brought to bear on both sides of the conflict resulted in the resumption of peace talks, although the logistical problems in delivering aid continued. The Irish Times then began to concentrate on reporting on Irish aid efforts – how the Irish government and aid agencies were responding to the crisis.

The coverage of the crisis then switched to a more critical discourse as the Khartoum government began to allow a limited number of flights into southern Sudan. The Irish Times began to concentrate on how the Khartoum government was attempting to use hunger as a weapon in the civil war. The newspaper also reflected upon the dilemmas facing aid agencies.

The aid agencies realized that the timing of their appeals to their respective publics via the media in the West had to be strategic. If they raised money and the Khartoum government continued to restrict or refuse flights of mercy to the region, there was a possibility that the public might lose interest or stop donating. The collection and distribution of aid was therefore determined not by the immediate needs of the famine victims in southern Sudan, but rather by the way in which the media could be best managed. The response of the public in Ireland and elsewhere was determined by the flow of media coverage – not by real time, but by media time – within the global media industries.

The newspaper’s development correspondent went to Sudan in late May. The immediate result was an obvious increase in the extent of detailed reporting and analysis. His reports described the conditions facing the southern Sudanese and attempted to assess whether they constituted a famine or the threat of famine. The coverage extended to examining the underlying reasons for the crises in Africa and made specific reference to colonialism. Some of the themes of the earlier coverage – the heroic Irish aid worker, the manipulation and misuse of humanitarian aid by the Khartoum government, repeated warnings about the imminence of famine – were central to how the story was told in June. One of the more notable pieces of reporting on the Sudanese crisis occurred on 6 June when the newspaper’s development correspondent criticized the role of the Western media in their reporting (or failure to report) on African issues.

The coverage ended in August. For The Irish Times and other media organizations the newsworthiness of the story ceased when international humanitarian flights began to get through to the Sudanese and famine was averted. The problems inherent in alerting the public to the crisis without the political dimension being resolved meant that many journalists felt that there was nothing more to add to the famine story. It had lost its newsworthiness.

Lessons Learned:

This case study suggests that:

1. The media are clearly responsible for the increased amount of information that some social actors are now offered. We are not, however, living in an egalitarian global village where information and knowledge flow freely between continents. The global media industry has immense power in terms of how it covers events outside the developed world.
2. Global news agencies and major broadcasting organizations are primarily responsible for the selection and packaging of news from the Third World.
3. Third World countries have an obvious dependence on the global media industry, and especially in times of crisis when news has to travel fast. In this light, media coverage of Third World issues sustains the unequal relations of power that exist between the West and the Third World.
4. Global issues such as famine or poverty, although experienced through the media, are nonetheless appropriated through a local prism. Media audiences are exposed to stories about faraway places and events, but these stories have a heavy emphasis on local involvement. Thus many of the stories about the Sudanese famine crisis focused on the Irish response, both voluntary and statutory, and celebrated the heroic role of the Irish aid worker. The process of globalization now at work links, in a rather direct way, locales with large structures and occurrences. But the reverse also holds true: local factors play a strong role in the way global processes are experienced. The latter have to make themselves local in order to become effective.

Case study: It’s all in the game: monopoly, football and satellite television

Williams (1994) is a critical analysis of the role of sport, and of soccer in particular, in the spread of satellite television in the United Kingdom. As part of a larger examination of citizenship and the commercialization of sport, Williams (1994) explains how Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB achieved a position of dominance through brokering an exclusive deal with the Football Association’s Premier League. His study raises several important questions about access to sporting events in a media setting.

The merging of British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) with Murdoch’s Sky television in 1990 to form BSkyB had initially resulted in major losses for the global conglomerate News Corporation. This was to be short-lived, however. Williams (1994) argues that international sport played a highly significant role in changing the fortunes of BSkyB. He says: ‘The major reason for this apparent upturn in the fortunes of BSkyB is clear. BSkyB has emphasized coverage of international sport. More especially, exclusive ‘‘live’’ coverage of Premier League soccer from England has been the key cultural product in establishing BSkyB as a major European-wide pay-to-view satellite channel’ (1994: 383). This emphasis on sport replaced an earlier combined emphasis on movies and sport as a key reason for audiences to subscribe to BSkyB.

In a deal hammered out in 1992 between BSkyB and the recently formed Football Association Premier League, Murdoch’s organization bought the sole rights to broadcast live English football on a pay-to-view basis. Williams (1994) estimates that the deal cost BSkyB £304 million. While this represents a significant (and risky) investment for BSkyB, there is ample evidence to suggest that the strategy has worked well in the battle for ratings and subscriptions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Williams (1994) notes, for example, that in the mid-1990s Murdoch’s Fox TV bought the exclusive rights to NFL football in the United States. The strategic role of soccer in the game plans of global and other media organizations is stressed by Williams (1994). While he concedes that variations exist in other European countries where soccer is a popular sport, he notes that:

France now seems most like the English case these days. Canal Plus, a subscription only commercial channel, has monopolized live coverage of soccer since 1984, showing twenty-two matches a season costing an estimated £20 million per year. In Germany, the private SAT 1 cable channel agreed to a new five-year deal in 1992/93 costing DM 700 million (about £245 million); 75 per cent of German households expect soon to be cabled. In Spain, a joint deal worth about £300 million between local region channels and Canal Plus produces two live matches a week for eight years (from 1989), while in Italy, the state-funded RAI and Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest network shared extensive highlights-only coverage of Serie A soccer matches up until 1993/4, when weekly coverage of one live match was introduced. (1994: 387)

Williams (1994) underlines the emergence of a two-tier system within the world of soccer and among audience members who would wish to view Premier League matches. The formation of the Premier League divided English soccer in two, with the wealthier clubs benefiting from the BSkyB deal. Access to the live Premier League matches is now restricted to those who can afford the pay-to-view or subscription channels on Sky Sports.

The commodification of sport (and of soccer, rugby, cricket and boxing in particular) has been a key part of the market domination strategies engaged in by media conglomerates such as BSkyB. In their attempts at market domination the possibility of viewing the main sporting events live is heavily emphasized. There is evidence to suggest, however, that some audience members (and sports fans in particular) are critical of this strategy. Audience viewing patterns may also be changing as a direct result of pay-per-view. Soccer, in particular, is watched in bars or public houses rather than in a domestic setting.

Quick Questions:

1. What are the implications (for audiences and for sports clubs) of the commodification of sport by media conglomerates?
2. Has the commodification of football changed the ways in which sporting events are consumed and experienced?
3. Do you think it matters that media coverage of a growing number of cultural events such as football matches have been privatized?

Case Study: Structure and Agency in the making of Alan Parker’s film Angela’s Ashes

Alan Parker directed the film version of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes.
Released in 2000, the film had varied fortunes, attracting mixed critical reviews and a limited amount of box-office success. Directed by Parker and released through the Hollywood-based Universal Paramount Studios, the film is a good example of where we can see the operation of structure and agency within media production.
Agency or creativity can be seen on a number of fronts. Parker himself exercises considerable agency in interpreting both McCourt’s original work and the film script that had been developed previously by the Australian writer Laura Jones. He states:

Scott Rudin and David Brown (the film’s producers) developed the script with Laura Jones and she was able to take what was a very difficult and complex book and pare it down to the very bare minimum. I thought she’d probably been too strict with paring it down, and I tried to flesh it out. One of the things I did was to go back to the book because there’s always so much more in the book than you could possibly put in a film. (Parker, 2000)

Parker’s agency as a film director is also seen in the production values he chooses to use in order to retell McCourt’s story. The most obvious example is Parker’s metaphorical use of rain throughout the movie. The original text makes continual reference to ‘the damp’. The dampness in Limerick (Ireland) is seen as being one of the main reasons why some of the McCourt children suffer from illnesses and die. In shooting the film Parker replaces the dampness experienced by the memoir’s main protagonist with rain, primarily because it is relatively easier to film. The rain is intended to act as a signifier of dampness for the audience. We can also identify a humorous encoding by the director. In many of his films, Parker himself appears in a minor role. In Angela’s Ashes he plays the part of a doctor who breaks wind whilst attending to a young Frank McCourt. In a previous Parker film – The Commitments – we can see an encoding of an intertextual reference when a number of the films characters walk past a cardboard cut-out display in a record store advertising Parker’s movie based on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall.

Audiences themselves, of course, have also got the capacity to engage in creativity or agency. The film version of Angela’s Ashes is interesting in this regard in that audience agency in interpreting the film may have been based, for example, upon their own personal experiences of poverty, on their reading of the original text by McCourt or discussions they may have had with others prior to seeing the movie version.

On the constraint side of the equation a number of important factors can be identified. The fact that the original text had been a commercial and critical success with audiences produced a constraint of its own for the film’s director. Given that a significant number of the film’s potential audience had read the memoir (either in English or in translation) prior to seeing the film version, it was realized that this created a certain difficulty around audience expectations. The fact that Universal Paramount studios funded the film created a further constraint in that the makers of the film were presumably expected to create a film that would be a commercial as well as a critical success. From a working class British background, Alan Parker’s previous film work demonstrates a firm commitment to documenting working class lives in a gritty and realistic way. Parker’s commitment to telling a story about poverty is however constrained by the demands of making a movie that would have a mass audience appeal.

Quick Questions:

1. In reading this study can you identify examples of structure and agency on behalf of the director?
2. In what ways are audiences shown to exercise agency in this case-study?
3. In your opinion which holds more sway – commercial considerations or artistic Endeavour?

Case Study Analyzing Media Content: The Royle Family

Somewhere in the north of England (presumably Manchester) it is teatime in The Royle Family household. Jim Royle gets up from his armchair and switches on the television set. Soon he is joined by the rest of the family – his wife Barbara, son Anthony and daughter Denise – to talk about and to the television set. Later they will be joined by Barbara’s mother Norma and Denise’s husband Dave. From previous viewings we know that Jim Royle is unemployed and that Barbara has recently returned to work outside the family home.

Over three series, the subject matter of this BBC (UK) situation comedy has largely centred on the conversations that the Royles have in their sitting room about each other, about television, about their immediate neighbours (Mary, Joe and Cheryl) and, occasionally, about the wider social world outside of  their home. Television is a constant presence in their everyday lives. The programme’s production values are kept fairly simple, and, at times, as a viewer or spectator, one is looking at the Royles through their television set. The action rarely stirs from this one location. The Royle Family, arguably, may be read as a nostalgic and humorous look at (white) working-class life in post-industrial Britain, a theme that was also in evidence in other forms of British popular culture in the early years of the twenty first century such as the ‘Britpop’ phenomenon, when uncertainties about British identity resulted in a media focus on the ‘authentic’ Northern English (white) working class. It could also be said, however, that it exemplifies how even representations of working-class life have been commodified in the post-industrial or postmodern era.

Although they only make occasional reference to the outside world, the social positioning of the Royles as working-class may be decoded from the things that they say about other social class groups above and below their social position. There are further clues as to their diasporic Irish roots in the occasional presence of Irish relatives at family events such as Baby David’s christening. Their acquaintances in the underclass are referred to by their nicknames such as ‘flat-nosed Alan’, ‘Twiggy’ and ‘Leggings Lorraine’. Their leisure time outside the sitting room centres on their local pub – the Feathers. As well as commenting (usually in the form of lampooning or criticizing) upon ‘real’ television personalities, the programme’s characters hold forth on a wide range of family and other issues. Much of their conversation is concerned with domestic politics, with money and with who is responsible for which domestic task. Invariably, Barbara or Anthony ends up with the job in question.

How Might We Begin to Critically Examine The Royle Family?

1. We could approach an analysis of The Royle Family’s content in a number of ways. We could examine how it compares to other situation comedies or dramas in terms of how it represents working-class life. We could investigate how as a situation comedy it compares with other genres (such as the ‘social problem’ film, soap opera or the realist television documentary) in representing family life, class, gender or sexual politics, for example.  What are the limitations and possibilities of situation comedy in terms of what a text can say about these and other issues?
2. We could examine the narrative structure of the programme by viewing all the episodes in the three series produced. Does the programme conform to a particular narrative structure? What sorts of narrative conventions does the programme employ?
3. We could examine the production values used in the series by focusing on the styles of camera work or incidental music employed by the programme’s director. What sort of visual and aural language does the programme utilize?
4. We could examine one or more episodes of The Royle Family to see how the text works at a semiotic or symbolic level. What sorts of signifiers do the programme’s makers use in order to convey to audience members that this programme is about a working-class Manchester family? What sorts of signifiers are to be found in the Royles’ household?
5. We could investigate the Royles’ use of (bad) language and accent. More particularly, we could examine how the programme’s characters discourse about themselves, each other, television and the wider world. Such a focus might consider how men and women talk among themselves and to each other.
6. What do these fictional characters say about gender roles or sexual orientation, for example? What does the text say about masculinity and femininity in post-industrial Britain? What do they say about the state or the government? What does the programme as a whole have to say about gender politics in the post-industrial world? What do the Royles say about the underclass or the middle class in their midst?  Skeggs, for example, suggests that the series ‘…presents a sustained attack on middle-class pretensions. Yet the middle-class are likely to misrecognize the nature of the class hatred it contains; they must, since the show has won so many art-culture system awards.’ (2005, 975) How do the representations of working-class life in the Royles compare to other forms of media representation on so-called ‘Chav’ or underclass culture?
7. In considering The Royle Family as a whole we could speculate as to whom the text is aimed at in audience terms. How does it position its male and female viewers? Whose version of working-class life do we see? Given that The Royle Family has been distributed and consumed in the global television market we could usefully ask about how it has been interpreted in diverse geographical and varying cultural contexts? How is the text read and understood by audiences?

Concluding Comments: We have briefly outlined some of the ways in which we could possibly examine the contents of The Royle Family. None of these individual approaches is without its pitfalls, however. In my reading of the text I have decoded The Royle Family as being representative of the working class. How did I decide upon this? Could the text be read differently by audience members from different cultural contexts or by researchers with different research interests? I have referred to the semiotic dimension of the text. How can I be certain that others would not interpret or read specific symbols in a contrary way? What matters most, however, is the decision to select a specific theoretical and methodological approach in order to attempt to make sense of a selected media text.