CONTRA-FLOW OF GLOBAL OF GLOBAL MEDIA INDUSTRIES

Agu, Ikenna E.

BSU/SS/COM/PHD/16/7340

COM 901: Seminar in Global Media and Cultural Domination

Department of Mass Communication

Benue State University, Makurdi

ikennasports@yahoo.com

08036053643

Abstract

The paper examined the Contra-flow of global media industries, mainly television and film, as despite the exponential growth of the Internet in the last decade; it was being used only by about 15 per cent of the world’s population in 2015, while television and film had a much larger audience base. This paper widened the discussion by articulating in tabular form the export of media goods by selected non-Western countries, dominant flows, contra-flows, the advent of "Contra-flow" in global news etc.Agenda setting theory was used to underline this paper. While celebrating the global circulation of media products from a wider range of hubs of creative and cultural industries, the paper emphasized the disparities in the volume and economic value of such flows in comparison to the dominant ones and cautions against the tendency to valorize the rise of non-Western media, arguing that they may reflect a re-figuring of hegemony in more complex ways.

Key Words: Media, Subaltern Flow, Contra Flow, Global Media

Concept of Contra-flow of Global Media Industries

Contra-flow of global media industries is the movement of cultures and information from one place to another, brought by mobile subjects (migrants) that can have a positive or negative impact or effect on society. More importantly, contra- flow(s) emerged because of the global mass media reversing the dominant Western, First World direction, in other words it is no longer from “the West to the rest”. Contra-flows can be seen through the media such as telenovelas (soap operas), Bollywood etc. Thussu (2006) defines contra-flow as: "the semantic and imaginative referents for the institutional, cultural and political matrix of a world framed by processes of global cultural power and local negotiation: a world experienced through the identity politics of nations, individuals and cultures and negotiated through contestations of locality, nationality and global citizenship." 

Contra-flow is not the mixing or meshing of two cultures. Rather, contra-flow(s) is about the movement of cultures, like a two-way traffic lane, where individuals are said to live “between cultures.” The term contra-flow originated from the preceding peripheries of global media industries, designated ‘sub-altern flows.’ 

A good example of contra-flow media are telenovelas or soap operas. Telenovelas have become global because of the leading producers of telenovelas such as Televisa in Mexico, Venevision in Venezuela, and Globo TV in Brazil, reaching millions of homes all around the globe. Through these leading networks, migrant communities are able to obtain information.

Over the last two decades the media world has witnessed a proliferation of multilingual growth of content emanating from these regional creative centres (Banerjee, 2002). The availability of digital technology, and deregulated broadcasting and satellite networks has enabled the increasing flow of content from the global South to the North, for example, the growing international visibility of telenovelas or Korean and Indian films, as well as regional broadcasting, such as the pan-Arabic Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC), the pioneering 24/7 news network Al-Jazeera, or the Mandarin language Phoenix channel, which caters to a Chinese diaspora.

Non-Western countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and India have become increasingly important in the circulation of cultural products, as indicated by Table 1.2 below. Japanese animation, film, publishing and music business was worth $140 billion in 2003, with animation, including manga (comics), anime (animation), films, videos and merchandising products bringing in $26 billion, according to the Digital Content Association of Japan (JETRO, 2005). South Korea has emerged as a major exporter of entertainment—film, television soap operas, popular music and online games—with television dramas such as Jewel in the Palace being extremely popular in China, prompting commentators to speak of a Korean wave (the ‘Hallyu’) sweeping across east and southeast Asia (Shim, 2006).

Table 1.1 A typology of media flows

Dominant flows		Contra-(subaltern) flows
Global		Transnational		Geo-cultural
Hollywood		Bollywood		Phoenix
MTV		Al-Jazeera		Zee TV
Disney		Telenovelas		TRT-International
CNN		TV5		AI-Hayat
Discovery		Telesur		Baidu.com
BBC		Radio France Internationale		MBC
ESPN		CCTV-9		NHK World TV
Google		RTTV		islamonline.net
CNBC		Euronews		Roj TV
Wall Street Journal		M-Net
Japanese animation		Korean films

Source: US Government, 2005

Table 1.2 Export of media goods by selected non-Western countries

Countries		Books		Newspapers and periodicals			Recorded media
China*	668				40	510
Japan	108				34	371
Russia	240				15	59
Mexico	120				33	146
South Korea	72				4	175
India	43				13	191
Brazil	12				11	11
Turkey	8				2	13
South Africa	19				2	8
Egypt	6				1	0.3

* Includes Hong Kong and Macao.

Source: UNESCO, 2005a, figures for 2002, rounded to nearest million.

One reason for the growing visibility of such products is the physical movement of people from one geographical location to another, brought about by a process of ‘deterritorialisation’, which García (1995:229) described as ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories’. According to a report of the UN Global Commission on International Migration, the world had nearly 200 million migrants in 2005, partly as a result of globalisation of commerce and communication. Though migration is generally associated with the working classes, increasing internationalisation of a professional workforce, employed by the transnational corporations, international non-governmental organisations and multilateral bureaucracies, as well as a growing number of foreign students, has ensured greater mobility of middle-class populations around the world (UN, 2005).

Transnational satellite broadcasters and online media companies have tapped into these emergent geo-cultural and linguistic groups (Karim, 2003; Chalaby, 2005). In Britain, South Asian channels including Zee, Sony, Star and B4U, are available on Sky’s digital network, while in the USA, such platforms as Echostar DISH system and DirecTV provide a range of programmes for various diasporic groups. MBC is one of the most widely viewed channels in the Arab world, claiming an audience of 130 million viewers and helping to shape a new kind of Arab identity, based on language and culture rather than nationality.

The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, which, since its launch in 1996 has redefined journalism in the Arab world, is a prominent example of contra-flow in global media products. By 2006, this pan-Arabic 24/7news network was claiming to reach 50 million viewers across the world, undermining the Anglo-American domination of news and current affairs in one of the world’s most geo-politically sensitive areas. If the live broadcast of the 1991 US military action against Iraq contributed to making CNN a global presence, the ‘war on terrorism’ catapulted Al-Jazeera into an international broadcaster whose logo can be seen on television screens around the world. In the region, satellite networks have led to what one commentator has called ‘the structural transformation of the Arab public sphere’ (Lynch, 2006). That public sphere also has an Islamist agenda; Al-Jazeera has been labelled by its critics as ‘the voice of Bin Laden’, having aired his taped messages. For the wider world, it has provided an alternative source of information emanating from a news-rich arena and as its services are available in English, its presence is likely to become more important in global news discourse.

Private media corporations have been more successful in accelerating the contra-flow in media products. Since they do not necessarily represent a particular country, they have contributed to creating geo-linguistic or geo-cultural identities, for example the Hong Kong-based Mandarin-language, Phoenix Chinese Channel, which is part of News Corporation. In the decade since it hit the airwaves in 1996, Phoenix has emerged as a key example of a geo-cultural television news and entertainment network which has made its presence felt among Chinese-speaking communities around the world (more than 35 million Chinese people live outside China). Phoenix sees itself as ‘the window to the world for the Chinese global community’ and says it ‘seeks to promote a free flow of information and entertainment within the Greater China region’ (Phoenix website).

Literature Review

Subaltern Flows

This idea is mentioned by Thussu (2012) in his article “Mapping Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow”. He described the subaltern flows as “originators of transnational media flows have a strong regional presence but are also aimed at audiences outside their primary constituency." To better describe “Subaltern flows”, he mentioned the CCTV-9 (now known as CGTN - China Global Television Network) as an example. CCTV-9 is an English language network of China Central Television that broadcasting since 2011 because the official language used here is English. The potential viewer of CCTV-9 can conclude into two major group, the foreigner in China and the overseas Chinese. As Thussu argued that “the expansion of CCTV-9 reflects the recognition by the Beijing authorities of the importance of the English language as the key to success for global commerce and communication and their strategy to bring Chinese public diplomacy to a global audience.”

Transnational telenovelas

Another key example of transnational ‘subaltern flow’ is the Latin American soap opera, the telenovela, which is increasingly becoming global in its reach (Large and Kenny, 2004; Martínez, 2005). The transnationalisation of telenovelas has been made possible through Televisa in Mexico, Venevision in Venezuela, and Globo TV in Brazil—the leading producers of the genre. The Brazilian media giant TV Globo (exporting 26,000 hours of programmes annually to 130 countries) and Mexico’s Televisa (the world’s largest producer of Spanish-language programming, which in 2004 earned $175m from programming exports, largely from telenovelas), are also the two primary exporters of this popular genre of television across the globe (Martínez, 2005).

By 2005 the telenovela had developed into a $2 billion industry, of which $1.6 billion was earned within the region and $341 million outside, being broadcast in 50 languages and dialects and reaching 100 countries from Latin America to southern and eastern Europe, to Asia, Africa and the Arab world (Martínez, 2005). Apart from being a commercial success, telenovelas can also help in the construction of a transnational ‘hispanic’ identity, as the Venezuelan scholar Daniel Mato has suggested (Mato, 2005). The appeal of the genre lies in the melodramatic and often simplistic narrative which can be understood and enjoyed by audiences in a wide variety of cultural contexts (Sinclair, 1999). Bielby and Harrington have argued that this reverse flow has influenced soap operas back in the US, leading to ‘genre transformation’ especially in day-time soaps (Bielby and Harrington, 2005).

The success of telenovelas outside the ‘geo-linguistic market’ of Spanish and Portuguese consumers, shows the complexity of media consumption patterns. Such telenovelas as The Rich Also Cry were very successful in Russia in the 1990s, while Sony developed its first telenovela in 2003—Poor Anastasia for the Russian network, CTC (Martínez, 2005). The genre has become popular even in Western Europe: a German company has produced their own telenovela, Bianca: Road to Happiness,shown in 2004 on the public channel ZDF. In India, Sony has successfully adapted the popular Colombian telenovela, Betty la Fea into Hindi as Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin, which became one of the most popular programmes on Indian television (Large and Kenny, 2004). The transnationalisation of telenovelas is an indication of contra-flow in television content. As one commentator has noted:

In all, about two billion people around the world watch telenovelas. For better or worse, these programmes have attained a prominent place in the global marketplace of culture, and their success illuminates one of the back channels of globalization. For those who despair that Hollywood or the American television industry dominates and defines globalization, the telenovela phenomenon suggests that there is still room for the unexpected. (Martínez, 2005)

‘Bollyworld’

Given its size and diverse social and cultural antecedents, India is among the few non-Western countries to have made their presence felt in the global cultural market. Particularly significant is India’s $3.5 billion Hindi film industry which, in terms of production and viewership, is the world’s largest: every year a billion more people buy tickets for Indian movies than for Hollywood films. More films are made in India each year than in Hollywood, but their influence is largely confined to the Indian subcontinent and among the South Asian diaspora, though in recent years many ‘cross-over’ films have changed this situation (Kaur and Sinha, 2005). The unprecedented expansion of television in the 1990s and early 2000s was a boost for the movie industry, with the emergence of many dedicated film-based pay-channels. In addition, advancements in digital technology and the growth of broad-band have ensured that Indian films are regularly shown outside India, dominating the cinema of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora as well as constructing a popular culture based on ‘Bollywood’.

The globalisation of Bollywood has ensured that Indian films are increasingly being watched by an international audience as well as a wider diasporic one: Hindi films are shown in more than 70 countries and are popular in the Arab world, in central and southeast Asia and among many African countries. This has made it imperative for producers to invest in subtitling to widen the reach of films, as well as privileging scripts which interest the overseas audience. Indian film exports witnessed a twenty-fold increase in the period 1989–99—by 2004 exports accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the industry earnings (FICCI, 2004; UNESCO, 2005a). Plans for joint ventures between Indian film producers and Hollywood giants received a boost with the decision of the Indian government, announced in 2000, to allow foreign companies to invest in the film industry. One result of such interest is that diasporic film makers such as Mira Nair (director of Monsoon Wedding) and the British-based Gurvinder Chaddha (director of such internationally successful ‘British-Asian’ films as Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice) have acted as a bridge between Western and Indian popular cinema.

In 2004 PricewaterhouseCoopers valued the entertainment and media sector in India at $7 billion and it was expected to grow at about 14 per cent over the next five years to reach over $10 billion by 2009 (FICCI, 2004). By 2005, such neologisms as ‘Bollyworld’ were being used—referring to an Indian cinema ‘at once located in the nation, but also out of the nation in its provenance, orientation and outreach’ (Kaur and Sinha, 2005:16).

Hybridity as hegemony

These prominent examples of ‘subaltern’ and ‘geo-cultural’ media flows may give a false impression that the world communication has become more diverse and democratic. A careful analysis of the reality of global media flows and contra-flows demonstrates a more complex process, however. The imbalance between the ‘dominant’ and the ‘subaltern’ and ‘geo-cultural’ global media flows reflects the ‘asymmetries in flows of ideas and goods’ (UNDP, 2004:90). Despite the growing trend towards contra-flow as analysed in this book, the revenues of non-Western media organisations, with the exception of Japanese animation, are relatively small and their global impact is restricted to geo-cultural markets or at best to small pockets of regional transnational consumers. None of the Latin telenovelas has had the international impact comparable with US soaps such as Dallas or the cult following of Friends or Sex and the City, and, despite the growing presence of Indian films outside India, its share in the global film industry valued in 2004 at $200 billion was still less than 0.2 per cent.

At the same time, ‘dominant flows’ are becoming stronger. It is no coincidence that the world’s biggest television network MTV (reaching 418 million households in 2005) is American, as are CNN International (260 million households worldwide) and Discovery Channel (180 million households worldwide). In 2004, out of the world’s top five entertainment corporations, according to Fortunemagazine, four were US-based: Time Warner (2004 revenue: $42.8 billion); Walt Disney (2004 revenue: $30.7 billion); Viacom (2004 revenue: $27.05 billion); and News Corporation (2004 revenue: $20.8 billion). Wal-Mart was for the fourth year running the world’s largest corporation, with a revenue in 2004 of nearly $288 billion and profit of $10.2 billion. Not surprisingly, US-based companies—181 in total—dominated the list (Fortune, 2005). Voice of America claims to have 100 million weekly listeners for its 44 languages; AP reaches 8,500 international subscribers in 121 countries, while APTN is a major television news agency. The world’s top three largest business newspapers and magazines are American: The Wall Street Journal (2005 global circulation 2.3 million), Business Week (1.4 million) and Fortune(1.1 million). The world’s top three magazines too are American: Reader’s Digest (2005 global circulation, 23 million), Cosmopolitan (9.5 million) and National Geographic (8.6 million), as are the two major international news magazines: Time (2005 global circulation: 5.2 million) and Newsweek (4.2 million). The world’s top three advertising agencies in 2005 were all based in the US: Young & Rubican (gross worldwide income $9.25 billion), The Ogilvy Group ($6.48 billion) and J.W.Thompson ($5.05 billion) (Thussu, 2006).

The question of how contra is contra and against whom also acquires salience. With its slogan ‘News from the South’, the pan-Latin American ‘anti-hegemonic’ news network Telesur promises to be an alternative to CNN. ‘It’s a question of focus, of where we look at our continent from’, Jorge Botero, Telesur’s news director told the BBC. ‘They look at it from the United States. So they give a rose-tinted, flavour-free version of Latin America. We want to look at it from right here’ (quoted in Bruce, 2005). It has been dubbed as al-Bolivar—a combination of Al-Jazeera and the Latin American hero. The French government has announced a 24-hour international TV news network, the French International News Channel (CFII) that aims to be the French-language CNN—‘CNN a la Française’. ‘France must…be on the front line in the global battle of TV pictures’ was how President Jacques Chirac justified the network, a joint venture between state-owned broadcaster France Télévisions and commercial television company TF1 (AFP, 2005). These examples, however, are exceptions rather than the rule—both are state-sponsored flows and their impact on global communication is yet to be felt.

In ideological terms, commercial contra-flows champion free-market capitalism, supporting a privatised and commodified media system. One should therefore avoid the temptation to valorise them as counter-hegemonic to the dominant Americana. Subaltern flows are unlikely to have a significant impact on the American hegemony of global media cultures, which, arguably, has strengthened not weakened given the localisation of media content, despite the supposed decentring of global media. This can also bode ill for local cultural sovereignty, as one UN report noted: ‘the unequal economic and political powers of countries, industries and corporations cause some cultures to spread, others to wither’ (UNDP, 2004:90). Moreover, as Americana expands and deepens its hegemony, a hybridised and localised media product can provide the more acceptable face of globalisation and therefore effectively legitimise the ideological imperatives of a free-market capitalism.

Towards a new cartography of global communication

Media flows have a close relationship with economic power: traditionally, trade has followed television. According to a 2003 Goldman Sachs report, over the next few decades Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC economies, could become much larger forces in the world economy. A ‘new geography of trade’, with East Asia, and China in particular taking the lead, is already having ‘a significant impact on international trade flows’ (UNCTAD, 2005:153).

By 2005, South Korea was leading the world in broadband penetration, with nearly a quarter of its population having access to broadband, while China had emerged as the world’s largest television market, overtaking the United States. China also had the world’s largest number of mobile phone users and had become the largest exporter of IT products (OECD, 2005). In communication hardware too China had made impressive progress: the China Great Wall Industry Corporation, a major satellite company, had launched 30 satellites since 1990.

The global expansion of India’s informational technology industry has created the phenomenon of ‘offshore outsourcing’. According to the National Association of Software Service Companies (NASSCOM), the apex body of India’s IT industry, the sector has witnessed an annual growth rate of more than 25 per cent, earning $17.2 billion in export revenue for 2005 (NASSCOM, 2006). As a UNESCO report noted:

Today the value of Indian cultural and creative industries is estimated at $4.3 billion. This sector is growing at an annual rate close to 30 per cent and analysts forecast that exports may continue to grow by 50 per cent in the coming years. An important factor in this impressive performance is that Indian companies are succeeding in bringing international audiences to the cinemas, in addition to the traditional diaspora communities of the USA, the United Kingdom and the Middle East. This strategy includes expansion to non-traditional countries, both industrialised and emerging, such as Japan and China. (UNESCO, 2005a: 44)

Though large population countries such as China and India are yet to fully integrate into the global market, changes in the media and communication industries in these two countries have been remarkable, making them the second and the fourth largest users of the Internet in absolute terms. Such demographic shifts may lead to the decline of English dominance on the Internet, as other languages, including non-European ones, proliferate. In 2006, Chinese was the second largest language of online communication (UNESCO, 2005b). India and China, a British Council report notes, ‘probably now hold the key to the long-term future of English as a global language’ (Graddol, 2006). In the long run, what John Hobson in his important book has called ‘oriental globalisation’ is likely to become more important, given the rapid economic rise of the world’s two largest populated countries with old histories and new geo-political ambitions (Hobson, 2004).

Media flows and contra-flows form part of the wider struggle over information flows which define power relations in the global information economy. In the era of ‘full-spectrum dominance’ and the ‘global information grid’, a hybridised, glocal Americana is likely to circulate with faster velocity, greater volume and higher economic value. It is no coincidence that on the logo of the Pentagon’s Information Awareness Office, the motto is ‘Scientia est potentia—knowledge is power’. Despite the massive movement of media across continents, cultures and communities, one should not lose sight of the fact that ‘soft’ media power is firmly underpinned by ‘hard’ political and economic power.

The advent of "Contra-flow" in global news

While the debate regarding the extent of "contra-flow" in the entertainment industry is ongoing, until 9/11 there were little signs of a "contra-flow" in global news. Here, since the 1970's and 1980's, the undisputed Western dominance took place mainly through global news agencies located in the West. Such agencies were the US based Associated Press International (API), the UK-based Reuters and the French Agence France Press (AFP).  

During the 1980's and 1990's, there was no evidence that the advent of regional non-Western news agencies – which emerged in light of calls for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) - weakened the Western news agencies dominance.  In a comprehensive study for United Nations Education, Scientific and Culture Organization (UNESCO), Boyd-Barrett and Thussu (1992) pessimistically concluded that "the development and maintenance of local and regional centers of news exchange does not in and of itself indicate a weakening in the global market hold of the major western transnational." 

More recent studies, which followed on Thussu and Boyd-Barrett's findings, noted that the gap between non-Western news agencies and Western news agencies actually increased significantly in the 1990s. To illustrate this, consider that in the 1990s, Reuters became one of the top five global media corporations, with nearly 200 news bureaus. By comparison, at the same time, the major non-Western news agency Gemini (which focuses on news from the developing world) collapsed and other non-Western news agencies such as the Pan-African News Agency (PANA) and the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) "dissolved…[and] have been reborn in smaller, mostly commercial, guises." Further, to add to the existent global dominance of Western news agencies, a new layer of dominance of Western transnational news networks was established in the late 1980's with the emergence of transnational networks, such as Star TV, Sky News, BBC World Service and the "global news leader", the US-based CNN.  

The argument of this article, though, is that the new layer of transnational Western networks which brings the Western agenda to the top of the "global news agenda" is being increasingly counter-balanced by Al-Jazeera and its influence on the global news map. In the following examples I will illustrate how the global spread of Al-Jazeera's reports has been gradually eroding Western dominance and promoting a counter-hegemonic news perspective to audiences worldwide in four major news realms.

The first realm: the advent of anti-hegemonic news to mainstream US channels

Since 9/11, Al-Jazeera has succeeded in becoming a brand name in the West and its counter-hegemonic images have repeatedly set the "global news agenda", despite the US' resistance. I will illustrate this argument through two case studies from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where Al-Jazeera challenged the US administration's version of news events on the US mainstream networks. In both cases, it was Al-Jazeera's reach to news events behind the enemy lines and the global spread of its images which contributed to the emergence of these oppositional reports on US television channels.

In Afghanistan, it was Al-Jazeera that first showed the world images of a fallen US drone on the eve of the war. Regardless of the Pentagon's attempt to hide the images, Al-Jazeera emerged as a source to challenge the Pentagon on an event that might have otherwise remained unreported. The availability of these images strengthened the authenticity of reports questioning the Pentagon’s denial of having lost a spy plane and allowed CNN, Al-Jazeera's content partner during the war in Afghanistan, to challenge Pentagon officials over the shoot-down of the plane.

During the outbreak of war in Iraq, Al-Jazeera was once again in position to dictate the "global news agenda" by challenging the Pentagon and the traditional US media's framing of the war by enforcing non-traditional counter-hegemonic images on the US networks. On March 22, 2003, the fourth day of the war in Iraq, despite the US administration's request to censor the report, Al-Jazeera aired a video showing the charred bodies of four US soldiers lying face up and interviews with five US Prisoners of War (POWs). In the video, the POWs looked extremely frightened.  One of the soldiers was a woman. Such images were undoubtedly discouraging to US morale at such an early stage of the war. 

This video according to Sontag (2003) can be considered culturally incongruent since it broke three main taboos of US reporting: firstly, and most important, it broke the principle developed in the name of "good taste", under which "US blood" and particularly the "naked face" is rarely shown .  The principle was first established during World War II after Life magazine published graphic photos of three US soldiers killed on Buna Beach during a landing in New Guinea, which raised severe reaction "at home". The principle was firmly adopted as a broadcasting value after the Vietnam War when the US networks collectively agreed to refrain from showing graphic images of "American blood" on television, particularly "the naked face". Here, particularly controversial was Al-Jazeera's decision to broadcast the close-ups of the faces of dead US soldiers that had been killed in action, some of them lying face up in pools of blood.  

The second taboo broken involved the airing of images of frightened and beaten US soldiers at such an early stage of the war, which for some ridiculed the US army and could have hurt morale: as noted above, the soldiers captured were not frontline fighters, but from a maintenance unit that was ambushed. The video showed individual interviews with the five prisoners, several of whom appeared to be extremely frightened and confused. When asked why he had come to Iraq, one soldier said, "I came to fix broke stuff". Another soldier answered: "I follow orders". A third soldier was shaking with fear. It can be argued that the airing of such images ridiculed the "unbeatable" US army and showed its vulnerability. According to Bennet's "indexing" hypothesis (1990; see also Hallin, 1994), the US media refrains from airing such culturally incongruent images during war at times when the administration is in agreement regarding the necessity of the war (as was the case during the months preceding the war in Iraq).     

Finally, the airing of the images of POWs and their re-broadcast by television networks worldwide broke a third taboo in traditional US wartime reporting - that immediate family members should not have to learn through the media of their loved ones death or capture in a military operation. Here, Nikki Johnson, the mother of POW Shoshanna Johnson, learned about her daughter's capture through the Spanish-language television station, Telemundo, which re-broadcast the Al-Jazeera images (Agencies, 2003 http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/03/25/sprj.irq.pow.johnson).  

In light of these taboos having been broken and the "rally-around the flag" reporting atmosphere, it might have been expected that the US networks would have censored the report altogether. However, the reports and images were aired on CNN, NBC and CBS, and were discussed on 26 news shows between ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News in the following 4 days. Arguably, the reason for this was that traditionally, it was Western news agencies that held such images and decided when and how to distribute them to other networks worldwide. Here, however, Al-Jazeera's graphic images had already been presented both online, on Al-Jazeera's English website, and through other news agencies, making them available to US viewers with either cable/satellite or Internet connection. 

Indeed, the images were aired not only on non-Western stations such as Telemundo but even on television screens in countries that were US's closest allies, such as the UK and Australia. For example, when the US government requested (through the Australian Defense Department) that the Australian media "pixilate" the images in order to "meet[s] its obligations under the (Geneva) conventions", the Australian media captains argued that the Geneva Convention applies only to the behavior of combatants, not observers. 

In accordance with the global spread of the images and in light of the US administration's failure to stop their broadcasting even on the screens of its closest allies, CBS reporter Susan McGinnis noted that Al-Jazeera has "put images for all the world to see" (CBS Morning News, 24 March 2003). This global spread of the Al-Jazeera footage supports Volkmer (2002)  argument regarding the enforcement of culturally incongruent reports from non-Western sources on Western screens, which is a true sign for the emergence of a genuine "counter-hegemonic contra-flow". Volkmer rightly argued that in crisis situations Al-Jazeera’s footage can "…enforce political pressure on national politics and provide a communication realm, which would otherwise not be possible on a national level." (Volkmer, 2002, p. 243)  

Nevertheless, it is important to also note here the boundaries of "counter-hegemonic contra-flow". In response to Al-Jazeera's airing of the images of dead soldiers and interviews with the POWs, some of the US networks not only denounced and censored the images, but also made a link between the ‘controversial’ images and their so-called ‘biased’ source. NBC (NBC, Today, March 23, 2003) went as far as comparing between Saddam's Hussein (alleged) violation of international law (holding weapons of mass destruction) and Al-Jazeera’s violation of another international law: the Geneva conventions. In conjunction, the networks fell silent on a subsequent wave of attacks on Al-Jazeera. This began with the ousting of Al-Jazeera from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange on 25 May 2003 for 'irresponsible' coverage. The US networks’ silence on violent acts against Al-Jazeera continued when Al-Jazeera’s website was hacked by John William Racine, a 24-year-old Californian web designer, who was later fined and sentenced by a US court for the offence. The networks also failed to denounce the action taken by Boston-based Akamai Technologies, whose refusal to offer their service to Al-Jazeera, without explanation, left Al-Jazeera's website vulnerable to attackers. 

Most important, the networks failed to denounce the bombing of the Al-Jazeera offices and the killing of Al-Jazeera’s reporter Tariq Ayoub by the US army on April 8, 2003. This was despite Al-Jazeera's allegation that the US army forces knew their office location and eyewitness reports from the Palestine Hotel – including those of several well-known and respected Western journalists – denying that any weapons fire had come from the building. In November 2005, a ‘Top Secret’ document from the British prime minister's office was leaked to a Daily Mirror reporter and allegedly exposed that U.S. president George W. Bush had discussed bombing the Al Jazeera offices in Qatar. Here, analysis reveals that of the five major US networks, CNN was the only network to give the killing of Tariq Ayoub extensive coverage. NBC and ABC both gave the event a single 5-second mention, and Fox and CBS ignored the incident. 

In conclusion, it can be argued that although Al-Jazeera has the ability to "enforce" counter-hegemonic images on the West thanks to the global spread of its images, it has subsequently been degraded by the Western networks to a 'deviant' source (Hallin, 1994). 

The second realm: English.aljazeera.net's popularity amongst Western surfers

On September 1, 2002, Al-Jazeera launched an English-language version of its Arabic Web site (http//english.aljazeera.net, hereafter referred to as English.Al-Jazeera.Net). According to its mission statement, the Website was designed “to fill a niche for English speakers who want to get the other side of the story, the Arab perspective” by breaking the traditional “language barrier” (Dube, 2003 http://www.poynteronline.org/dg.lts/id.32/aid.46709/column.htm) that exists between Western audiences and the Arab television networks. The launch of this English language news service represents an unprecedented attempt by a foreign network to directly target a Western audience with broadcasts from “behind enemy lines,” with the potential to influence public opinion through reports that frequently contradict the mainstream news media. Undoubtedly, the degree to which Western audiences acceptEnglish.Al-Jazeera.Net will determine the success of this ambitious project and whether it can break the hegemony of Western news organizations as the sole providers of information for Western viewers, readers, and Internet users during wartime. 

In order to examine the interaction between Western surfers and Al-Jazeera's website, I have conducted an exploratory case study. The study utilized two complementary research techniques: content analysis (quantitative) and virtual ethnography (qualitative). The technique of content analysis was used to identify and classify the nature of Web sites that systematically re-present reports fromEnglish.Al-Jazeera.Net. Next, the technique of virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000), which perceives Internet users as a specialized audience that not only consumes but also “culturally produces” content, was conducted in order to analyze what the web users made of the English.Al-Jazeera.Net reports. This was accomplished by examining 486 messages discussing English.Al-Jazeera.Net articles on 102 websites, forums and blogs. 

The primary limitation of this exploratory study is the inability to confirm the identities of the Internet users and Web site content designers that re-presented the English.Al-Jazeera.Net reports (gender, ethnicity, age etc.). Many of the respondents did not reply to requests for interviews or refused to be identified. As such, the report relies on previous studies that have identified the active users of blogs and alternative Web sites as generally “upscale males” with a high level of education and income.

The results were retrieved through searches on Google and Alta Vista in order to maximize the number of results and avoid exclusions stemming from the individual search algorithms. Google was chosen for the study since it is the search engine that index more sites than any other search engines (Vaughan and  Zhang, 2007). Alta Vista, in this case, was used due to the fact that (in comparison to other search engines) its search algorithms produced the most results which did not appear in the Google search.

The study examined the re-presentation and representation of three randomly selected reports from English.Al-Jazeera.Net's coverage of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan from October 1, 2003 to November 30, 2003. The first report, “The Picture Which Shames U.S. Army” (October 17, 2003) by Yvonne Ridley, discussed a picture of US soldiers searching young Afghan children for explosives in the village of Zermit. The photograph – taken secretly – was given to Al-Jazeera by the Islamic Observation Centre. The second article, “Shocking Images Shame U.S. Forces” (November 10, 2003) by Yvonne Ridley and Lawrence Smallman, discussed the image of US soldiers tying up Iraqi women and children in their homes. The third article, “U.S. Continues to Humiliate Iraqis” (November 23, 2003) by Lawrence Smallman, discussed the image of US soldiers searching young Iraqi girls for explosives. The piece quoted an Iraqi father who “promised” that if US soldiers intended to “humiliate” his daughter in such a way he would rather die “and take a few soldiers with him.”

The search has found that these news reports appeared on 118 English Web sites, of which 102 originated in Western countries or were operated by Westerners. Of these, 88 were based in the U.S., six in the U.K., six in Canada, and two in Ireland. 

The reason for the emergent Al-Jazeera-alternative websites bond could be that although alternative media is structured to “subvert society's defining hierarchical social relationships, and sees itself as part of a project to establish new ways of organizing media and social activity” (Albert, 2003 see http://www.zmag.org/whatmakesalti.htm), they often lack the resources to do so (see Boyd-Barrett, 2007). Alternative media cannot always present an oppositional worldview to the patriotic local media since it rarely has enough reporters in the field, particularly during wartime. Here, the availability of reports from a mainstream counter-hegemonic network such as Al-Jazeera creates a win-win situation: the alternative websites get a constant supply of quality news reports and Al-Jazeera provides the Arab angle of news reports to Western viewers on an unprecedented level. A typical example is the following posting from a respondent on Indymedia Vancouver: 

…thank God we have al-jazeera and other news media that present an alternative view to the US propaganda machine. Have you not already learned how many lies the US administration and main stream media have fabricated to justify this illegal and atrocious war? Your attempt to justify treating women and children as such only reveals your true racist agenda (Indymedia Vancouver, Nov. 10, 2003, http://vancouver.indymedia.org/ news/2003/11/81153.php).

Similarly, on Indymedia Portland, the respondent “Zach” argued that the Fox News slogan of “fair and balanced” actually fit Al-Jazeera better: 

… last night I listened to the founder and owner of the Aljazeera network speak. He spoke about the s*** they get from the U.S. for showing certain things, but he said he also gets the same s*** from every country in the Middle East for reporting "not so nice things" about them too. Now that"s “Fair & Balanced” (Indymedia Portland, Nov. 10, 2003, http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/11/274602.shtml).

However, the most surprising finding is that websites with no political affiliation also chose to use Al-Jazeera's material on various events. The following discussions provided the most heated debates regarding the nature and credibility of English.Al-Jazeera.Net, particularly because such forums invite users with less defined or rigid views. Govteen.com, a non-profit US-based corporation that aims “to provide interactive and engaging educational opportunities for teenagers by teenagers” logged more than 50 postings after its re-presentation of the English.Al-Jazeera.Net report on the restraining of Iraqi women and children. On Govteen.com, “Weejoby”, the first user to post a message about the article and start the debate, wrote: "Why did i[sic] have to go to aljazeera to find out about this? Can anyone find it on CNN for me?" (Govteen.com, Nov. 12, 2003, http://forums.govteen.com/showthread.php?t=52516&page=1). This is interesting because the participants are US teenagers whose opinions regarding the war could be significantly shaped by the content of these forums. The proliferation of transnational news channels and alternative news sources, then, can generate a heightened awareness of differing political perspectives. One former study has found that this diversity of angles can foster an attitude of skepticism towards the content and perspective of the mainstream media (Michalsky et al., 2000 p. 37 see http://www.afterseptember11.tv).       

Thus, regardless if the participants agree with the credibility or meaning of the images, their discussion of and encounter with Al-Jazeera's material on such mainstream websites and forums is a new phenomenon that arguably would not have occurred if it was not for the strength of the Al-Jazeera brand. 

          This analysis has also demonstrated that the more liberal and “alternative” the Web site (alternative news media and blogs), the more they are willing to use English.Al-Jazeera.Net reports and the more likely they are to accept Al-Jazeera as a credible news source. In contrast, Web sites related to the mainstream media such as Opinion Journal by Wall Street Journal and hate groups rarely use English.Al-Jazeera.Net reports and regard Al-Jazeera as a “mouthpiece” for Osama bin Laden.

            To conclude, while this small-scale analysis does not establish that Al-Jazeera's articles are used as a main source for Western blogs and websites for their everyday news discussions, it does show that Western surfers are aware of the alternative views provided on English.Aljazeera.Net.

The third realm: the Al-Jazeera English television channel

On November 15, 2006, Al-Jazeera launched a 24-hour English television channel. The channel aims at "emphasizing news from the developing world, without an Anglo-American worldview" (https://english.aljazeera.net). Its stated objective is to "reverse the [North to South] flow of information". The channel's executives also declare that it aims to compete with CNN and BBC World and give a global perspective to a potential world audience of over one billion English speakers. In turn, we see that the channel proudly presents its objective of providing counter-hegemonic worldview to the current transnational news broadcasters. In contrast to the "Bollywood" and "telenovelas'" "contra-flow", which usually takes place in Hindi and Spanish (respectively) and therefore often limits them to diasporic audiences, Al-Jazeera addresses global viewers in English and therefore maximizes its viewing potential.

Indeed, the numbers are smiling for the new Al-Jazeera English Channel: while the founders had initially expected to reach around 40 million households, the channel far exceeded that target on its launch date, reaching 80 million homes. Al-Jazeera English can be viewed in over 50 countries, including countries that are rarely exposed to the Arab take on news events in English, such as Israel. 

Schiesel (2001) said it is important to note that despite the ambition of the United States administration to block access to the Al-Jazeera English Channel, it is nearly impossible to do so thanks to technology. To illustrate, consider that although most American cable providers have not agreed to carry the channel (i.e. Comcast, the largest cable company, said it made the decision based on purely financial grounds), viewers with broadband connection can bypass the local carriers' decision by watching the channel online. Further, subscribers to the DishTV satellite system and to Globecast are able to get the English-language Al Jazeera on television for an extra fee.

Despite it being too early to fully study the effect of Al-Jazeera's English television channel, all these factors signify that it has a good chance of successfully reaching and impacting Western viewers, and providing them directly the Arab take on global news.

The fourth realm: the race to counterweight CNN and BBC World 

Al-Jazeera is rapidly refining the global news map by inspiring the emergence of regional and global counter-hegemonic news networks in developing regions. In 2005, Hugo Chavez launched Telesur (Spanish for "The New Television Station of the South") in Latin America as a counterweight to the Western-centered Spanish-speaking CNN and Univision. Telesur, whose slogan is "Our North is the South,”  is co-owned by Venzuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Nicaragua and broadcasts to most of the Latin American continent. Upon its launch, Bruce (2005) stated that both Chavez and Telesur Head Andres Izarra said that the birth of the channel was inspired by the success of Al-Jazeera. Indeed, Latin American often calls Telesur "the Latin Al-Jazeera". In early 2006, Telesur established its link to Al-Jazeera by signing a content-exchange agreement with the Qatari network.

            The trend to counterweight CNN and BBC World spreads to other regions as well. In July 2007, both Iran and Pakistan joined the ranks of non-Western countries with news networks born in order to counterweight the Western-centered global news stations. The Iranian-run Press TV aims to counter accusations against its nuclear arms race and "show the world the Iranian side of the story". The station is based in Tehran and broadcasts in English round-the-clock. Concurrently, Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf launched Dawn News under Pakistan Herald Publications Limited (PHPL), Pakistan's largest English-language media group. Similarly, in June 2007, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) launched SABC News International, which is "dedicated to reporting domestic & international news from an African perspective" (http://www.sabcnews.com/features/news_international). The channel currently broadcasts to Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Europe.  

Further, the competition to counterweight the influence of CNN and BBC World is taking place also in the G8 countries: Russia, Germany and France, have all launched their own English-channel news networks recently, namely Russia Today, Deutsche Welle and France 24 (respectively). 

Beyond the trend of counter-weighting the global dominance of CNN and BBC World, in many non-Western regions the local carriers are gradually replacing these global Western news networks with Al-Jazeera. For example, SABC discontinued its CNN service in 2004 and the BBC World Service in 2006, exchanging them with Al-Jazeera. Similarly, in November 2007, the Israeli cable carrier HOT announced that it was discontinuing the CNN service and was in negotiations to replace it with the English Al-Jazeera channel.   

Theoretical framework

Agenda Setting Theory

The main thrust of the Agenda Setting Theory is that while the mass media may not be powerful enough to determine for us what and how we actually think, they are obviously influential in determining what we as a nation, society or group think about at a particular time: they pre-determine what issues are regarded as important at a given time in a given society. For instance, they set the agenda for political campaigns; they “help” to keep political and other crises alive; they help to bring some people to public prominence and fame (or notoriety). The elements through which the media (consciously or unconsciously) prosecute agenda setting include:

The quantity or frequency of reporting on an issue;

Prominence given to the reports — through headline display, pictures and layout in newspapers, magazines, film, graphics; or timing on radio and television;

Core assumptions and statements

Agenda-setting is the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media. As well, agenda-setting describes the way that media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. Two basic assumptions underlie most researches on agenda-setting:

1.                  the press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it;

2.                  media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues.

These core statements were established by measuring the changes in salience through the use of surveys with the presence of more frequent news coverage.

One of the most critical aspects in the concept of an agenda-setting role of mass communication is the time frame for this phenomenon. In addition, different media have different agenda-setting potential. From the perspective of agenda setting, the analysis of the relationship between traditional media and new virtual spaces has witnessed growing momentum.

Discussion

There is no doubt that the emergence of media networks like Al Jazeera, CCTV etc have seriously challenged the hegemonic position of the core western media like BBC, CNN etc, but it has not significantly bridged the gap on global information flow. The core Western media still dominate the information flow taking into consideration their economic strength, access to modern technology and most importantly, long history of acceptability. This means that if contra flow should be fully achieved in terms of balancing the information flow, serious effort must be put in the area of aggressive, quality and professional information flow coming especially from the third world country. 

Conclusion

This paper has shown that there is a significant effort from the third world countries to balance up the conventional trend of core western media controlling and dominating the global media flow. The Al-Jazeera "contra-flow" is significantly different from former "contra-flows" - particularly the "Bollywood" and "telenovela" contra-flows - which usually complemented rather than opposed Western values when exporting programs and films on a global level. In stark contrast, Al-Jazeera's anti-hegemonic reports have managed to successfully challenge the hegemonic perspective of Western networks on many levels, as illustrated in this paper. The analysis conducted shows that more and more Western and non-Western viewers are exposed to the counter-hegemonic point-of-view of events.

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