News Agencies, National Images, and Global Media Events

Abstract

One strategy used by nations to enhance their image is to host global media events. This study examines Associated Press, Reuters, and Inter Press Service coverage of six major U.N. summit meetings for their presentation of the host nations. Three of the conferences took place in western capitals; three were held in the developing world. While hosting a summit resulted in a nation getting a higher profile than it would if only a participant, western hosts received more overtly positive coverage than those from the developing world. The topic of the U.N. summit also influenced how news agencies portrayed a host nation.

Seeing Europe Through the Eyes of Others: How ‘Local’ is the EU in Asia-Pacific News?

“…Empirical news media studies, such as those conducted by Chang (1998) and Giffard and Rivenburgh (2000), concur that news selection, processing, and gatekeeping vary dramatically from culture to culture, country to country, region to region, and from owner to owner. The values and heritage of the news producers, as well as the degree of conformity of EU issues with the national agenda, inevitably influence the volume of coverage and its evaluation.…”

Image Impacts of Planned Special Events: Literature Review and Research Agenda

“…Special events are not hosted in a sociocultural vacuum (Getz, 1997;Hall, 2001); rather they are deeply embedded in the "glocal" sociocultural realities. Many studies find that ideology (Issue 4) (Berger, 2010;Dimeo & Kay, 2004;Giffard & Rivenburgh, 2000;Preuss & Alfs, 2011;Rivenburgh, 1992Rivenburgh, , 1995, politics (Issue 16) (Mangan, Ok, & Park, 2011;Paret, 1978), elitism (Issue 9) ( McCallum et al, 2005;O'Donnell, 2006;Reid, 2006), and gender (Issue 12) (Berger, 2010;Trump, 1998) can influence the nature of the event hosts' projected images. Briefly, these forces (among others) create an invisible "field," through which the hosts' projected images are usually filtered if not distorted.…”

“…A couple of studies on the 1988 Winter and Summer Olympics (Jaffe & Nebenzahl, 1993;Ritchie & Smith, 1991;Rivenburgh, 1992) heralded a significant increase of publications later on in this period. In total, 20 studies had emerged to examine the image of impacts of sport events (e.g., Chalip, Green, & Hill, 2003;Mossberg & Hallberg, 1999;Ritchie & Smith, 1991), sociocultural events (Richards & Wilson, 2004;Trump, 1998), political events (Giffard & Rivenburgh, 2000), and business events (Erfurt & Johnsen, 2003). Besides, under the general topic, various interesting subtopics (e.g., nature of the image impacts, influences of image subject/ideology/gender on the impacts, and "effect decay") were further developed.…”

The creation of cultural policy in the media: a field research of cultural discourses in Germany

“…Our point of departure was a press release from 2 March 2010 that introduced the book's subject into the media discourse, as well as the following reports from the Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA). The DPA qualifies as a privileged disseminator of information; its basic purpose is to make information and news available to news media editorial teams (Giffard and Rivenburgh 2000). By including the DPA, we also attained a situation in which not only those media could report about the subject who were addressed by the press release, but also the entire national press landscape.…”