By Kaarle Nordenstreng and Michael Griffin (Editors)

Hampton Press (1999)

Reviewer: James F. Scotton
Marquette University

This is a book that suffers from too many authors (34) and chapters (21) and too little organization. The Media Monitoring theme seems to encompass all types of studies, mostly content analyses ranging from media coverage of famine in Africa to election coverage in Eastern Europe and TV violence in the United States. The book's 21 chapters are in eight sections, too many to provide a good structure for all this information.

Most of the content analyses are of U.S. media. George Gerbner's classic 1982-92 television study yields two articles, one focusing on the portrayal of violence and the other on women's roles. Another study of U.S. television by Charles Whitney and others is also firmly based in the data. Most other chapters have much less data on which to base conclusions and even some rather severe judgments.

In the Preface and Chapter 1, Nordenstreng makes clear the purpose of the book. First, he wants to report on media monitoring projects that developed after the 1980 MacBride Report to UNESCO. That report called for "a new more just and more efficient world information and communication order" and started a U.S.-UNESCO rift that persists to this day. Nordenstreng also wants "a renewal of the social responsibility theory of the press." This theory, of course, came out of the 1948 Hutchins Commission Report and was popular, at least in academic seminars, for several decades. Given the founding fathers Nordenstreng cites, it's no surprise that the bete noire is a familiar one: commercial Western media. There has been a series of recent books attacking these media (The Global Media, 1997; Electronic Empires, 1998; Digital Capitalism, 1999), probably in reaction to the unprecedented march of Western media and their models across the apparently welcoming satellite audiences.

Nordenstreng wants to get a global system of monitoring this media organized. This is a difficult assignment. Efforts started after the MacBride Report met Western media and political (particularly U.S.) hostility. Two chapters report on recent efforts. Annabelle Sreberny and Robert L. Stevenson report on a 1995 project involving monitors in 45 countries. Only preliminary results are here, suggesting the scope of problems when analyzing disparate data from widely dispersed researchers. Another contribution that attempts to look at media globally is Margaret Gallagher's study of how media portrayed men and women in 71 countries on one day in 1995. It took a year to organize a network of women to carry out the study and six months to collect and analyze the data.

Although there is useful data here, much of it was published earlier. Some of the data become platforms for some rather large leaps. Rune Ottosen shows again that coverage of the Third World by the Western media is focused on war and conflict. In Somalia, he says, Western journalists "were obsessed with violence." Fair enough, given the demands of TV news directors. But then Ottosen says the focus and obsession exist "even though reader surveys have indicated that what readers want is more coverage of everyday life and local culture." To be precise, this, like a low-fat diet, is what readers say they want. The evidence suggests that Western readers are both overweight and avid consumers of media violence. The other African study charges TV coverage with emphasizing the "natural disaster" of famine, not focusing on more important political, economic and social causes. The authors make a rather long leap in concluding that journalists "are relieving the news audience of the need to question any Western/U.S. complicity in the formation of poverty or creation of famine."

The agenda of the book and at least some of its authors is ambitious. Hermant Shah, in a thoughtful review of how race is covered in U.S. media, wants both researchers and the media to change. Changing the first can lead to a change in the second, he suggests. Most media studies, he argues, are too narrowly focused on traditional content analysis. A new approach is needed. "An initial step media researchers can take is to document through qualitative methods the ways mass media segregate and degrade racial and ethnic minorities in the process of creating a sense of nation." Once the problems with the news coverage of minorities is exposed, writes Shah, "action is needed to help news media to see the problems they create and convince them to change their practices." Will the media pay any attention? Says Johan Galtung, another contributor who has tried for four decades to get the media as interested in peace as they are in war, "Maybe not so much as the French chef reported to have committed suicide when his restaurant lost one star."

Works Cited: