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75 No. 113 — November 2004 Tal Azran RESISTING PERIPHERAL EXPORTS: AL JAZEERA’S WAR IMAGES ON US TELEVISION Abstract This paper describes work that is underway to develop a framework for the analysis of media flows from periphery to centre — the phenomenon known in globalisation studies as ‘contra- flow’. The framework proposed in this paper challenges the fundamentals of current studies of peripheral exports, which arguably fail to consider Western resistance involved in the re- presentation of peripheral networks due to the presumption that ‘contra-flow’ single-handedly supports the cultural heterogenisation paradigm. The paper suggests that this presumption is outdated, particularly in light of growing tensions in the wake of 9/11, and that ‘contra- flows’ which threaten the West can promote cross-cultural polarisation beside heterogenisation.
The paper argues that researchers would be in a better position to identify the general tendency of media globalisation if they began to think of periphery–centre encounters more critically through the proposed framework. To illustrate this, the paper examines the case study of US media’s re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s so-called ‘counter-flowing’ war reports through the proposed framework. Introduction Transnational audiovisual flows from the periphery to the centre are now a well- established aspect of the spread of the US model of professional television, the availability of digital and satellite technologies and the deregulation of international trade. From a media globalisation perspective, the significance of these networks is that ‘countries once thought of as major “clients” of media imperialism, such as Mexico, Canada and Australia … have successfully exported their programs and personnel into the metropolis — the empire strikes back’ (Sinclair et al., 1996: 23).
Media exports from the periphery that counter the previously established one-way information flow from centre to periphery are known as ‘contra-flow’.
Many scholars, such as Lull (2000: 153), have perceived that the phenomenon of contra-flow creates a process of ‘transculturation’, ‘in which cultural flows … interact with other cultural forms, influence each other, and produce new forms’ (2000: 153). For Lull, the successful integration of peripheral cultural flows with the media of the metropolis results in ‘re-territorialisation’ (2000: 159–64). Such use of the concept of contra-flow, then, assumes that global cultures are in a process of ongoing cultural mixing. Accordingly, we see that the great majority of the researchers of peripheral exports in the last 20 years have used the concept of contra-flow to argue for an ongoing cultural hybridisation (Antola and Rogers, 1984; Allen, 1995; Sinclair et al., 1996; UNESCO, 1998; Chohan, 1999; Lull, 2000; Volkmer, 2002). 76Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy Missing from the literature is a framework that will identify tensions between peripheral media exports and the centre, specifically due to Western resistance to these flows. Such a framework would go beyond the current view that periphery– centre encounters only produce cross-cultural heterogenisation and would allow also for the identification of cultural flows from periphery to centre which fail to ‘reterritorialise’. Specifically, this paper proposes that a turn to a more critical framework is essential in light of growing tensions between the West and the Arab world in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 (henceforth 9/11). It aims to develop guidelines towards such a framework, particularly with reference to news, and to put this to an empirical test through a case study of a media export that is considered a contra-flow. I chose to examine the export of Al Jazeera’s war images to US news networks as a case study since media researchers see Al Jazeera as a counter-flowing network in the wake of 9/11 (see below). While the network’s images undoubtedly influenced audience perceptions of the war, Al Jazeera faced resistance from US networks and thus produced the contradictory effect of promoting cross-cultural polarisation and heterogenisation at the same time. The framework As a point of theoretical departure, I propose that we should study the integration of peripheral media exports through adopting a customised holistic approach. To elaborate, the holistic approach emphasises the interdependence of media production, news sources, the general social and political context of media representation, and audience reception. It was developed with the study of media representations of ethnic groups in mind (Fenton et al., 1997; Halloran, 1998; Deacon et al., 1999), but here I focus on a different form of cross-cultural communication: the phenomenon of re-presentation, or the repackaging and rebroadcast of Al Jazeera news items on US television networks.
As a first step, we need to consider the mediation of the peripheral flow. The paper argues that, while researchers have heavily relied on the Appadurai idea of ‘heterogeneous dialogues’ to analyse peripheral exports (e.g. Lull, 2000), they have focused on dialogues that portray cultural mixing while failing to consider that Appadurai also saw that some interactions result in cultural resistance, where ‘states seek to pacify populations whose own ethnoscapes are in motion and whose mediascapes may create severe problems for the ideoscape with which they are presented’ (1990: 10). We need to look beyond the Western re-presentation of the imported material and examine the original data as presented by the peripheral network. This will illuminate the mechanism of data selection — particularly which images and information have been filtered and which have been overly emphasised to cater to Western audiences.
Second, and relatedly, researchers need to compare the Western re-presentation of peripheral exports with the original context under which the material was presented by the peripheral network, in order to verify that the export was not manipulated and re-presented ‘out of its original [ethnic] context’. Third, in order to put the Western re-presentation of peripheral media exports in perspective, we should compare it with the re-presentation of similar images when coming from Western 77 No. 113 — November 2004 sources during similar crises. This will allow us to better assess the impact of the fact that the information comes from a peripheral network on the frequency and valence in the [Western] re-presentation of the images. Fourth, researchers should conduct a study of audience reception of the peripheral export in the receiving metropolis to learn how the ‘active audience’ interprets it. (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; Cobley, 1994). Last, to contextualise the analysis even further, some researchers might be interested in identifying silences — cases where the metropolis ignored significant newsworthy items from the periphery.
Al Jazeera as a counter-flowing network The first time most Americans heard the name Al Jazeera was on Sunday, 7 October 2001, the day US and British forces began targeting the Taliban in Afghanistan. On that day, American networks ‘imported’ from Al Jazeera exclusive war images from Kabul as well as an exclusive video message from Osama bin Laden. Thanks to these images, Al Jazeera rose overnight from being a local Middle Eastern name to become a player in the global news media arena. For many, by imposing its images on American networks in this way, Al Jazeera brought the enemy’s perspective directly to mainstream American viewers, thus transforming traditional wartime news coverage and public opinion in the West.
Accordingly, for Zednick:
Suddenly, al-Jazeera was not only delivering the news to its thirty-five million viewers, including 150 000 in the US, it was telling the world’s top story to billions of people around the planet via international media that had little choice but to use al-Jazeera’s pictures. It was not simply covering the war; it became an important player in the global battle for public opinion. (2002: 3) Volkmer (2002: 241) added to Zednick’s view the idea that Al Jazeera would actually influence the content of Western broadcasting. Volkmer anticipated that the advent of ‘authentic’ news networks such as Al Jazeera during a crisis:
will increasingly create counter-flows of mainstream news coverage — internationally and domestically — and might establish a new dimension in the global news flow, which not only refines domestic and foreign news in national journalism during times of crisis but also the news angle of transnational channels, such as CNN.
This argument was also made in an empirical study that compared news frames of the war in Afghanistan on CNN and Al Jazeera from 9/11 to July 2002. The study saw that Al Jazeera ‘provided a new perspective not present in American media during the 1991 Gulf War’ (Jasperson and El-Kikhia, 2003: 120). The example to support this argument was taken from a CNN report from 9 October 2001, a re-presentation of Al Jazeera ‘pictures from the hospital inside Kabul, which showed some injuries, showed some children, women and men who the Taliban claim have been injured in the previous night’s attack’ (CNN Live, 13 October 2001, cited in Jasperson and El-Kikhia, 2003: 120). Thus the study concluded that Al Jazeera was ‘forcing a change on not only other media outlets in the region but also on non- Arab media covering Arab issues’ (2003: 131). 78Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy I challenge the fundamental presumptions and methods used by the above researchers. To compare the re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s images with the 1991 Gulf War would actually refute their findings, for Jasperson and El-Kikhia failed to consider the presentation of the images of the bombing of the al-Amariya shelter. These images, taken by Western news agencies, were one of the most covered events of the first Gulf War, and even raised questions regarding the efficiency of the ‘precision bombing’ tactic, while similar Al Jazeera reports on Afghan civilian casualties during the 2001 war in Afghanistan were mainly ignored.
This example illustrates the different spin that Western media put on (similar) images when they come from an Arab source. The proposed framework, then, challenges the research perspective taken by Jasperson and El-Kikhia and shows that researchers need to go beyond the fact of the flow of peripheral images and ask how the images would be re-presented differently had they come from a Western source.
Let’s examine the validity of the argument that Al Jazeera counter-flows to US media cannot take place without analysis of the relevant political context. In relation to traditional US reporting during wartime, Hallin (1986) notes that the media move from their near-propagandistic stance during periods of official consensus (‘the sphere of consensus’) towards a more neutral style of reporting (‘the sphere of legitimate controversy’) only with the emergence of officials’ dissent. For example, Hallin found that, during the Vietnam War, television news dramatically changed its initial support towards US involvement in the war after the Tet Offensive.
Bennett (2003) suggests that, between 9/11 and Bush’s declaration of victory in the Iraqi war on 1 May 2003, we ‘witnessed an extraordinary convergence of factors that produced near perfect journalistic participation in government propaganda operations’, which led to reporting under ‘the sphere of consensus’. In accordance, if Volkmer’s assertion proves true, a counter-flowing Al Jazeera would at times influence the consensual news angle of US networks towards a more neutral stance of reporting under the ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’. Re-presentation of images from the war in Afghanistan I analysed the transcripts and images of 251 news items where US media re- presented exclusive war reports from Al Jazeera during the course of the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. These include the re-presentation of air strikes and civilian casualties during the war in Afghanistan, and the re-presentation of the famous video of dead American soldiers and prisoners of war (POWs) during the war in Iraq (23 March 2003). The dates chosen are intentionally within the period defined by Bennett as media reporting ‘under the sphere of consensus’, so the analysis begins on 11 September 2001 and ends on 1 May 2003, the day president Bush declared victory in Iraq. The analysis examines re-presentations on the five major US television networks — the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Cable News Network (CNN) and the Fox News Channel (FNC, or Fox).
Since the study examines TV news re-presentation of images, the method of visual 79 No. 113 — November 2004 analysis was chosen as the preferred research strategy. The images were collected from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and the relevant transcripts were collected from Lexis-Nexis News Archive. In addition, I interviewed reporters from Al Jazeera and the CBS Senior Vice President for News Coverage, to learn first-hand about the Al Jazeera–US network interplay.
Our analysis begins on 7 October 2001, the day British and American forces began hitting the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Since Al Jazeera was the only source of images from Kabul (thanks to the news monopoly ensured by the Taliban), the five major US networks rebroadcast Al Jazeera’s exclusive war images of a night sky periodically lit up by explosions. By airing Al Jazeera’s war images, FOX network, CBS, NBC and ABC breached an exclusive content exchange deal between CNN and Al Jazeera (El-Nawawy and Iskandar, 2002:
163–65) and the networks often did not credit Al Jazeera for its images (Michalsky and Preston, 2002: 16).
The networks’ use of Al Jazeera’s images made a great impact on the White House. US officials saw Al Jazeera’s war reports, which contained graphic images of civilian casualties, as counter-productive to the war on terrorism. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described Al Jazeera’s coverage as ‘propagandistic and inflammatory’, and accused the network of manufacturing footage of dead civilians:
‘What they do is when a bomb goes down they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children.’ (NBC Evening News, 28 October 2001) In line with the administration’s policy, the US networks emphasised the images of the air-strikes on Afghanistan while filtering Al Jazeera’s graphic images of civilian casualties. According to Sontag, images of air bombings are traditionally aired to illustrate American ‘air superiority’ over its enemy and to present an image of a sterile ‘techno war’ (Sontag, 2003: 68). To illustrate this, consider the following ABC Good Morning America report of air-strikes on 11 October 2001:
Got some pictures to show you that are sort of signs of the times. These are off that Middle Eastern television network, Al Jazeera, and it is a picture of … planes in the air right over Kabul flying not only now at night, as they did when the attacks began, but during the daytime, as well, with air superiority established now … The visual analysis shows that CNN was the only network that regularly aired reports on civilian casualties from Al Jazeera. However, CNN filtered the graphic images of civilian casualties from the reports. On 8 October 2001, CNN Live This Morning rebroadcast an Al Jazeera report on a bombing that destroyed a military hospital around the capital of Kabul. On the following day, CNN Live at Daybreak re-presented another Al Jazeera report on a US missile attack that mistakenly hit a mine-clearance humanitarian organisation and reportedly killed four Afghani employees of the organisation. The original reports included very graphic images:
from young children bruised and bandaged in hospitals (including one famous image that showed severely bruised dead children — see Figure 1) through mothers wailing and lamenting the loss of families, to bodies laid out on stretches and people digging graves for civilians. However, CNN chose to show the relatively ‘sterile’ and ‘after the fact’ image of homes reduced to rubble (see Figure 2). 80Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy Figure 1: Dead Afghani kids, Al Jazeera exclusive, 8 October 2001.
Reprinted with permission from Al Jazeera Figure 2: CNN report, homes reduced to rubble, 8 October 2001. Copyright\ Al Jazeera. Reprinted with permission from Al Jazeera. 81 No. 113 — November 2004 Overall, the re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s reports of large-scale civilian killings caused by ‘precision bombing’ was scarce compared with what might have been the case with images from another Western source, such as the networks’ presentation of the largest-scale civilian killings reported during the war: the 23 October 2001 US bombing of a village near Kandahar, which mistakenly killed 93 civilians, and another bombing in the village of Quetta, which again mistakenly killed another 29 civilians. The Pentagon, which apart from Al Jazeera was the only source for images of the attack, has acknowledged that on at least two occasions on that day, its bombs mistakenly hit civilian areas (ABC World News Now, 23 October 2001). To report the incidents, CNN, NBC and ABC used the images from the Pentagon, which showed injured civilians in a hospital in Baghdad, mostly in good condition compared with those contained in Al Jazeera’s images.
While the networks ignored Al Jazeera’s graphic images of the casualties, they did re-present Al Jazeera’s exclusive footage of the precise bombing of a moving Taliban fuel convoy (CNN Sunday Morning, 28 October 2001; CBS Evening News, 27 October 2001), a sign of the efficiency of the precision bombing technology and of the ability to hit moving targets. Thus we see that the only Al Jazeera images selected for this report were those that counteracted the Pentagon images of civilian casualties by illustrating the efficiency of ‘precision bombing’.
In contrast, during the 1991 Gulf War, a tragedy of similar scope — the war bombing of the al-Amariya shelter (which killed 288 civilians, mostly women and children) — received much wider coverage thanks to the presence of Western cameras. MacGregor (1994: 242) describes the al-Amariya coverage as an:
overdrive reporting of what promised to be the single most important story of the air war [which involved] the unprecedented issue of large numbers of reporters working from an enemy capital under fire, filing reports that the enemy might use for propaganda purposes to reach over the heads of governments and their persuasion machines to speak directly to Western public opinion.
CNN’s Peter Arnett affirmed that there was no military target within miles of the site and that the building was a baby-milk plant, pointing out a clearly visible sign reading ‘shelter’ in Arabic and English, thus pointing out US guilt in bombing the shelter. On the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather presented the deaths as a failure of the whole ‘precision bombing technology’, and described the images of a man looking for his relatives between some of the bodies and the wounded as ‘some graphic scenes of the reality of war’ (13 February 2001). Re-presentation from the Iraq war During the buildup to the war in Iraq, the US administration, which was running the Iraq war from a base outside of Al Jazeera’s home city of Doha, Qatar, had worked hard to maintain a good relationship with Al Jazeera, which it saw as an important vehicle in explaining to Iraqis the American reasons for war. The Al Jazeera reporters were offered extra spots as ‘embedded’ journalists with the US military, though it had to decline spots in Bahrain and Kuwait due to its unstable 82Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy relationship with the host countries (cf. Khalil, 2003). This, however, changed on 23 March, when Al Jazeera aired a six-minute tape showing four dead US soldiers and interviews with five prisoners of war, all members of the 507th mechanised division which took a wrong turn and was ambushed by Iraqi forces around the southern city of al-Nasiriyah.
In the original footage presented on Al Jazeera, the commentator stated that Al Jazeera was showing the images in the name of objectivity. However, Al Jazeera’s airing of the images and their re-presentation by Western networks broke a few taboos in American war reporting. The first, developed in the name of good taste since the war in Vietnam, is that ‘US blood’ — and particularly the naked face — is rarely shown (Sontag, 2003: 68–70). US media had to decide how to handle Al Jazeera’s images, which showed the dead soldiers face up and focused on their wounds — images that had not only already been presented to Arabs, but also to international audiences through various news agencies.
Nevertheless, in the United States, the networks chose to censor the images (see Figure 3): Fox network, NBC and the ABC explicitly explained to their audience that the images were too brutal to show; CNN and CBS partially censored the images. CBS showed a glimpse of the footage of dead American soldiers and blackened out their faces, while the voice-over read ‘Donald Rumsfeld cautioning all of us when we see these fixed location shots, it is just giving us a small sliver of an idea of what is going on.’ (Face the Nation, 23 March 2003) Figure 3: Dead American soldier, Al Jazeera report, 23 March 2003.
Reprinted with permission from Al Jazeera.
The CNN Live Event/Special (23 March 2003) declared it had made a decision not to show the ‘disturbing’ images of those killed. Instead, it used a single image of a dead soldier with no identifiable features. The CNN network further added that, in other images, it was apparent that a number of soldiers had been executed, some of them in the forehead — a symbol of the enemy’s cruelty and a violation 83 No. 113 — November 2004 of the Geneva Convention. Similarly, on NBC, Jim Miklaszewski reported that — according to the Pentagon version — some of the American soldiers had been executed, emphasising the Pentagon’s version over his own analysis, which was as follows:
I must add this caveat, however … that in taking a close look at the tape it appears that some of them had other wounds. They may have been killed elsewhere, their bodies taken to this building. And even those who appear to have been executed could have been shot elsewhere and brought into the building. (NBC, Today, 23 March 2003) The airing of the images of POWs and its re-broadcast by TV networks worldwide broke another taboo in traditional wartime reporting in the United States, in that immediate family members should not have to learn through the media of their loved one’s 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. In response, the administration sent requests to all news agencies worldwide not to air these images, at least until family members were notified, in order to maintain this principle. In turn, the NBC also denounced Al Jazeera’s ‘controversial’ decision to air the ‘disturbing’ videos (NBC, Dateline, 23 March 2003). Following the administration’s requests, Al Jazeera agreed to withhold the broadcasting of these images until the families were notified (although it was already too late).
Traditionally, it was Western news agencies that held such images and decided when and how to distribute them to networks worldwide. Here, Al Jazeera’s graphic images were already presented, in the words of Susan McGinnis from CBS, ‘for all the world to see’ (CBS Morning News, 24 March 2003). Various media, and even some Western networks, refused to censor the images. A famous example is the broadcasting of Al Jazeera’s images by Australian media, which refused the US and Australian administration requests to pixilate the images of American prisoners of war since, Australian media captains argued, the Geneva Convention applies only to the behaviour of combatants, not observers (Holloway, 2003).
The US administration, however, still urged the American networks to censor the images of the POWs. In an interview on CNN Live Event/Special on 23 March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld declared that networks that chose to air the images were doing something which was ‘unfortunate’, since the Geneva Convention ‘makes it illegal for prisoners of war to be shown and pictured and humiliated’. Here again, US media adopted the administration line and insisted that the images violate the Geneva Convention. Further, some news anchors did not apply the journalistic code of detachment and expressed their grief over the images. On the CNN Live Event/ Special, it was Aaron Brown who said the images were ‘chilling for us, and I suspect many of you’ (24 March 2003); on NBC, Kelly O’Donnell also shared her feelings with the viewers: ‘Many of us, not only those in uniform but those of us covering the story, were deeply moved and disturbed by it … it’s a very sensitive topic here and, the images of Al Jazeera caused a great deal of concern.’ (NBC, Today, 24 March 2003) Furthermore, for the NBC, Al Jazeera’s airing of the 84Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy images supported the administration’s central arguments for the war: that the enemy do not respect international law and does not adhere to all of the conventions or the rules of warfare (NBC, Today, 23 March 2003; NBC News Special Report:
Target: Iraq, 23 March 2003).
However, the US administration invokes the Geneva Convention selectively. In contrast to the above incident, on 4 October 1993, US media chose not to censor similarly graphic images of dead soldiers and an interview with a POW in Somalia, images taken after an ambush on US soldiers which resulted in the deaths of 19, the wounding of 65 and downing of two US helicopters. The networks then aired graphic images of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a crowd of enraged Somalis — images that won the Toronto Star’s Paul Warson a Pulitzer Prize. Further, the stations aired a video-interview filmed by the militia of anti-West warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, showing a severely beaten American hostage, US Army Captain Michael Durant, the Black Hawk pilot whose aircraft was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade. A search for the term ‘Geneva Convention’ during the airing of the video and Durant’s release 10 days later (4 October 1993–14 October 1993) yielded only one result, from a discussion on Durant’s fate on CNN Live Report from 5 October 1993.
Although audience research is not part of this study, many Americans displayed aggression towards Al Jazeera immediately after the airing of the images. 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. It continued with the hacking of its website (a Californian man was later fined and sentenced by a US court for the offence), and ended with Boston-based Akamai Technologies’ refusal to offer its services to Al Jazeera without explanation, leaving its website vulnerable to attackers.
In an interview in June 2004 with Al Jazeera’s reporter in New York, Abed El-Rahim Foukara, he revealed that American viewers constantly called Al Jazeera’s American bureau to complain, asking why Al Jazeera was kidnapping and beheading prisoners of war. Foukara said that the feeling in Al Jazeera was that this was the result of the US media’s re-presentation of Al Jazeera since, as they saw it, whenever American media felt uncomfortable about reporting on a certain event, they detached themselves from the images by emphasising that the report came from Al Jazeera. According to Foukara, this took the burden off their shoulders and they were able to avoid complaints from the administration and a negative response from their audience. In response to my question regarding US media’s re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s images, Foukara said that he felt that American networks were strong enough to ‘digest whatever you throw at them and use it selectively, especially if it comes from what they perceive as a hostile network in a hostile language’.
The networks, in turn, do not seek to maintain the authenticity of Al Jazeera’s images. When I mentioned Foukara’s account to Marcy McGinnis, Senior Vice President of CBS News, who is responsible for CBS’s worldwide newsgathering operation, McGinnis said that CBS would not refine its reporting ‘based on someone else’s culture. We see the images we get from Al Jazeera and try to make sense 85 No. 113 — November 2004 of them to our viewers. We cater them to our audience.’ (Interview with Marcy McGinnis, June 2004) Conclusions In this paper, I have sought to challenge the view that the advent of ‘contra-flow’ straightforwardly supports the notion of cross-cultural heterogenisation, and argue that in reality the integration of these flows in global media is a complex, less coherent process. Through acknowledging the global political context and paying special attention to resistance and opposition to these peripheral exports in the case study of US media’s re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s so-called ‘counter-flowing’ war reports, I have drawn attention to particular tensions between the availability of exclusive images from a source perceived to be sympathetic to the enemy and established traditions of patriotic war reporting. Specifically, we see that the importing of Al Jazeera’s images did not change traditional reporting in America under ‘the sphere of consensus’. Rather, the US media broadcast the war in accordance with the administration’s policy, and selectively chose non-controversial images from Al Jazeera. On events where Al Jazeera’s images threatened to break traditional taboos in American reporting, the images were Westernised in line with the principle of good taste or totally censored.
Notwithstanding this conclusion, I do not ignore the positive effects that Al Jazeera has brought to the global media map — from exclusive content exchange agreements with major networks such as CNN and ABC (which might promote more balanced re-presentations in the long term, particularly under ‘the sphere of legitimate controversy’), through Al Jazeera’s cross-border broadcasting to its 40 million viewers worldwide, to images that contributed to alternative Western news sources (e.g. internet websites). More accurately, perhaps, the US media’s re-presentation of Al Jazeera’s images produced the contradictory effect of cross- cultural polarisation and heterogenisation at the same time.
It is a long way from a single case study to a body of evidence strong enough to determine influences of peripheral exports besides cross-cultural heterogenisation.
Media globalisation researchers need, therefore, to re-examine other peripheral flows which, like Al Jazeera, are considered to create cross-cultural heterogenisation, in order to determine the extent to which they are able to reterritorialise cultural meanings. Further research should test this framework from the following aspects:
the dynamics of the interaction between US media and Al Jazeera during the postwar US occupation in Iraq, where US media moved to report under ‘the sphere of legitimate controversy’; other Western networks’ appropriation of images from Al Jazeera and other transnational Arab networks; analysis of resistance to peripheral popular cultural exports such as music and films; and last, peripheral resistance to global Western media empires, following Thussu (1998).
In this paper, I have suggested the need for an appropriate ‘customised holistic’ model to analyse media flows from periphery to centre, from which a new and more comprehensive way to analyse global media flows will emerge. Without such a framework, it will be very difficult to track the dynamics of global media flows, and particularly peripheral exports, in the wake of 9/11. 86Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy References Abercrombie, Nicholas & Longhurst, Brian 1998, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, Sage, London.
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Tal Azran is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media and Communications, University of Melbourne.
