Global news

By Brian Micklethwait | 8 July 2005

One of the oddities of living right in the middle of world events is that it is often hard to be sure that they really are world events, a worry captured nicely by the words of Dame Edna Everage concerning her creator Barry Humphreys: "He's very, very well-known. I'd say he's world famous in Melbourne."

Yes, the media are now the global media. But the global media have many faces, and they have a habit of presenting different faces to different national fragments of their global audience. Things like fizzy drinks are often tweaked to suit differing national tastes, and it's the same with the news. In particular, the global media will never miss a chance to tell the locals of this or that locality that "the eyes of the world" are upon them, even when almost none of them really are.

Bob Geldolf's Live 8 concerts certainly made a world famous splash in London. But was Live 8 quite so world famous in other parts of the world? Consider this story, from the Washington Post:

How little interest was there in ABC's Saturday night broadcast of Live 8 concert highlights? NBC's coverage of the rain delay of NASCAR's Pepsi 400 in the same time period drew nearly double the audience.

The Internet is what made that story easily readable by a Londoner.

Meanwhile, only the Internet can truly confirm for the curious consumer of the national media in Britain that when it came to the London terrorist bombings of July 7th, those eyes of the world really were on London, if only because so many world leaders were assembled a few hundred miles away from the explosions, British Prime Minister Tony Blair among them. Not everyone in the world is going to interpret the bombings in the same way, but an enormous number of people will by now, one way or another, have heard about them.

If you only want the world as seen from where you sit, then the Internet will give you that story, in unprecedented detail. Nevertheless, the Internet is a giant leap away from national parochialism in news, and towards news that is truly global, for all those who particularly want that.