Understanding Global News: A Critical Introduction

by Jaap van Ginneken

A lively and critical introduction to the news media, this book has been written specifically for media students and trainee journalists. Understanding Global News invites the reader to explore contemporary journalistic practice, and questions the assumption that the media provide a mere window on the world. Challenging the often unquestioned notions of media objectivity, the author turns the classic Who? What? When? and Why? onto the news media. By employing a range of theoretical perspectives and a large variety of examples, the author demonstrates the way in which our perceptions of the world are constructed by the news media.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Marion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book again after many years and find it still very relevant to analyse modern news media.
The author makes a great job at introducing basic concepts and theoretical perspectives while illustrating his explanations with empirical examples.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overall introduction to the types of unconscious cultural and institutional lenses employed in international news reporting, due to everything from the structure of the news day to the profit-structure of most news corporations to what bars journalists tend to hang out in when they work abroad. (That would be the American ones, where they meet other journalists and often simply report what they say, rather than talking to folks in the place where they're from.)
But (as my class told our prof) it's not worth the current price that Sage has tacked on there. It's $50 in paperback, $135 in hardback; he gasped when we told him this - turns out he bought his copy a few years ago for $15 (new).
Take that, you-who-doubt that there is price gouging in the academic book market.