Televisual Representations of France and the UK under Globalization

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to examine how France and the UK are represented in the television news texts at two different periods in time in order to explore whether and how these representations have changed as globalization has progressed. The thesis contributes to the study of collective identities, political cultures and comparative methods of mass communication. The aim should be understood against the background of the globalization of the media and the national traditions of television and treats the television news media as telling stories about the world that shape public perceptions of that world and have a bearing on the cultivation of collective identities. By using a combination of content and narrative analysis television news texts from 1986 and 1996 are compared.The study shows that the televisual representation of the UK remained largely the same while that of France differed. This might be linked to differences in the development of the BBC and the TF1 newsroom cultures, where the BBC remained largely unchanged while TF1 changed as a result of the privatisation of the channel. Both France and the UK were represented as national communities but while the UK was a political community, France changed from having been a political community to be represented as a social and a cultural community. National differences in televisual representations were found to differ with regard to auto- and hetero-identification, where the French news could be characterized by auto- and the British by hetero-identification. The results of the study give reason to argue that globalization of the media gives rise to fragmentation while there is little to suggest that it reinforces moves towards a global village where national borders are depicted as redundant.