Search

This article uses cosmopolitanism as a theoretical basis for the investigation and analysis of the global corporate and state media's normative roles in human rights and democracy. Through the case studies of CNN and Xinhua's reportage of the Tibetan protests in 2008, the article observes patterns of ideological coalescence between western capitalist hegemony and the big western media conglomerates such as CNN. It argues that, as a good global corporate citizen, CNN undoubtedly made contributions in exposing human rights abuses in Tibet, but also unwittingly worked to advance the interests of a manipulative and unjust neoliberal international order that uses human rights as a political tool. This is demonstrated not only through CNN's selective articulation of human rights, but also the worrying coincidence between its ideological construction of the Tibet story and the rebuke of China's human rights record by the western governments and other western institutions. While Xinhua provided an alternative discourse to that of human rights, it was observed that whereas nationalism arguably protects China's revolutionary legacy and its modernization project, the discourse was also largely authoritarian and acted in contradiction to some of the constitutionally entrenched civil and political liberties of minorities while also raising cynicism about the Chinese government's commitment to international human rights laws that it ratified and acceded to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates latent and manifest dimensions of nationalism and their theoretical and empirical relationships with patterns of media use in the everyday life context of metropolitan China. Data from a face-to-face survey conducted with a random sample of 600 Shanghai residents show that the mass media's appeal to the public perception of nationalism acts effectively and differentially on both event-triggered and banal everyday forms of nationalism. It is also found that attention to news has a direct effect on manifest nationalism, but a largely indirect effect on latent nationalism through specific knowledge, mental complexity, patterns of information processing and interpersonal communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]