Media performance and global policy making: A comparative study of press coverage on global warming

A properly functioning mass media system is crucial to the realization of the public interest. Previous media performance research concentrated on a few Western societies by taking liberal democracy as the normative theory. However, globalization has expanded the public interest into a global level, making it imperative to study the media performance in different countries in serving the public interest of the whole international society through serving global democratic decision making. A normative model of democracy is used to establish universal standards for assessing media performance on the basis of each nation's coverage of an issue regarding the global common good. This project takes deliberative democracy as the normative model. It compares how the print media in six countries perform as the multiple international public spheres facilitating international public deliberation on global warming. Their performance in terms of source and content diversity was assessed through a content analysis of direct quotations. The six newspapers were: The New York Times of the US, The Times of the UK, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of Germany, The Mercury of Australia, The Straits Times of Singapore, and the Wenhui Daily of China. The Relative Entropy Index (H) and Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) were applied as universal measures for assessing diversity. The results of content analysis reveal that The New York Times had the best performance in both source and content diversity, while the other newspapers are marked by more or less variations in their diversity ranking. In general, judged on the basis of measured source and content diversity, the newspapers from Western countries in this study have performed relatively better than the non-Western newspapers in their role as elements of the international media public sphere. However, the reasons for their performance cannot be inferred entirely from the differences in the political regimes of the nations where these papers were published. Rather, cultural factors such as different journalistic traditions and pragmatic political factors, such as their governments' official stands have also influenced the media's construction of the issue.