Taking global crises in the news seriously: Notes from the dark side of globalization

Abstract

From climate change to the war on terror, from financial meltdowns to forced migrations, from pandemics to world poverty and from humanitarian disasters to the denial of human rights, these and other global crises represent the dark side of our global age. They are spawned by it. When represented within today’s world news ecology such ‘global crises’ can also shape processes of globalization — deepening our sense of globality and, possibly, contributing to what Ulrich Beck’s discerns as a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ (Beck, 2006). With too few exceptions, however, researchers have yet to theorize and examine today’s endemic, interpenetrating and proliferating global crises or their complex dependencies on the world’s news media and emergent forms of global journalism. This article elaborates on these claims and sets out the case for taking global crises seriously, both ontologically and epistemologically, and how they can variously become enacted within the complex flows and formations of global news.