Cosmopolitanization and Real Time Tragedy: Television News Coverage of the Asian Tsunami

Ulrich Beck argues that people become cosmopolitans by default, as a side-effect of circumstances they do not govern over. He is interested in when such 'unconscious' or latent cosmopolitanism becomes conscious or active, and gives rise to a global public. This article explores television news reporting of the 2004 Asian tsunami as a mediated instance of this phenomenon. It asks whether the episode can be said to have promoted what Beck would call a cosmopolitan outlook, and if so how. The article is based on an analysis of the work of eight European broadcasters, and in particular their work to activate the reflexivity which Beck argues is crucial to the cosmopolitan outlook and to nourish what Boltanski calls the spectator's imagination of distant suffering. Empirically challenging the notion of a globalized media, the reporting of five nationally-based European broadcasters is compared with that of three European channels broadcasting to global audiences. Of interest here is whether the preconditions for cosmopolitan consciousness vary from country to country, and/or from target group (national) to target group (global).