Cultural Factors in the Flow of International News: A Review of the Literature

• Main Author: Sakurai Takuya
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: EDP Sciences 2017-01-01
• Series: SHS Web of Conferences
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20173300008

This paper offers a review of the literature of international news flow, and surveys how the previous studies have attempted to capture “cultural factors” influencing the flow. The factors are grouped into four types of variables: language, former colonial tie, ethnicity, and geographical proximity. This paper argues that cultural factors cannot be significant without economic interests in the era of post-Cold War, that the structure of international news is imbalanced because a few powerful countries dominate the international news market, and that international news reduces cultural varieties to the singular international realities disseminated by the media of such countries.