Voices from the South

Viola Sarnelli

Voices from the South: Al Jazeera English and the international news flows

Authors

Viola Sarnelli

University of Naples "L'Orientale"

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2785-460X

Keywords:

Al Jazzeera in lingua inglese, studi culturali e postcoloniali, informazione transnazionale, mezzi di comunicazione, informazione televisiva, informazione satellitare fuori occidente, rivoluzioni Tunisia ed Egitto 2011, racconti multimediali, social media, streaming

Synopsis

Publisher: UniorPress

Series: Materia Postcoloniale

Pages: 180

Language: Inglese

NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/resolver.pl?nbn=urn:nbn:it:unina-27536

Abstract: "Voice to the voiceless" has been the slogan introducing the launch of Al Jazeera English. Like its Arabic sister channel, Al Jazeera English is funded by the Emirate of Qatar. Its mission is to offer a perspective of Middle Eastern affairs to a wide international audience, this time in the language of globalisation. In a post-9/11 era marked by military and identity conflicts, Al Jazeera English has had the merit to introduce a new model of television news that is “conciliatory”, far from the polarised and hyperbolic ones, and at the same time de-centralised, shifting the focus to a ‘South’ defined in opposition to the culturally and politically hegemonic ‘North’. This book explores how the channel adopts and yet reshapes the Anglo-American news standards; the contradictions between the channel’s democratising push, as in the 2011 uprisings, and its funding state’s conservatory policies; between universal aspirations and the new regional boundaries characterising the transnational news domain. These issues are all investigated analysing the channel’s content, with a perspective that aims at enriching the traditional news media studies approach with views from postcolonial theory and cultural studies.

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Author Biography

Viola Sarnelli, University of Naples "L'Orientale"

Viola Sarnelli has developed a strong interest in the international news media field while studying for her BA in Communication Sciences (Bologna University) and her MA in Intercultural Communication (L’Orientale University, Naples). In parallel with her university studies she has worked as a freelance journalist for several newspapers, magazines and radio stations in Italy. During her Ph.D. in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at L’Orientale she explored the editorial line, the audience and the digital media strategy of Al Jazeera English news channel. This book presents the main outcomes of her Ph.D. thesis. After completing her doctoral degree, in 2014 she has been awarded a EU-funded postdoctoral scholarship in Algeria, to investigate the consumption of national and international news in the country following the 2011 Arab uprisings.