Political protest tends to follow communications revolution, and developments in both realms matter to the way audiences are informed, addressed, and implicated in world events. This chapter reviews scholarship that addresses these inter-related issues from competing perspectives. Is digital technology empowering 'ordinary' people and helping activists mobilize them to protest issues of global concern? Or are states using uprisings in their strategic communication, misrepresenting protests in other countries and thus misleading audiences, while harnessing media technology in ways that constrain, rather than empower dissenters? Concepts such as techno-enthusiasm, the protest paradigm, strategic narrative, and cosmopolitanism signal different scholarly approaches to such questions and to the larger study of cross-border journalism, with a focus on global television news.

The stories told by expert activists about the relationship between AI and inequality are the focus of this article. It explores internet governance discourse in two fora - RightsCon and Sweden's Internet Days - which, it is argued, comprise a communicative space that is both global and liminal. Narrative analysis is used to map how 30 expert activists from around the world, whose engagement is bound neither to state nor corporate interests, talk about how AI can be understood as a boon or a bane to inequality, both social and communicative. While common themes are in evidence (such as the need to safeguard people's right to own their own data), some noteworthy dissonances are also discernible (such as whether such people should be envisaged as individuals or collectivities). The narratives are critical in that they resist the impetus of rapid, and in some cases unfettered, technological advancement while at the same time pushing back against the apocalyptic AI narratives familiar from popular culture. The study contributes to an understanding of the socio-technico imaginaries of a category of actors who merit more attention than they have been paid by scholars to date. Their expertise grants them authority, and the stories they tell speak of agency.

Moving people comprise both a subject of news reports (of refugees, migrants and other people-on-the-move) and a way of reporting on the issues involved. Viewers can be moved and placed in a discursive relation to the displaced when news stories construct what Arendt called ‘proper distance’. This possibility is explored in the article, which compares coverage of migration issues in 2019 on four global television news channels: Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International and RT. The results provide evidence of approaches that differ in striking and thought-provoking ways, giving global television news consumers different resources for making sense of a complicated global crisis.

Almost as soon as the Al Jazeera network launched its English-language channel late in 2006, a young boy began peering at its viewers through an opening in a wall on the screen. He turned up at regular intervals in an advertisement typical of those used by television channels to promote their outlet and its take on the world  - or the promise to take viewers out into that world. What is interesting about this particular image is that it is not clear whether the boy is on the outside looking in, or on the inside looking out. Viewers are invited to wonder where they are in relation to the boy, and to meet his gaze. It is clear from the curiosity in his eyes, and from the schoolbag on his back, which give him the attributes of a learner, that he wants to know more, suggesting we should meet him in this, too. As well as emplacing us in a liminal space, the advertisement is marketing a certain way of doing journalism. ‘You need to be able to see the world from many perspectives in order to report the world back to the world’, explains a reporter. The image is a quotidian illustration of the influential argument pursued by Massey (1993) that distinctions usually thought easy (to the extent that they are thought at all), such as inside/outside and near/far, are called into question by a relational politics of place. What makes them interesting, particularly under conditions of globalization, is that they do not only bifurcate. They arise and become visible through a point of contact, which can also be a point of connection. Journalists who report the world back to itself (and the newsrooms they work for) can be thought of as discursive cartographers whose maps are drawn from both borders and connecting points. One particular geography is in focus in this paper: that of inequality in the stories of world events that journalists have been telling global publics for the past decade. How are voices used to make mediated space into place in what Jackson (1989) called “maps of meaning”? And how do journalists approach the task of giving visibility and voice to those experiencing unequal conditions? Analysis of global television news output (207 Al Jazeera English and CNNI broadcasts, from 2009 and 2019) and interviews with journalists (conducted in 2020-21) are used to gain insights into the discursive connections in mediated places that arise when three different sorts of actors meet: the reporter in the field, the marginalized or ‘disadvantaged, and the viewer, as emplaced by the news narrative.

Scholarship on “global journalism” – to the extent that the phenomenon is explored empirically – is often based on the analysis of national media. This article considers, instead, how the global fares in global newsrooms, and what has happened to global news since the early years of the millennium. It is argued that, while much has changed in world politics and scholarly agendas, global news is characterized more by continuity than change, and that the interesting differences are not between “then” and “now,” but between news outlets. The results of the analysis of 2189 newscasts, 7591 headlines and 5379 news items broadcast over a period of 13 years by four global news organizations (Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International, and RT) call into question assumptions about the cosmopolitan nature of channels said to speak to the world. They show that only a small percentage of their news can be considered “global” in terms of topic and geographical scope, although there are thought-provoking differences in how the global is narrated. Taken together, they provide occasion to revisit the scholarly debate on global journalism.

Digital futures build on a hybrid present. As Chadwick (2017) has convincingly argued, the contemporary media system is characterized by interactions among ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and the genres and norms associated with them. Authors like him and Noble (2018) remind us that biases in and exclusions from representations in media that pre-date the digital era are inherited and perpetuated by the digital media that preoccupy so many scholars. If the digital future is to be reimagined, it is thus necessary to be clear about representations in the hybrid present - in hybrid media such as global television, which is disseminated online as well as on screen. With this conviction as its starting point, our paper examines representations of social inequality, including information inequality and the technological divide, in four global television news outlets between 2009 and 2019. The work of Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International and Russia’s RT in ‘framing inequality’ for global rather than national audiences (the focus of Guardino 2019, among others) is analysed by comparing how representations vary according to the ‘place’ of news (Usher 2019), what attention is paid to which inequalities, and whose voices are heard. The empirical study is conducted in two steps. The first is a content analysis of programmes broadcast in four years of constructed weeks (covering 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2019). The second is a closer reading, informed by narrative method, of selected news items relating to our shared - or fragmented - digital future. Taken together, the results of the two empirical steps form the basis for a discussion of whether global news in the hybrid present can be thought more likely to highlight the nefarious costs of connection (Couldry & Mejias 2019) or, conversely, to foster the connectivity envisaged by cosmopolitanism (Robertson 2010, 2015), which can be thought to help reinforce the values that abet inclusiveness, respect and reciprocity, as advocated in the conference theme. The paper reports preliminary findings from a 4-year project about the communicative dimension of inequality under globalization.

The point of departure for this paper is the intersection of two mutually dependent crises - that of migration, and the crisis of public discourse characterized by a rise in incivility and dissemination of false claims about threats to national societies. The aim is to compare coverage of migration issues in three global television news channels: Al Jazeera English, BBC World and CNN International in June 2018 in ordeer to problematize the role of global journalism in a context of information warfare. The results of the analysis of 108 news reports provide evidence for the argument that the approaches of the three outlets differ in thought-provoking ways, and that the consumer of global news is given far-from-simple answer to the question of whether the refugee crisis is about politics, humanity or morality.

The chapter is about the interconnection of resistance, music and screen. It argues that there is more to popular music than the sound of it, and that songs should be understood as narrative packages of which music, lyrics and visuals are component parts. Seen in that way, it becomes clear that the protest song is not dead, as is sometimes claimed. It is argued, furthermore, that popular music, when performed live, can be thought of as a manifestation of the ‘public screen’ said by DeLuca and Peeples to be intrinsic to contemporary protest. After surveying protest image events in which musicians have taken part throughout tumultuous recent history, it explores the incidence of protest in the Billboard Year End Rock Chart (which incorporates YouTube video streaming data in its calculation of ranking positions) before taking a closer look at music videos of protest circulating on YouTube.

Contemporary protest is often intertextual: characters, anthems and slogans from feature films and television series turn up regularly at demonstrations throughout the world. Taking this as its starting point, the chapter reflects on the relationship between popular fictions and protest from a historical point of view. The protesters at the heart of four texts – Spartacus, Robin Hood, The Hunger Games and Mr. Robot – are compared in a narrative analysis that shows a startling resemblance between these seemingly disparate tales. It is argued that the tropes associated with these rebels and the decadent capitals threatened by their indignation – be they Rome, New York or Panem – comprise powerful ideological backdrops to real protest, and frameworks for sense-making of it.

The protest worlds of four global news channels are mapped in this chapter: BBC World, CNN International, Al Jazeera English (AJE) and RT (formerly Russia Today). Televisual representations of dissent contain the traces of struggles over representation between political elites, protesters and journalists that differ in ways that matter to the mediation of protest, in the ‘global newsroom’ as in others. While the task of mapping them empirically is daunting, it is argued that basic content analysis is a good place to start. The chapter reports a unique comparative analysis of 1,211 newscasts, one per week for six consecutive years, and any protest, in any part of the world, that made the headlines. It shows, among other things, that some countries and regions appear to be ‘off the map’ of protest, while others are in vivid relief, and that both AJE and RT pay more attention to protest than the others.