Global News
Reporting Conflicts and Cosmopolitanism
Series:
Alexa Robertson
Chapter 4. Brave New World
Extract
· 4 · brave new world ‘O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t.’ Miranda’s speech in The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, II ‘whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered…. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years War. That made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or beauty when anthrax bombs are popping all around you? People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then.’ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932/1994: 208). Scholars who study global flows of people and ideas in terms of cosmopoli- tanism look at the evolving media landscape through a different ivory tower window than the writers in focus in Chapter 2, and see a space for fruit- ful encounters with different cultures and with people who are geographi- cally and experientially distant. Scholars of mediated cosmopolitanism are 62 global news: reporting conflicts and cosmopolitanism interested in the narrative techniques that can bring the Other closer, or position the viewer by his or her side, or in his or her place. They are more likely to wear a happy face, as Hannerz (2004) put it, than the metaphor- ically furrowed brows of scholars critical of media globalization, and like Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, draw attention to the beauty...
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