One of the hardest things about living in a foreign country is understanding the news-even when it is in English. Some politician you have never heard of has given a news conference. Welfare benefits of bewildering complexity have become a hot issue. A television celebrity with an unpronounceable name has just gotten divorced. The most obvious reason for a failure to grasp the sense of news produced in other countries is a simple lack of familiarity with the politics and cultural life of those countries. But there is more to this disconnection than simple unfamiliarity. A careful look at news stories from around the globe suggests that differences in the media in various countries can also stem from deeper divergences in philosophy and worldview. Moreover, there are signs that this gap in fundamental perceptions is closing far less rapidly than many people in Europe and North America probably assume, despite the superficial impression of uniformity caused by the spread of such technologies as cable television and the Internet.

The nations of Africa provide many examples of this misperception. How might a Westerner react to a media report about an epidemic of witch hunting, a story carried in some of the main Zambian newspapers in 1999? How about the exploits of a warlord-- a dwarf named Singbe-who was said to have magical powers enabling him to lasso people several hundred yards away, as was reported in the Sierra Leonean press in the same decade? Or the vampire stories that appear quite often in the Tanzanian press? In all three cases, these events are not presented as oddball stories but are offered as genuine stories of substantive value. These are stories that a citizen of any North Atlantic country would hardly take seriously, yet each has all the hallmarks of news, having been written in a conventional fashion by some of the leading press organs of its respective country.

It is instructive to consider this phenomenon not simply as a lesson in the intricacies of African media but also as an entry point into bettering our understanding of the media of Western nations. Considering the acceptance of these bizarre stories from faraway actually throws some light on the persistence of UFO stories in some US media or the prominence of satanic abuse stories in even the most respectable British newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s.

What is News?

The determination of what constitutes news is chiefly made by journalists, editors, and politicians, all acting in an informal collusion with the consumers of news programs, articles, or items. There has to be some degree of consensus across all the parties involved that a given story is indeed news. In order to qualify, a text has to be assumed by its audience to represent reality. One part of making a story credible news is transmitting it in an agreed form (normally electronic or print media), since even a newsworthy story can only become real news when it is published or aired in the right place. One defining feature of news, then, is the medium or form in which it is presented. This is rapidly changing as new technologies emerge, but older forms can also prove highly resilient. In many African nations, for example, people continue to give considerable credence to unofficial, oral forms of information. The reason for this is not only the relative scarcity of newspapers but also the continent's vibrant oral tradition. While some may call it merely rumor, it is nevertheless a medium for the transmission of news, since many Africans regard such information as "hard" or authoritative-often to the dismay of news managers and government spokespeople.

A news story also has to take a particular form to be recognized as legitimate. Every media professional knows that information has to be presented in a way that the public will recognize and accept, in effect because it fits into one or another of a range of news archetypes. The eminent historian and former New York Times reporter Robert Darnton once compared these story outlines to cookie cutters. There are quite a few different types and sizes of story templates that emerge from the never-ending dialogue between media professionals and their listeners, viewers, and readers. Occasionally these templates change suddenly and radically, creating a whole new story archetype. A good example is the Watergate affair, which changed the way US citizens thought about both the presidency and the media. This incident also had a major effect on the way the whole world viewed propriety and scandal and on the role played by the media in a just political order. It made journalists less reverential in the way they reported politics. Finally, the scandal bolstered a tendency for reporters to figure in their own stories and even to become the heroes of them.

Any serious news-gathering operation, of course, is based on facts, or at least on events perceived as such. It is of crucial importance, though, to look at the order in which the facts are placed and at the story that they are deemed to convey. Facts can be arranged in any number of sequences, resulting in a great variety of implicit or explicit ideas about what they convey.

The Story Behind the Facts

One story that came close to being universally recognized as news provides a good example of how facts alone can be subject to vastly different interpretations in different countries: the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

The facts at the outset seemed straightforward. The beautiful, temperamental, former wife of the heir to the world's best-known monarchy died with her Egyptian lover in a car driven by a professional chauffeur at high speed. The questions that most interested the British press concerned the exact sequence of events in the final minutes before the crash. Was her driver drunk? How many photographers were pursuing them? For the mainstream British media, the known facts could be fitted into a range of story-- templates. Here was the sentimental story of the tragic woman with a heart of gold in a perpetual search for love. Here was the search for scapegoats in the shape of the paparazzi who hounded her. Above all, here was another chapter in the continuing saga of Britain's royal family.