News of the Other : Tracing Identity in Scandinavian Constructions of the Eastern Baltic Sea Region

Have the changes taking place in the Baltic Sea Region since 1989 altered Cold War frameworks, Orientalist stereotypes, and sporadic news of threats and crises from the East? The studies in this volume demonstrate a startling continuity in the depiction of our eastern Baltic neighbors as fundamentally different from us, as backward or as harbingers of potential threats. The authors demonstrate that journalism is still closely tied to national perspectives of the world, which in turn is related to a broader Western discourse about the Other. Some authors locate identity through journalism's ritualistic dimensions — providing a sense of safety and security as well as warnings of risk and threats - whereas others find it in taken-for-granted strategies of Othering. This is not the whole story, however, for the authors demonstrate that globalization is changing the national context on which journalism is based, thus local news of the Baltic Sea region differs significantly from national news, and EU journalism blurs the boundaries between the national we and its Others. This volume describes, analyzes and compares the manner in which identity is constructed in Swedish, Danish, Finnish and German news about events, people and issues in the eastern Baltic Sea Region at the beginning and the end of the 20th century