What global citizens and whose global moral order? Defining the global at BBC World News

This article provides a critical assessment of the popular notion that we are moving towards an increasingly global understanding of political community and citizenship. At the centre of this debate is a specific, although often implicit, account of media developments. Drawing on original research done on the global news network, BBC World News, this article makes the case that news practices are developing in a far more complex and contradictory way than is often implied in discourses on the global ‘turn’ in politics. Globality as understood and represented at BBC World News is a question of not only certain culturally and institutionally informed assumptions about what constitutes public interest, but also, increasingly, a question of resources and dominant political rhetoric from a few institutions of power. What is more, developments in news practices do not necessarily lead to new and challenging communicative contexts in our understanding of the world, but rather may entrench and reinforce existing power relations. These empirically informed assessments of media developments need to form a much bigger part of discussions on the ‘global shift’