News of the Other

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.

Content

Foreword
Kristina Riegert

Introduction
Kristina Riegert

I. Identity in a Globalizing World

Identities. An Apparatus for Re-membering and Dis-membering
Ullamaija Kivikuru

In Other Worlds. Mainstream Imagery of Eastern Neighbors
Jan Ekecrantz

Knowing Me, Knowing You. Mediated Identities in the Eastern Baltic Sea Region
Kristina Riegert, Patrik Åker

II. Mediated Definitions of the Other: Then and Now

Placing Good and Evil. Revolutionaries, Streets, and Carnival in German and Swedish Newspapers, 1918-1919
Madeleine Hurd

Swedish and Danish Television News of their Baltic Neighbors 1995–2000
Kristina Riegert

Representations of Otherness in Finnish Culture. Media Images of Russians and Estonians
Pentti Raittila

III. Mechanisms of Identity

The Mass-Mediated “We” in Danish Journalism
Anker Brink Lund

Newspapers’ Picture of the World. The Domestic Family of Man
Patrik Åker

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Stereotyping Russia, the Western Way
Eva Kingsepp, Merja Ellefson

The Dramaturgical Need for Closure. Mass-Mediated Stories of Risk
Maja Horst, Mette Lolk

The Authors