The study of international and global news to date has focused on the operation of foreign news values, the unequal flows and emergent contra-flows of transnational news as well as the phenomenology of 24/7 live broadcasts. Today these debates are often played out under opposing `global dominance' and `global public sphere' positions. Each in its own way is concerned about communications democracy — whether its discerned curtailment by processes of geo-political economy or temporal-spatial extension by increased global cultural flows. In this article we contend that there is a `democratic lacuna' at the heart of these debates. This silence concerns how exactly leading world news channels — principally CNNI and BBC World but also international competitors such as Sky and Fox News — communicatively present the voices, views and values of contending interests and identities from around the world. Elaborating a new conception of `communicative frames' based on contemporary positions of social and political theory and applying this to a large corpus of news output, we begin to evaluate generalizing theoretical claims, both critical and celebratory, about the contribution of global 24/7 news to processes of global dominance or an emergent global public sphere.
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