The national print media and cosmopolitanism in Romania : A comparative case study of the 2011 earthquake in Japan and the 2010 Hungarian toxic sludge

Abstract

The purpose of the present research paper is to study if and how cosmopolitanism, here understood as 'an orientation, a willingness to relate with the Other' (Hannertz 1996, 103 as cited by Chouliaraki 2008, 387), is present within Romanian print media, both in quality and tabloid newspapers. While the topic of cosmopolitan media discourse has been closely examined at the level of Western societies, this line of research seems to be poorly developed when it comes to Eastern European media cultures and their own understanding and use of those particular means that enable audiences to relate to distant suffering. Therefore, the present study should be viewed as a step further to reduce this research gap and reveal the most dominant trends in terms of cosmopolitanism in Romanian print media in the context of two major Europe wide broadcasted disasters: the earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011 and Hungary’s toxic red mud catastrophe that occurred in October 2010.