ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I take the media reporting of two expeditions to the South Pole as a case study in the development of news discourse across the twentieth century. The expeditions are those under Robert Falcon Scott (1910-13) and Peter Hillary (1998-9). They are parallel stories of exploration and hardship from the beginning and end of the twentieth century.The ways in which their news reached the world illustrate three related issues in the globalization of international communication:
1 how technology changed the time and place dimensions of news delivery across the twentieth century (e.g. how fast the news is received, and through what medium)
2 the consequent and concomitant shifts in news presentation (e.g. written versus live televized coverage)
3 associated changes in how humans have understood time and place across the century – that is, the reorganization of time and place in late modernity (Giddens 1991; Bell 1999).
