ABSTRACT
People who do not live in or routinely travel to other countries have little opportunity to challenge their conception of the mass media provided “reality” of those countries. Mass media are almost wholly responsible for shaping that reality, and among mass media, television news is especially influential, for it alone provides our contemporary visual representations of most of the world (Behr & Iyengar, 1985; Larson, 1984; Ogundimu, 1992). Television news providers, in turn, receive most of their images and information relating to most of the nonlocal world from just a few global news organizations: television news agencies.
