ABSTRACT
Global mass communication is characterized by transnational communicative flows as well as by an increasing number of transnational media and transnational media structures at all levels (media ethics, production, reception, regulation and economics). However, the national or geocultural character of most media cannot be denied in structural terms, that is, with respect to the organizational structures and primary environmental references of politics, economy and markets. Without wanting to argue in excessively structuralist terms, this global interdependence gap in global mass communication correlates to a high degree with the fragmentary media discourses of a national or otherwise local hue. So far there are no indications that the Internet is spawning a genuine global alternative to particularist journalism to any great extent, apart from niches. Largely irrelevant from a systems-theoretical point of view, from the perspective of theories of the deliberative public sphere the current situation is a challenge to the notion of the global public sphere because the kind of structural change in the media that might ensure the desired synchronization in perceptions of global society have yet to be seen.
