ABSTRACT
The ‘foreign’ media often have been among the first groups to be mentioned when regional leaders or ministers have sought to explain intergovernmental tensions, diplomatic rows or civil disorder. In the satellite television age there have been a number of striking cases where an image or sentence has relayed around the world at the speed of light, connecting previously isolated societies and socio-political traditions: the mallet-wielding Germans atop the Berlin Wall; the Chinese student halting a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests; the arcade game-like explosions of targets in Iraq during the Gulf War; or the mangled wreck of a black limousine in which the Princess of Wales had been fatally injured.
