Television As a Global Kaleidoscope: Multiple Socio-Cultural Realities within a Paramount Political Reality

In recent years, due to a number of factors like the severe global financial crisis,  the citizens of countries like Greece search for information through foreign media. Thus, globally broadcasting corporate or state television channels, (i.e. BBC, CNN, France 24, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, CCTV News), became very popular. This paper attempts to discuss these channels’ (re)presentations as alternate sources, focusing on three levels. First, the formative one : They all (a) use English for oral and written discourse ; (b) follow standardized forms of Western broadcasting ; (c) utilize the media cosmogony of our epoch. Second, the substantive one: (a) Operating within a ‘global village’ framework, they function in their ‘public sphere’ without barriers ;  (b)  They manage to create ‘media events’,  authenticated and explained by participating actors and professional experts ; (c) Cultivating a sense of relevant immediacy, they connect individual ‘life-worlds’ with  projected ‘world views’. Third, the conclusive one : (a) While documenting issues from ‘multiple (socio-cultural) realities’ (i.e. economy and business), with a presumably undisputed factuality, they express a ‘paramount (political) reality’. (b) This ‘reality’ is a ‘noematic construction’ which reflects  core values from a channel’s ethnocentric  perspective with a long historical tradition. Any interpretative scheme they provide derives from this perspective.  (c)  Thus,  foreign channels offer planned images, which hide the impact of political ideology in (un)official  “translations”, becoming improvisations with inauthentic color schemes on the screen camvas. The critical question remains: Are those media nothing but a kaleidoscope for the world audiences to (re)live with fictional innocence our modern epic, or do they provide unintentionally another “agora” for the democratic forum of “a global civil society” as its needed debating orators in the new “polis” ?