Constructing Social Problems in an Age of Globalization: A French–American Comparison

al diffusion of political ideas, ideologies, and practices, there has still been relatively little exploration of the extent to which debates in national news media about similar social problems have come to resemble one another, as well as the causes for such convergence or lack thereof. Some studies provide evidence of gradual, if uneven, convergence in certain journalistic practices and aspects of news content (Tunstall 1977; Castells 1997) and form (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001), producing what McQuail (1994) has termed an “international media culture.” Other studies, however, highlight continuing cross-national differences in journalistic norms and values (Padioleau 1985; Patterson and Donsbach 1996; Esser 1998; Weaver 1998; Deuze 2002) and point to significant differences in the treatment of the same international media events (Hallin and Mancini 1984; Gurevitch et al. 1991) or of similar kinds of issues (Ferree et al. 2002; Benson 2000; Saguy 2002). Unfortunately, these diverse and conflicting findings have not been synthesized either theoretically or empirically. As Guillén Constructing Social Problems in an Age of Globalization: A French–American Comparison