A couple of months ago I looked into the global news coverage of the British Guardian newspaper which showed the distorted world views that we get from the printed media. Now a new media report by the International Broadcasting Trust and the University of East Anglia shows how British television viewers see the world according to the international coverage on the program (“Outside the box: How UK broadcasters portrayed the wider world in 2010 and how international content can achieve greater impact with audiences” by Martin Scott with Sandra Milena Rodriguez Rojas and Charlotte Jenner).
The foreword of the report says:

This research reveals how the nature of international factual coverage has remained remarkably static over time. Although individual producers and commissioners do not set out to reproduce the same view of the world on television each year, this study reveals that the combined result of all of those individual commissioning decisions, amongst all broadcasters, is to produce factual programmes that cover broadly the same topics, in the same formats, featuring the same parts of the world, every year.

Read more about the media report on Martin’s media blog and in the Guardian.
In collaboration with Martin Scott, the principal author of the report, I have created some worldmapper-style maps depicting the statistics used for this report. The following map is part of this map series, showing the amount of new factual programming received by different countries on British television in 2010:

(click for larger map)

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