"Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age sets out to better understand the media’s role in the circulation and communication of these global challenges to humanity as well as the conflicts and contentions that surround them. Concerned as we are with crises that transcend national borders, whether in terms of impact or intervention, this book seeks to move beyond narrow national frameworks and nationally focused methodologies. In today’s globalizing world, where crises can be transnational in scope and impact, involve supranational levels of governance and become communicated in real time via global media, so national frames of reference and earlier research preoccupations are being superseded. The study of global crisis reporting, necessarily, needs to be situated and theorized in the context of journalism practised in the global age. As we shall explore, contemporary news media occupy a key position in the public definition and elaboration of global crises and are often far more than just conduits for their wider public recognition. In exercising their symbolic and communicative power, the media today can variously exert pressure and influence on processes of public understanding and political response or, equally, serve to dissimulate and distance the nature of the threats that confront us and dampen down pressures for change. In such ways, global crises become variously constituted within the news media as much as communicated by them." (p.2)