freedom of movement

How much of the world is open to you?

Countries you can legally enter without a visa with a passport from

All states that allow entry without visa (including for a limited amount of time) or offer visa on arrival to those holding the selected passport are colored in on the map. States that don't allow entry without a pre-arranged visa are hidden, respectively. The geography of the selected state is highlighted on the map.

Data on visa restrictions: From the Passport Index via ilyankou's GitHub repo. In order to disregard Covid-19-related restrictions, the dataset from December 2019 was used. Geodata from Johan on GitHub.

Credits for inspiration go to an artist (collective) whose name I cannot remember, but who I got this idea from some years ago. They exhibited a series of small world maps for different nationalities depicting only those parts of the world the according passport holders could legally travel to without a visa. If you know or are this artist yourself, let me know and I'll credit you.

Notes on the data / methodology:
Only countries present in the Passport Index' dataset are shown on the map and in the selection menu. Therefore e.g. Greenland, Antarctica, and many more are missing.

7.2.2020

Visa access and cross-border mobility: An unequal playing field for journalists in a globalized media landscape

The widely adopted model Hallin & Mancini1 developed to analyze media systems suggests looking at a number of indicators to understand and categorize the situation of the journalistic profession in different places. Based on this model, the authors as well as many other scholars have compared the situation of journalism in many different nation-states. However, in the wake of globalization and the resulting connections and dependencies between different states, supranational organizations, multinational corporations and individual actors across borders, journalists are increasingly affected by developments that happen outside their country’s (or the country of their passport’s) borders. The following is an attempt to use the framework of transnational journalism2 as a starting point to incorporate restrictions from outside a given state when analyzing national media systems with Hallin and Mancini’s model. More specificially, this essay explores the extent to which foreign states’ legislations affect journalists differently based on their nationality, by comparing the visa regulations for German and Afghan passport holders and resulting transnational mobility.

The indicators Hallin and Mancini suggest to analyze are:

While other scholars have questioned whether nation-states are a reasonable unit for analyzing media systems any longer at all,3 the comparative research carried out in this essay continues to compare two media systems (or more specifically one restriction influencing their media systems) as defined by national borders. Legal regulations around accessing foreign countries are analyzed as part of “state interventions” mentioned by Hallin and Mancini. Contrary to the original model, however, the regulations and legal restrictions researched are from outside the media systems native legislations.

Different passports were compared regarding the number of countries their holders are allowed to enter without any visa or with a visa granted upon arrival. The passports with the top “power ranks”4 are Saudi Arabia (1), Germany (2), Finland (3), followed by nine more Western European countries, Japan, South Korea and the US. On the bottom of the same ranking, Afghanistan (199), Iraq (198), Syria (197) and other countries from Eastern and Northern Africa as well as the Middle East can be found.

While German passport holders can enter 128 of the almost 200 countries compared in the dataset without any visa, and are entitled to visa-on-entry in another 44 of the states, Afghan citizens can access only 5 of the 198 countries without a visa, and another 30 with visa-on-arrival. (see Fig 1. and Fig 2.). Specific requirements for journalistic work visas were not analyzed in the scope of this research; Neither was any data on differing requirements and differing success rates for visa applications across different nationalities included. It would be interesting, however, to deepen the presented analysis in the future by gathering data on the above.

In a world “where journalists seek out sources across borders (i.e., journalistic practices and routines that span geographical and cultural borders), engage with international issues, and inform a global audience on global challenges”5, the legal restrictions in international mobility can be seen as another relevant “state intervention” in the framework of Hallin and Mancini’s model. It could also be applied to other models: for example, the same could be framed as one of the “restrictions” used in Hanitzsch’s6 model to describe journalistic cultures.

Germany and Afghanistan were chosen as two cases for this research because of the opposite ends of the global passport “power” ranking they can be found at. Part of the research question was to examine the extent to which conditions for journalists from different countries differ globally, so it was necessary to compare two countries from opposite ends of the spectrum.

From this point of departure it would of course have been most logical to compare the regulations for Afghan journalists with Saudi-Arabian journalists, as the latter hold the top rank in the passport index. However, Saudi Arabia is a unique case among the top 10 ranks, as the remaining 9 are countries of Western Europe. This essay explores the differences in transnational mobility in the context of a historically grown dominance of the West and their media systems. Therefore, Germany was chosen as an example case that is more representative of a trend that can be observed in the data: passport holders from Western Europe (and the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia) hold top ranks, while most of the countries with the least access to other states are located in the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa – regions that were in large parts colonized until the second half of the last century and are part of what is now called the “Global South”.

map of countries that german passport holders can enter without pre-arranged visa
Fig1. Map of all countries that German passport holders can enter without a visa (or by obtaining a visa upon arrival)
map of countries that afghan passport holders can enter without pre-arranged visa
Fig2. Map of all countries that Afghan passport holders can enter without a visa (or by obtaining a visa upon arrival)

While the disparity in cross-border mobility is only one of many different factors creating unequal conditions for journalism, it is in the context of a “long history of sociopolitical hierarchy that unfolds around this difference, [that] must be taken into account by journalism scholars” according to scholars Rao7 and Wasserman8.9

The ownership of globally dominant media has become more concentrated in richer countries over the last 20 years, as Baum and Zhukov10 found by comparing the global reporting of international conflicts.

Academics and journalists have pointed out parallels between (Western) journalism and “imperialism’s close cousin, colonisation”11 12, while others mention “debates [that] have been raging about the percieved homogenizing influence of the global media industry on local identities, cultures and ideologies13”.14

In “How can global journalists represent the ‘Other’?”15, Fürsich criticizes media representations of people beyond the West based on Said’s work16. Hafez’ study17 on Middle East reporting in German newspapers revealed that “whenever there is a big international debate or crisis, chief editors and columnists tend to marginalize the real experts within their media organizations and take over the lead in interpretation, with the result that ideology and oldboys networks, even between media and politics, often prevail over expertise18.”

Journalists from non-Western countries continue to raise questions around a percieved distrust towards local journalism19 and about the practice of being hired as “fixers” by foreign media – with the result of not being credited for work within their profession20 21.

Hellmueller22 explains this worldwide domination in the journalistic profession by Western media – although it is changing and increasingly including new powers such as China and India 23 - as “a product of European colonial expansion24”. They link the global dissemination of colonial newspapers and the spread of European broadcasting in colonized regions to what today is called globalization: “Ultimately, the British and the Americans, as the two great powerhouses of liberal capitalism, have effectively been the drivers of two centuries of globalization—with the British Empire being the organizing force of globalization’s first wave in the 19th century and the Pax Americana25 being the organizing force of the second wave in the 20th century. Both empires have shared the same commitment to the processes of modernization, liberalization, and globalization26. And both have set the stage of what we know today as global journalism.”

In this context, I argue that the different levels of restriction and freedom in movement across national borders influence the media systems – or conditions for journalism – in the compared countries in the following ways:

Afghan journalists German journalists
Domestic reporting Reporting to international/ global audiences hindered by being reduced to the role of „fixers“ and international/ foreign media relying on foreign correspondents/ “parachute journalists“ instead of local journalists Internationally relevant news mostly relying on local journalists; local journalism widely respected by global audiences
Foreign reporting: Reporting from other countries hindered by restrictive visa regulations Foreign reporting encouraged by lose visa regulations and by being commissioned as foreign correspondents/ “parachute journalists“ in non-Western countries

This analysis of course only applies to a small part of these two countries’ media systems, because it disregards the main section of media where local journalists produce for local audiences in their respective countries, and only applies to those sections of national media systems that interact with global or foreign audiences.

Nevertheless, the conditions created by these differing visa regulations further advantage German journalists and further disadvantage those from Afghanistan. It could be argued that the diverging access privileges to other countries create roles that inter-depend and reinforce each other: the less respected local journalists in non-Western countries are, the higher the demand of Western journalists to go report from those countries. The easier it is for Western journalists to travel to these countries and report from there, the less opportunities are left for local journalists to participate in a global media landscape.

Particularly the practice of foreign media hiring local journalists as ‘fixers’ is a phenomenon that seems to be restricted to countries of the Global South and can also be seen in Afghanistan27. In a report by Nieman Reports28 the work of ‘fixers’ was described as including the pitching of story ideas, setting up interviews, providing background and editorial advice. Generally speaking, German journalists doing this labor would be credited as journalists, while Palmer29 describes the same work of local journalists from conflict zones in the Middle East – like Afghanistan - as “important labor [that] has historically been invisible to the general public and the journalism industry more broadly” by being labelled ‘fixing’ and consequently, not being credited.30 31 32

On the other hand, the discussed analysis of the given data is not enough to prove a clear causal relationship. More countries with similar histories and positions in global power structures would need to be analyzed and compared in order to strengthen or contradict the hypothesis of a wider pattern. This deeper analysis would also need to investigate whether the presence of foreign military, or more generally, an international conflict, is a factor of its own that changes the premises of foreign and international reporting. Furthermore, it would be interesting to include more in-depth studies of journalistic cultures in different regions, as differing levels of journalistic education, skills in languages that are spoken by wide global audiences, and national legal frameworks certainly influence not only the national media systems, but also their relationships and inter-dependencies across borders.

In conclusion, the presented research was an attempt to include transnational aspects and effects into carrying out analyses of national media systems according to Hallin & Mancini’s model. As a case study, the number of countries that journalists with (1) a German passport or (2) an Afghan passport have access to without pre-arranged visas were compared. The resulting discrepancy in international mobility was framed as a factor influencing the journalistic profession in each country, either as a restrictive factor (in the case of Afghanistan) or as a privileging factor (in the case of Germany) in global comparison. This difference was found to potentially further contribute to the global dominance of Western media, which is not only an ethical question, but also a question of the accuracy and balanced-ness of reporting 33 34 35. The presented analysis suggested that the differences between the two compared countries may be indicative of patterns for larger regions or parts of the world (Western Europe+US and the Middle East, or even the Global North and Global South in general), but this hypothesis would require the analysis of data on multiple more states.

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