Processing local understanding/perceiving global media: reading convergent text across cultures

Post-structuralist audience studies celebrates diversity of reading but is silent on its cognitive means of production, the structuring mental activities wherein users/viewers respond to a text. Research in this paper’s processual account of media meaning formation focuses on S.E. Asian Internet access to the web sites of major Western television news providers. The paper discusses the cultural background of e-journalism consumption; it is a hermeneutic account of Malaysian Chinese, Indian, and Malay readers securing intelligible news items online at the commencement of the Second US-led Iraq Intervention: ‘Bush gets backing for Iraq war’ (CNN).