Globalization is becoming a fact. The development of transport and communication means that people scattered all over the world now adapt each others' customs, clothes, value systems and even vocabulary. The television plays a special role in the globalization process. Constant rush imposes uniformization of technologies and activities. The only thing which still allows to differentiate various programmes is the language. But to what extent? A TV news programme has to convey as much information

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... as possible, in the shortest possible time and in a way which will make the news comprehensible and easy to remember. This is extremely difficult, especially in view of the lowering intellectual level of the viewers. It is not surprising, therefore, that almost all components of a news programme serve the purpose of carrying information. A number of messages are transferred to the viewers by means of non-verbal communication: setting, clothes, gestures, announcer's facial expressions, graphic arrangement, screenplay, hierarchy of information, camerawork, editing technique, musical background and the choice of a journalistic genre. These subcodes constantly interact with the linguistic subcode. However, their combination is not a simple sum, but a combined result of their impact. The present article begins with an analysis of the verbal subcode (written and spoken) conducted on the corpus of English, Polish, French and Italian news programmes. Then, the interaction between the verbal and the visual subcodes in the corpus is examined. Already at the preliminary stage it becomes clear that globalizing and universalizing ten- dencies are present both in the verbal and non-verbal components of the news.