Media Imperialism Research Paper

Academic Writing Service

Sample Media Imperialism Research Paper. Browse other  research paper examples and check the list of research paper topics for more inspiration. If you need a research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our research paper writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

‘Media imperialism’ has been one of the most influential models in international communication. It has given rise to a significant body of empirical research, considerable theoretical debate, as well as support for international policy interventions about global communications imbalance. However it is increasingly subject to critique, particularly as a reflection of a particular moment of international media history that is now passing.

Academic Writing, Editing, Proofreading, And Problem Solving Services

Get 10% OFF with 24START discount code


1. The Broader Paradigm of Cultural Imperialism

Media imperialism needs to be seen as a subset of the earlier and broader paradigm of ‘cultural imperialism’ that is most closely associated with Herbert Schiller (1969, 1976). This critical Marxisant paradigm itself developed out of broader critiques of the triumphalist paradigm of ‘modernization’ propounded in the late 1950s and the 1960s predominantly by US theorists. This ‘dominant’ model proposed a single global process of modernization through a unilinear diffusion of Western technologies, social institutions, modes of living, and value systems to the eponymous ‘Third World’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1996). Critical views, especially those advanced by dependency theorists such as Gunder-Frank, saw the process instead as the spread of inegalitarian capitalism from a few core advanced industrial countries to the periphery, the South. In this process, the West was supplied with raw materials and cheap labor as well as with markets for their manufactured goods. The spread of Western influence was seen as establishing an ideological bulwark against the much-feared spread of communism.

Cultural imperialism, Schiller argued, ‘best describes the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the sytem’ (1976, p. 9). For Schiller, the carriers of Western cultural influence included communication technologies themselves, which were not value-neutral instruments but imbued with capitalist values; language (evident as English takes over as the global linguistic currency from the varieties of colonial linguistic heritage); business practices; the genres as well as content of soap opera, blockbuster film, popular music, etc. Schiller’s view was US-centric, and he saw media as central elements in the global expansion of capitalism centered on the US, fueled by advertising and consumerism. In the context of the Cold War, US policy makers’ promotion of the ‘free flow of information’—with no trade or legal barriers to the production or movement of mediated cultural products—undoubtedly helped the spread of US hegemony in ways that were consonant with, if not totally driven by, US foreign policy.




2. Media Imperialism

Media imperialism, a more focused subset of this model, was defined as ‘the process whereby the ownership, structure, distribution or content of the media in any one country are singly or together subject to substantial external pressures from the media interests of any other country or countries without proportionate reciprocation of influence by the country so affected’ (Boyd-Barrett 1977, p. 117). It differentiated between the shape of the communications vehicle, a set of industrial arrangements, a body of values about best practice, and media content, although it is the latter claim that received most research attention.

It highlighted both the issues around ‘cultural invasion’ as well as a more general imbalance of power resources. In essence, the model argued that the world patterns of communication flow, both in density and direction, mirrored the system of domination in the international economic and political order, the control by the West over the rest.

3. Empirical Research

Part of the strength of the paradigm of media cultural imperialism was its compelling clarity, which gripped many a critical academic imagination, and which suggested many fertile avenues of empirical research. It precipitated numerous studies that sought to examine the unidirectional flow of mediated product from the West to the South. The ‘one-way street’ of television traffic was mapped by Nordenstreng and Varis (1974); film production and distribution was studied by Guback and Varis (1982); international news flow by the IAMCR UNESCO study (Sreberny Mohammadi et al. 1985). Scholars investigated the reach and dominant role of Western news agencies (Boyd-Barrett 1980), supplemented latterly by study of the televisual news agencies (Paterson 1998). Others showed that Third World media organizations were modeled on those of the earlier mother empires (Katz and Wedell 1977). More recent studies detail the ongoing transnational processes of conglomeratization and the increasing vertical and horizontal linkages of media corporations (Herman and McChesney 1997). Cultural imperialism and media imperialism were among the first models to take the global dynamics of media production and diffusion seriously. These paradigms posed important questions about cultural homogenization, about the diffusion of values such as consumerism and individualism, and about the possible impacts of Western media product on indigenous cultures in the South (Hamelink 1983).

4. Political Policy Struggles

These models also provided the conceptual and empirical framework for the NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) debates which preoccupied UNESCO and the nonaligned movement through the 1970s until the USA, the UK, and Singapore walked out of UNESCO in 1984–5 (see Vincent and Galtung 1992). The MacBride Commission gathered input from over 100 international

experts, and in its final report, Many Voices, One World (UNESCO 1980) challenged as inadequate the prevailing idea of ‘free flow of information’ since it functioned to privilege Western hegemony and cultural diffusion and to turn the South into mere consumers of Western news values, entertainment, and advertising images. Instead the report suggested the important qualification of a ‘free and balanced’ flow, which was adopted as UNESCO policy, although it defaulted from precise suggestions as to how, for example, international news coverage could be appropriately ‘balanced.’

It is significant that UNESCO funded many of the early landmarks in critical international communication research yet from the mid-1980s, its focus and rhetoric has shifted toward a more neo-liberal position and a greater concern with issues around freedom and democratization than around balance flow.

The debates about global media inequality and concern about the logics of conglomeratization and the threats to local cultures continue even in 2001 at the forums of the MacBride Round Tables; the demand for a Peoples Communication Charter and in the activities of the Cultural Environment Movement (see Voices 21 1999). However, while the debates in the 1970s involved Third World policy makers, the critical voices are now mainly Western academics, while Southern politicians have become more involved in nitty-gritty decisions around deregulation, digitalization, and media convergence.

5. Critiques of Media Imperialism

5.1 Arguments From and About Historical Process and Effects

‘Media imperialism’ was a problematic argument both theoretically and empirically from the beginning, and by year 2001 it appears increasingly ossified. An argument that might have had some validity for some countries at a certain period of time became the dominant critical paradigm, operating as a form of political correctness by which critics were seen as apologists for the USA and its demand for a ‘free flow international regime for trade in cultural products’ (Sinclair et al. 1995, p. 6). By the 1980s when the global television and other media industries really changed shape, the ‘critical’ paradigm had become the ‘orthodoxy’ (Sinclair et al. 1995, p. 5).

Historically it is doubtless the case in most, especially technologically based, endeavors that the prime mover sets the model: in cars, in high-rise architecture, in media. Broadcasting did not develop with world domination in mind, even if some of its spread has been consonant with Western foreign policy interests. However, the model of state-controlled broadcasting which was adopted in much of the South hardly supported the ‘free flow of information’ of Western interests. It is also the case that subsequent media players ‘catch up,’ begin to produce their own content, and rework genres to fit their cultural habits. Already in the 1970s, Tunstall (1977) was arguing that Latin America’s high level of television imports in the 1960s was a transitional phase while nationally based television systems were being established.

Empirically, it is mainly from the 1990s with the expansion of global satellite systems and development of infrastructure that much of the population of the rural South has actually been introduced to television. Thus, oddly enough, media could not have had the strong effects imputed by the model (nor by the modernization theorists like Lerner 1958) because the televisual media actually didn’t reach most people in the South until the satellite expansion of the late 1980s. The crude adoption of ‘media imperialism’ arguments promoted a truncated historical analysis and tended to disregard earlier historical processes. It is probably the case that the cultural legacies of imperialism—the spread of Christianity, training in and use of European languages, establishment of systems of schooling and higher education, spread of administrative cultures—have had more enduring and far-reaching effect as carriers of Eurocentric modernization to the South than have the subsequent arrival of electronic media (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1997, Bitterlli 1989).

Additionally, many other industries, connected to but not reducible to the media industries, produce and market symbolic goods (fashion, foodstuffs, architecture and interior design, consumer durables) while the global tourism and travel industries literally transport millions of people a year. A focus on only one element of the contemporary production of culture cannot be read for the whole. Capitalism is also not organized and instituted through media, albeit that media content diffuses images of the goods, lifestyles, attitudes that are increasingly commodified and available for consumption in the capitalist market.

In that sense, the media can support processes of economic transformation and the profound shift from culture as ‘practice’ to culture as ‘commodity,’ and here reconnect to the bigger issues around modernization and development that tend to become submerged in the focus on media structures alone.

5.2 Arguments About Production and Flow

‘Media imperialism’ was a model developed at a time of comparative media scarcity and newly established broadcasting structures in the South. By the year 2001 there are many significant cultural industries in the South: Globo in Brazil, and Televisa in Mexico produce telenovelas; a huge multimedia complex near Cairo supports the production of Islamic soap operas, which Turkey also produces. And if the focus shifts away from television alone to include other cultural products, the diversity increases: Bollywood, the familiar label for the Indian film industry, is the Eastern challenge to Hollywood in the sheer number of film titles produced yearly, with the Asian diaspora constituting a sizeable audience. The Iranian and Chinese film industries are gaining global recognition and audiences. The marketing of ‘world music’ has helped the diffusion of Algerian, Senegalese, Cuban, and Brazilian contemporary music. The Indian ZeeTV is a powerful independent newscaster while Qatar’s Al-Jazeera is revolutionizing factual programming in the Arab World.

Thus the model’s metaphors of the ‘one-way flow’ down the ‘one-way street’ from the West to the rest (Nordenstreng and Varis 1974) are challenged by more diverse production, and more complex images of the ‘patchwork quilt’ (Tracey 1988). Southern media exports into the West have been dubbed ‘reverse imperialism’ while many of the new media mogul empires are not based in the West and Asian corporations and entrepreneurs (SONY, Masushita) have bought up segments of Western media.

5.3 Arguments About Audiences and Effects

‘Media imperialism’ also implied direct unmediated effects of television programming on audiences, turning them into Americanized consumers. It tended to ignore the particularities of local culture and their meaning systems as well as other processes of modernization (shifts in material production, migration and tourism, political institutionalization and democratization) that often operate alongside media development.

New approaches to the ‘active audience’ within media studies have forced a rethinking of international effects also. As with domestic viewing practices, analyses of the negotiation of meanings around US-produced programs such as Dallas by ‘foreign’ audiences show different audience viewing strategies including the imposition of local interpretive frames on ‘foreign’ media product (Liebes and Katz 1990). There is also strong evidence that audiences prefer locally made mediated culture where and when that becomes available (Sepstrup and Goonasekura 1994). The original logic of argument also depended on a rather ossified notion of ‘national’ culture, whereas even US product changes, so that the Cosby Show has become a popular, if rather inaccurate, symbol of changing race relations in the USA.

All this means that a single global product doesn’t always work across cultural divides. While a film such as Titanic may have global reach, falling into that magical, much-desired and heavily marketed category of the ‘global popular,’ most media production is now tailored for local, that is, linguistically bounded, sometimes still nationally-bounded, cultural markets. The mantra is to ‘think global, produce local.’

Regional linguistic-cultural markets are growing in economic significance as the ‘cultural discount’ (Hoskins and McFadyen 1991) of local cultural preference kicks in. While this can produce regional exchanges of news and television programming, it can also produce localized versions of the old paradigm, as in the concern about India’s cultural dominance over the subcontinent.

5.4 Arguments About Genres

Discussion about the nature and definition of media genres in relation to the South has perhaps not been fully engaged. The advent of an externally originated cultural form into a society has often caused controversy in, for example, fear about the impact of free verse on traditions of formal poetry or about the impact of the novel on non-Western writing cultures. Yet now Latin American magic realism and postcolonial family sagas crossing generations and national boundaries have transformed the very form of the novel. A debate once raged about whether Latin American telenovelas were a new form of television series, inflected with socially developmental themes, or whether they were simply soap operas with commercial promotional messages. Anthropologists have analyzed the rise of the Islamic soap opera (AbuLughod 1993) and it seems clear that Southern media texts are not ‘simply’ copies of Western texts, but neither are they utterly novel genres either. Textual give and take, multiple sources of inspiration and derivation in media content, needs to be taken seriously, and attention paid to how forms evolve over time, both within developed television industries like the USA and the UK as well as within ‘younger’ media systems. For example, Zee-TV is not the same as MTV, although it may also show music videos.

5.5 Arguments About Media Policy and Regulation

As the global media environment changes with growing convergence between broadcasting and telecommunications, growing digitalization and the spread of the Internet, so there has also been a move from notions of imperialism to ideas of cultural hegemony. Such constructs are less overtly spatial and usefully deconstruct a singular and unproblematic ‘West.’ There have been fierce intra-Western disputes, most obviously the French disagreements about the deregulated flow of US film within GATT talks, or the differences and competition between US and UK modes of news construction. Parts of South East Asia may now be more concerned about the dominance of Indian cultural product than US; and national law in one Western country encounters a different set of rules in another, as in the US-French dispute about the sale of Nazi ephemera through the Yahoo gateway on the Net.

5.6 Arguments About the State and Democratization

The concern of much of the debate with transnational media domination by the West and the dominance of the market often precluded serious analysis of national processes, particularly the complex class formations in the South and the role of states. Thus, for example in Latin America, repressive military juntas have used media as key institutions of authoritarian government (Waisbord 2000) while in rapidly modernizing South East Asian economies the ruling elites have aligned with global corporate interests, often against the needs of their own population. As popular movements for democratization and equality have grown inside such states, this has prompted greater analytic focus on the relations between transnational processes and national politics and media control, and how states and markets interact within different political and economic formations.

It is amongst the autocratic, sometimes religious, regimes of the Middle East and South East Asia that the argument about ‘media imperialism’ is still heard. The ‘protection of indigenous culture’ can be used as a weapon to prevent internal change and demands for democratization, and the ‘outside’ can be constructed solely as a predator involved in acts of rape against the feminized, vulnerable nation. Yet, in numerous Southern countries—Indonesia, Nigeria, Iran, Brazil—secular intellectuals, ethnic groups, and women are struggling for greater political openness and basic human rights as well as a media environment which facilitates the construction of an inclusive national public sphere. Sometimes the transnational space can act as one of solidarity and support for such struggles.

6. The Rise of ‘Globalization’

Many of the early debates around cultural imperialism and media imperialism actually prefigure key strands of argument that were taken up by the rhetoric of globalization in the 1990s: the recognition of the collapse of space and time through communications technologies; the commodification of social life; the significance of cultural flows. But within the model of globalization is also a sense of collapse of the older, single-centered hegemon into a more disorganised post-Fordist set of global production processes (Lash and Urry 1994); a more decentered and unstable political and cultural environment; and a variety of resistances to Western modernity with the rise of primordial religious and ethnic loyalities. The interpenetration of the global and local actually produces multiple formations of modernity.

‘Cultural imperialism’ tended to see cultures as singular, somewhat ossified, nationally bounded entities: ‘American’ television impacting on ‘Iran,’ for example. There is increased awareness of the loosening of the hyphen in the nation-state and thus the ‘national culture’ is better seen as a site of contest. These are not just issues for countries in the South, but for most countries around the world. In the UK, this is enacted politically with the devolution of Scotland and Wales, and in debates around immigration policy; and culturally by debates about the religious content of the millenial exhibition in the Dome, and about the representation of ethnic minorities in the media. National identity may be practiced daily through a variety of symbolic forms and organizational routines, but its actual content may be more fluid and disputed than ever.

Globalization highlights the manner in which pressures to modernize are being met with particular local orientations and practices. It can still be argued that Western values lie hidden behind a seemingly neutral ‘universal’ and abstract set of processes, but the precise way these are encountered, understood, and dealt with varies from country to country, even within the same region. Latin America presents considerable national variation as does the Arab world; hence, even an increased awareness of regionalism is insufficient. Among media academics, more particularism, more case studies, more nuance is required.

The real collapse of the three worlds of development has left a conceptual lacuna. It is hard to propose such totalizing models any longer. Rather, we need regional frames that take cultural specificities, local structures, political values, seriously. Globalization has exacerbated economic disparities among—but also within— countries and has not ended political repression. Contemporary ‘flows’ include massive movements of capital and of people, so others are no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’ and building transnational communities through various kinds of diasporic media.

Work on the media has also tended to be focused on a single medium, initially mainly television, now heavily focused on the Net; yet rather bizarre situations exist whereby entire newspapers are banned, for example in Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran, while Internet-based information circulates with impunity. Looking at only one element of a complex media environment can also lead to wrong conclusions.

A recent attempt to rework the ‘media imperialism’ model suggested the need to ‘encompass neo-colonialisms of inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, inter-gender, intergenerational and inter-class relations’ (Boyd-Barrett 1998, p. 167) but instead helps us to recognize that in the end the model is simply about power imbalances, which do not require the ‘imperial’ stamp to be of importance to examine. Indeed the ‘imperialism’ obscures the differentiated processes of economic inequality and complex power dynamics. Access to cultural expression often involves complex internal struggles for power as well as pushes from the outside. As Tomlinson (1991) has argued, cultural imperialism always consisted of many different discourses; the ongoing attempt to rewrap them into one through the trope of ‘media imperialism’ is an increasingly forlorn task. The world has changed and so must our language and our theoretical frames.

7. Conclusion

Perhaps the enduring cultural legacy of the USA lies in the development of a commercial model of television as a medium: using entertainment content to attract audiences who could be sold to advertisers (Sinclair et al. 1995). While this is still not a universal model and many states still try to control broadcasting, commercial pressures and availability of multiple forms of media distribution reception such as satellite and cable mean the globalization of capitalism and the manufacture of mediated culture are in the ascendant. In that sense, the focus on US-centric media diffusion obscures a far wider concern around the generic mass production of culture that is now flourishing globally.

 Bibliography:

  1. Abu-Lughod L 1993 Finding a place for Islam: Egyptian television serials and the national interest. Public Culture 5(3): 494–512
  2. Bitterlli U 1989 Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between European and Non-European Cultures 1492–1800. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
  3. Boyd-Barrett O 1977 Media imperialism: Towards an international framework for the analysis of media systems. In: Curran J, Gurevitch M, Woolacott J (eds.) Mass Communication and Society. Edward Arnold, London, pp. 116–35
  4. Boyd-Barrett O 1980 The International News Agencies. Constable, London
  5. Boyd-Barrett O 1998 Media imperialism reformulated. In: Thussu D (ed.) Electronic Empires. Arnold, London, pp. 157–17
  6. Boyd-Barrett O, Rantanen T 1998 The Globalization of News. Sage, London
  7. Galtung J, Vincent R 1992 Global Glasnost:Toward a New World Information and Communication Order? Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ
  8. Guback T, Varis T 1982 Transnational communication and cultural industries. Reports and Papers on Mass Communication. UNESCO, Paris, No. 92
  9. Hamelink C 1983 Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications. Longman, New York
  10. Herman E, McChesney R 1997 The Global Media. Cassell, London
  11. Hoskins C, McFadyen S 1991 The US competitive advantage in the global television market: Is it sustainable in the new broadcasting environment? Canadian Journal of Communication 16(2): 207–24
  12. Katz E, Wedell G 1977 Broadcasting in the Third World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
  13. Lash S, Urry J 1994 Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London
  14. Leibes T, Katz E 1990 The Export of Meaning. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
  15. Lerner D 1958 The Passing of Traditional Society. Free Press, New York
  16. Nordenstreng K, Varis T 1974 Television traffic—a one-way street? Reports and Papers on Mass Communication, No. 70 UNESCO, Paris
  17. Paterson C 1998 In: Boyd-Barrett O, Rantanen T (eds.) The Globalization of News. Sage, London
  18. Peoples Communication Charter 1999 http: www.tbsjournal.com Archives Spring99 Documents Congress Charter intro Charter charter.html
  19. Schiller H 1969 Mass Communications and American Empire. A. M. Kelley, New York
  20. Schiller H 1976 Communication and Cultural Domination. International Arts and Sciences Press, White Plains, NY
  21. Sepstrup P, Goonasekura A 1994 TV transnationalization: Europe and Asia. Reports and Papers on Mass Communication. UNESCO, Paris
  22. Sinclair J, Jacka E, Cunningham S 1995 New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision. Oxford University Press, New York
  23. Sreberny-Mohammadi A 1996 The global and the local in international communication. In: Curran J, Gurevitch M (eds.) Mass Media and Society. Arnold, London, pp. 177–203
  24. Sreberny-Mohammadi A 1997 The many cultural faces of imperialism. In: Golding P, Harris P (eds.) Beyond Cultural Imperialism. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 49–68
  25. Sreberny-Mohammadi A, Nordenstreng K, Stevenson R, Ugboajah F 1985 Foreign news in the media: International reporting in 29 countries. Reports and Papers in Mass Communication. UNESCO, Paris, No.
  26. Tomlinson J 1991 Cultural Imperialism, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
  27. Tracey M 1988 Popular culture and the economics of global television. Intermedia 16: 2
  28. Tunstall J 1977 The Media are American. Columbia University Press, New York
  29. Voices 21 1999 http: www.tbsjournal.com Archives Spring99 Documents Congress congress.html
  30. Waisbord S 2000 Media in South America: Between the rock of the state and the hard place of the market. In: Curran J, Park M (eds.) De-Westernizing Media Studies. Routledge, London
  31. UNESCO 1980 Many Voices, One World. International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems. UNESCO, Paris
Media Literacy Research Paper
Media Events Research Paper

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER


Always on-time

Plagiarism-Free

100% Confidentiality
Special offer! Get 10% off with the 24START discount code!