The Effects of Media Globalization

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By Mary Hickman

Media globalization cannot be stopped. It is a result of new

communications technology. It is also the prerequisite and facilitator for all
other forms of globalization. Multi-national media is critical to global
industries. Many Americans feel that we ought to enjoy the benefits of media
globalization, such as global communication, rather than fearing and
attempting to avoid the consequences—which ironically include hindrance of
free speech.

Communicating internationally has never been easier. Thanks to new

media platforms, we can have a video conversation with a loved one who is
10,000 miles away or keep up-to-date on the stock market with our cell
phones. The internet can also improve our health or save our lives. Your
doctor may send an X-ray or MRI to another doctor in India or China for a
second opinion and have it within hours. “…An Israeli company is making big
advances in compression technology to allow for easier, better transfers of
CAT scans via the Internet so you can quickly get a second opinion from a
doctor half a world away” (Friedman, 2005).

Thomas L. Friedman, quoting Craig J. Mundie, a chief technical officer

for Microsoft: “‘The Windows-powered PC enabled millions of individuals, for
the first time ever, to become authors of their own content in digital form,
which meant that content could be shared far and wide’”. Friedman’s book
underlines his belief that media has the power to cross cultural gaps, bring
people closer together and generally make our lives more convenient as it
never has before (Friedman, 2005). Through the worldwide web, endless
amounts of information are readily available to us. Yet it is important to
consider what the chief technical officer of Microsoft did not say: readily
available information does not necessarily mean we are better informed. And
while new global media can cross cultural boundaries, this does not always
bring people closer together. In truth it can deteriorate foreign relations as
cultural barriers are broken down by American media (Siochru, 2004).

Despite the benefits, there are also very real consequences. A majority
of all media is owned by a very small percentage of wealthy corporations.
Local media is being swallowed alive by conglomerations. Freedom of speech
is threatened by these multinational corporations; they drown out the voice
of local media with profit-maximizing formulas. Media moguls have the most
to gain from globalization of media. Their power is concentrated; they have
merged, often with companies that are unrelated to the field, as when GE
bought NBC (Pappas, 2004). Naturally, the political ideas and bias of GE can
be seen in NBC: GE expels criminal amounts of pollution. Therefore, pollution
is not a topic covered by NBC. Imagine, for example, what our local news
would sound like if it had been bought by Phillip-Morris (Pappas, 2004).

Multi-national media corporations produce products which maximize

their profits while decreasing the cost of production. Globalization has made
it “easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the
world….and…easy to play off one immobile national labor force against
another” (Chomsky, 1994). Jobs which might usually have been performed
locally are being shipped internationally and performed at less than half the
cost. Corporations are increasing profit by cutting costs and selling to an
international audience. Meanwhile, the American middle class is
disappearing along with the jobs. Robert McChesney, in a documentary titled
Orwell Rolls in His Grave, stated that the income for the wealthiest 1% of
Americans has risen 141% over the past twenty years. The income for the
American middle class, however, has only risen a pathetic 9%. These
statistics ought to appall and frighten, yet they go largely unnoticed by the
American people because they are not handed over to us by our media
(Pappas, 2004). Charles Klotzer of St Louis Journalism Review: “The top 5% is
capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is
clearly losing ground, and the highly touted American middle class is
disappearing”. Klotzer claims that the media intentionally ignore these facts
(Klotzer, 2004).

The benefits of media globalization may make it difficult to see these

consequences, which are often subversive. After all, why should the media
inform us about the negative effects of their global dominance? To do so
does not support their main interest: profit. According to Noam Chomsky,
“Their first interest is profits, but broader than that. It’s to construct an
audience of a particular type…One that is addicted to a certain life-style with
artificial wants” (Chomsky, 1996). The wealthiest countries have the
resources to produce the most media; therefore, the media delivered to the
global audience will promote the culture of the wealthiest countries. And it is
the wealthiest minority within these countries who defines the content of the
media, thereby influencing culture around the world.

The multi-national media corporations are not held accountable for

their actions. Only the government has the power to regulate media; in the
past twenty years there has been a rising trend in decreasing regulation for
the media. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. witnessed an “unprecedented
historical explosion of mergers” (Bennett, 2000). These corporations were
allowed to merge at least in part due to free market principles on behalf of
the government. However, one of the consequences of the mergers is they
have led to “…lowered public service obligations of media organizations…as
free market ideology has ironically created near monopoly business
practices” (Bennett, 2000). Not only does the oligopoly have the
government’s blessing; the American media oligopoly is also subsidized by
the government (Pappas, 2004). Anyone who believes in a true democratic
society ought to feel outraged that tax dollars are being given to lobbyists to
fund a lucrative oligopoly.

More media is readily available to us than there ever has been before.
As the number of media vehicles increases, so does competition in the open
market. This increase in competition has not led to an increase in content
diversity. Instead, media content, or media products, have become
standardized to fill a profit formula as the largest media corporations
compete with each other for audience share. Even news stations have taken
up the profit formulas. It can be inferred that what occurs is a lower quality of
journalistic content and an unspoken agreement across the board as to what
news is (Bennett, 2000). “There’s just a common consensus among
extremely narrow sectors of power as to the way the world should be
perceived and as to what kind of people there should be” (Chomsky, 1996).
The effect of a self-censored media is thought-control, controlled by
personalized media content.

According to Lance Bennett in an address presented to the UNESCO-EU

Conference,
“…The journalistic abandonment of the public interest is not driven by
changes at the individual level in professional journalism norms or motives.
Nor is it driven by…popular demand for less substantial information. To the
contrary, the media, and their news products in particular, have fallen in
public esteem to the lowest levels recorded in the modern era of polling”
(Bennett, 2000).
The pursuit of profit, not truth, is at the core of multi-national media. There
have been increases in advertising in media while journalistic quality
plummets. A memo from Coca-Cola’s ad agency to magazines states:
 “The Coca-Cola company requires that all insertions are placed
adjacent to editorial that is consistent with each brand’s marketing
strategy … We consider the following subjects to be inappropriate:
hard news, sex, diet, political issues, environmental issues … If an
appropriate positioning option is not available, we reserve the right to
omit our ad from that issue” (n.d.).

Media is largely funded by advertising. The Coca-Cola memo makes it

explicit that media content is affected by the desires and politics of
advertising agencies.Noam Chomsky, when asked what globalization means
for the press and media, replied: “It means much narrower concentration of
media sources…It will reflect the points of view of those who can amass the
huge capital to run international media. Diversity and information will
decline, media will get more and more advertiser-oriented” (Chomsky, 1996).

If Noam Chomsky is correct and advertising in media increases, we can

expect our media to be overwhelmingly dominated by advertiser interests
and bias. In summary, we can expect the quality of journalism to wither.

Media is a unique “product” in that it shapes how people think and

behave. It is a product of culture which also shapes culture. Sean Siochru
made note of this in an address at the World Commission on the Social
Dimension of Globalization, held in Geneva: “Media products are different,
not least because they are more than mere consumer goods: in important
respects they also ‘produce’ us” (Siochru, 2004).

Because of the societal influence demonstrated by media, it is

imperative to regulate it differently than other commodities (Siochru, 2004).
Currently, America enforces very little regulation over media for the sake of
an open and free market (Pappas, 2004). While the free market principle
works for most other goods and services, the theory as applied to media has
been detrimental to society (Bennett, 2000). The media falls victim to strong
consumerist desires, which they encourage American citizens to exhibit. “For
capitalism’s cheerleaders, like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, all
this suggests that the human race is entering a Golden Age. All people need
to do is sit back, shut up and shop and let markets and technologies work
their magical wonders” (McChesney, 2001).

The truly frightening aspect of the consumerist philosophy is that

America is not the only country affected; globalization has allowed us to
share our culture of greed with the world.
When multi-national corporations are granted free speech rights, the voice of
the people is stifled. The authors of the Constitution intended to guarantee
these rights for individuals only; individuals do not have the same voice as a
global media corporation (Pappas, 2004). Furthermore, when one considers
that media shapes culture and that American oligopolies are largely in
control of media globalization, one could come to the conclusion that media
globalization is an imperialistic effort on the part of media conglomerates
(Chomsky, 2004).

Thomas L. Friedman, author of the best-selling book The World is Flat

and an opinion editorial columnist for The New York Times, noted the
significance of the recent explosion of media. Says Friedman,

“[Media globalization] … will be seen in time as one of those

fundamental shifts or inflection points, like Gutenberg’s invention of
the printing press, the rise of the nation-state, or the Industrial
Revolution—each of which, in its day, noted Rothkopf, produced
changes in the role of individuals, the role and form of government, the
ways business was done and wars were fought, the role of women, the
forms religion and art took, and the way science and research were
conducted, not to mention the political labels that we as a civilization
have assigned to ourselves and our enemies.”

Friedman acknowledges that media globalization currently does, and

will continue to have a profound impact on the way people conduct their
lives. While media globalization is in itself more helpful than harmful,
American media corporations are setting a dangerous trend in their media
“products”. If we assume that the example that America is setting as the
forerunner of media globalization will be imitated on a global scale, the
consequences are beyond frightening: they will threaten democracy by
silencing the voice of the people.
References

Bennett, Lance. (2000 November). Globalization, Media Market Deregulation,

and the
Future of Public Information. UNESCO-EU Conference.
Chomsky, Noam. (1994 June). Profits of Doom. New Statesman and Society.
7.305.
Chomsky, Noam. (1996 July). Media and Globalization: An Interview with
Noam
Chomsky. CorpWatch. Retrieved February 14, 2007, from
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1809&printsafe=1
Chomsky, Noam and Edward Herman. (2001 April). Filtering the News. New
Internationalist. P. 13
Klotzer, Charles L. (2004 October). The 10 Best-Censored Stories: Key Issues
that the
Mass Media Largely Ignore. St. Louis Journalism Review. 34.270, P. 30
McChesney, Robert. (2001 March). Global Media, Neoliberalism and
Imperialism.
Monthly Review. 52.10, P. 1
Pappas, Robert Kane. (2004 November). Orwell Rolls in His Grave.
Peterson, David. (1997 June). The Global Media: An Interview with Edward S.
Herman
and Robert W. McChesney. ZMagazine.
Siochru, S. O. (2004). Social consequences of the globalization of the media
and communication sector: Some strategic considerations. Geneva:
International Labour Office.