Media Globalization

• Media globalization shall be defined as the

phenomenon of expanding multinational
corporate media investment, resulting in the
emergence of a global oligarchy of first tier
corporations, which own and operate a variety of
mass media content and distribution technologies
including: television, radio, film, music, ...
The Benefits and Disadvantages of Mass
Media
• It Can Keep Us Connected. ...
• It Can Spur Business. ...
• It Can Spread Art and Culture. ...
• It Can Give Voice to the Voiceless. ...
• It Can Empower the Already Powerful. ...
• It Can Be Used for Disinformation and Hate. ...
• It Can Homogenize Culture. ...
• It Can Overtake Personal Connections.
Media Globalization
• Many scholars argue that media globalization has dire effects on
democracy and civic life.
• Fierce competition and takeover wars waged by multinational
corporate giants against local and national media companies.
• Second-tier national and regional conglomerates also prey on weaker
competitors, both to grow large enough to protect themselves from
takeover by multinationals and to create the production and
distribution synergies that size is thought to favor.
Effects of Media Globalization
• (a) reduced corporate social responsibility to serve diverse political, cultural,
and demographic audiences;
• (b) increasingly generic programming in both entertainment and public affairs;
• (c) a reconstructed political media space that excludes much of local politics,
citizen activism, public policy analysis, and deliberation;
• (d) emphasis on low cost, attention-getting sensationalism that promotes
discouraging antisocial and antipolitical images; and
• (e) a public value shift associated with treating audiences purely as consumers,
resulting in program content that is more compatible with advertising values
and consumer lifestyles than with citizen engagement in public affairs
(Bagdikian 1997, McChesney 1999, Price 1996, Schiller 1996).
Other Views on Media Globalization
• Critics accused the media oligarchs of imposing a cultural hegemony
by standardizing content around consumer values and
• pursuing profit-maximizing business models that drive independent
culture producers to the margins of the media marketplace (Bourdieu
1996, 2002). Herman & McChesney (1997) argue that as commercial
values invade media systems, even passive media consumption tacitly
legitimizes the politics and morality of a profit-driven social order.
The Rights of the Community and
Globalization
• The free flow of products and information versus the rights of communities to
impose political and cultural limits;
• Commercialization and privatization of communication systems versus public
interest protections for citizens and consumers;
• Standardization of news and entertainment products versus national and
cultural diversity;
• The right of business to compete and expand in world markets versus the
protection of local production and ownership;
• and, the degree to which citizen information flows should be regulated by
design through public service systems or left to the often erratic outcomes of
markets (O Siochr ´ u et al. 2002)
INSIDE THE GLOBAL MEDIA REGIME
• Multinational conglomerates and national media corporations seek to advance
commercial norms, namely concentrating ownership of production and distribution,
dominating advertising markets, and placing profit considerations above social
responsibility.
• International and domestic political institutions into which media businesses project
their commercial norms, and that provide the main arenas for contesting them.
• Domestic publics within nations, both consumers of media content and citizens
challenging that content.
• Digital media (e.g., Internet and Web) channels with global reach that are only
partially integrated into commercial systems, which enable the distribution of
political alternatives to commercialized content and the organization of grassroots
protests against the regime.
Media Corporations: Redefining the Issues
• If norms promoting neoliberal media deregulatory policies were not
so popular, media giants would be less muscular, and surely less free
to produce programming with so little public accountability.
• The global media market was dominated by as few as seven giant
corporations that have grown at astonishing speed into vertically and
horizontally integrated behemoths: Disney, (AOL) Time Warner, Sony,
News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi Universal, and Bertelsmann
(McChesney 2001).
• The quest for dominance is, in itself, a political problem worth
worrying about. For example, McChesney (2001) offers a simple
model of corporate media behavior as imperialistic, involving these
elements:
• (a) the race to conquer new territories (markets)
• (b) the escape from national regulations and identifications that
enables corporations to become semiautonomous world powers, and
(c) the quest for size or scale, which aims at depriving markets of
alternative sources of products.
Competitions between Behemoths
• Perhaps the more interesting part of media territory is the
transmission and reception capacity, which is expanding due to
technological innovation in digital communications.
• If there were only so much space to conquer, the gobbling up of
channels and bands might present a larger problem.
• In an expanding universe, large corporations must compete not only
with each other but often within themselves, resulting in many of the
organizational fiascoes witnessed in recent years among the
corporate behemoths (Compaigne & Gomery 2000).
Challenges to Media Imperialism
• These challenges to the media imperialism argument encourage us to
be more careful in thinking about what the media conglomerates
actually contribute to this transnational media regime.
• It is proposed that one should look beyond the growth and
domination motives of the corporations and consider that these
corporate players share a remarkably common normative policy
agenda, the aggressive promotion of which constitutes one political
pole of the media imperialism.
Regime Formation
• Murdock (1990) outlined this agenda in terms of four stages : “denationalization”
(corporate business plans that remove companies from systematic national control
or regulation),
• “liberalization” (pressures to relax ownership and competition rules within
nations),
• “commercializing the public sector” (pressures to break public service television
and radio monopolies by licensing commercial competition and reducing public
funding, with the aim of forcing public service media corporations to take on
commercial sponsors and develop ratings-based programming), and
• “reregulation” (policy initiatives that permit vertical and horizontal integration
through multiple ownerships and acquisition of the means of production,
distribution, licensing, and delivery of content across those multiple holdings).
Media and Cultural Receptivity
• Cultural receptivity is also a factor in understanding regime behavior
at the national level.
• For example, some nations that are open to market and content deregulation
may exhibit consumer tastes that mesh poorly with the generic product
models of global media corporations.
• McChesney (2001) argues that this often results in multinational corporations
simply buying national assets or signing distribution deals that give them
some control over local content production.
• This was the model that Sony applied in Brazil. At the same time, such
arrangements facilitate the export of Brazilian music to global audiences—
which is hard to find overly objectionable.
Barriers
• Cultural barriers account for uneven engagement with the regime in
other national media markets as well.
• For example, the deregulation of a rather dismal Indian state television
monopoly in the 1980s produced a flowering of channels and outlets for a
thriving internal (Bollywood) film and television industry (Thussu 1997).
• Indian domestic interests and political cultures have been less resistant to the
domination of Indian national news by global generic content providers such
as WTN, Reuters, and APTV, whose feeds appear in local programs and echo
through imports from Murdoch (Sky News), BBC, and CNN (Thussu 1997).
France’s Case
• The case of France represents another variant of the interaction between domestic politics
and culture and various arenas of regime contest.
• The French case was characterized by domestic political receptivity in the form of a
breakdown of a center-right proregulatory consensus in the early 1980s.
• This receptivity was balanced by state-sanctioned cultural selectivity, a combination that
accounts for French acceptance of some regime norms and fierce resistance to others (Kuhn
1995).
• The French case is also interesting because it enables us to see how national politics often
crosses into international venues.
• France has long been a player in international arenas, from UNESCO (United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) initiatives for a New World Information
and Communication Order in the 1970s to more recent WTO negotiations over cultural
products