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Media Globalization Globalization of media needs to be discussed and thoroughly analyzed in order to foresee and to prevent its possible negative effects. The scientific community has split into opponents and proponents of globalization. The opponents claim that globalization is undemocratic and it is dangerous for cultural identity and national interests. The arguments pro state profitability and commercial benefits of this process. If public opinion clings to the opposition a new group of questions will become urgent: can globalization be stopped?
If there is any alternative to globalization? The attitude of public and the formation of its opinion much depend on the information available through general sources: books, journals, magazines etc. In my essay I will examine the information on media globalization circling in contemporary books and academic journals. In particular, I will touch the following aspects: the necessity to understand globalization, global oligopoly, the dominant players in media industry, the reasons, the forces and the major processes of globalization, its alternatives and effects. Finally, I will conclude about the general coloring (pro or contra), and summarize the information obtained from the sources.
According to Robert W. McChesney (2000), the current era is characterized as one of globalization, technological revolution, and democratization. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). Media and communication play a central and defining role in all of these areas. This happens because economic and cultural globalization arguably would be impossible without a global commercial media system to promote global markets and to encourage consumer values. (Robert W.
McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). In his article Global Media, Neoliberalism and Imperialism Robert W. McChesney expresses his belief that if one takes a takes a close look at the political economy of such industries as contemporary global media and communication, one may understand the mythology and hype, we are living in, and realize what is taking place together with what should be done in order to organize effectively for social justice and democratic values. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). In the article Global Media, Neoliberalism and Imperialism McChesney asserts that not long ago, in eighties and nineties, national media systems were owned by domestic industries of radio, newspaper and television. There were major markets importing films, books, music and TV shows, and they generally were dominated by U.
S. firms. Nevertheless, at that time the media systems were national and kept their local commercial interests. This pattern has almost changed now due to the appearance of a global commercial-media market. As a result, today the understanding of contemporary and future media starts with grasping the idea of global system and the differences between national and local levels. Media analyst for the investment firm Paine Webber, Christopher Dixon, in his explanation of the process occurring in media expressed the similar idea: What you are seeing is the creation of a global oligopoly.
It happened to the oil and automotive industries earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment industry. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). McChesney draws a distinction between two related facets of global oligopoly. First, the dominants firms are moving across the planet. The author of the article Global Media, Neoliberalism and Imperialism, however, points out that contemporary dominant firms are based in U. S.
A. Since the U. S. market is well developed and only permits incremental expansion (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). The dominant firms capitalize on the foreign markets that offer much of potential growth.
This tendency of occupying markets abroad was noticed by many other contemporary analysts. Thus, Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone remarked: Companies are focusing on those markets promising the best return, which means overseas, (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001), while former chairman of Vivendi's Universal Studios, Frank Biondi maintained that 99 percent of the success of these companies long-term is going to be successful execution offshore. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). It is true that national and local markets are being swallowed up by dominant firms all over the world. In particular, dominant media firms more and more view themselves as international or global entities.
Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff commented the case of controlling of a German firm of more than 15 percents the U. S. music and book-publishing markets: Were not foreign. Were international, and then he added: Im an American with a German passport. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). Further, in 2000, Middelhoff proclaimed that Bertelsmann was not a German company any more: We are really the most global media company. (Robert W.
McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). The same view was articulated by AOL-Time Warners Gerald Levin, who said: We do not want to be viewed as an American company. We think globally. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). The second facet, according to McChesney, is convergence and consolidation among firms.
Specific media industries become concentrated and the dominant players in each industry of media are subsidiary of global media conglomerates. This idea can be illustrated in the following way. In 1980 U. S. market of educational publishing had many viable players. Nowadays, there are only four firms left which are controlling this market.
The level acquisitions and mergers taking place is gripping. In 2000, the total of merger deals in telecommunications Internet, and global media came to $ 300 billion; it is three times more that figure of 1999, and much higher than the sum from ten years earlier. It evidences that media firms either grow very quickly or get swallowed by their competitors. (M. Shatzkin, 2002).
The same tendency can be observed in other industries. In September 2000 the CEO of Chase Manhattan claimed: We want to be an end-game winner. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). Additionally, McChesney in his article offers the explanation of reasons of media globalization. One of them is technology. McChesney asserts that the improvements of communication technology and its fast development make global media empires feasible and lucrative in a manner unthinkable in the past. (Robert W.
McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). Another reason, and a more significant one, is pressure of gaining profits, which is inherent to capitalism. In media it eliminates the barriers to commercial exploitation of this industry and allows its concentrated ownership. The author of the article concludes that this phenomenon together with new values contributed to the national deregulation of media: With neoliberal values, however, television, which had been a noncommercial preserve in many nations, suddenly became subject to transnational commercial development. (Robert W. McChesney, Monthley Review, vol. 52, n 10, March 2001). Hemant Shah, Associate Professor School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin, in Journalism in an Age of Mass Media Globalization concentrates on the problem of media ownership within national borders.
He points out that mass media ownership is facilitated by a world-wide trend toward deregulation and privatization of the mass media. (Hemant Shah, Communication Theory 6 (2): 143 - 166, 1996). The researcher offers Alternative Journalism to replace the Prevailing Model of Journalism, which resulted from media ownership. I find his ideas about Alternative Journalism to be important and constructive in the frames of anti-globalization movement. He articulates the faint hopes expressed by McChesney regarding the resistance of local media systems to international conglomerates and shows methodology of developing anti-ownership journalists. Shah remarks: For journalism to assume a more meaningful social and civic role, it must do what the prevailing model does not allow. It must raise fundamental questions about power, social justice, and culture.
Then the researcher adds: This effort requires that whenever appropriate, journalists take a stand, actively interpret "facts, " let ordinary people speak about their experiences, and make moral and ethical judgments about the nature of capitalism (and racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, etc. ). (Hemant Shah, Communication Theory 6 (2): 143 - 166, 1996). Thus, Shah defines the new tasks for new Alternative Journalism, which would oppose the neutralized reporting of Prevailing Journalism, serving the interests of its owners. Also important in Journalism in an Age of Mass Media Globalization is the chart, drawn by Shah, which compares the two models of journalism: prevailing model with an alternative one. This chart labels the approach of "emancipatory journalism" and highlights democracy-enhancing potential and liberating vector of mass communication.
In another book The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism the authors Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, study the incorporate players in the new age of information. These players and their functioning are characterized by Herman and McChesney in the following way: "The global media are the missionaries of our age, promoting the virtues of commercialism and the market loudly and incessantly through their profit-driven and advertising-supported enterprises and programming. " (E. S. Herman, W.
McChesney, 1997). Today the large dominating firms, according to Herman and McChesney, have a two-tiered grouping: the first tier comprises ten mega corporations, and includes some well-known firms like Time Warner (its annual sales approach $ 25 billion), GE and Disney; the second tier consists of a number smaller firms, such as the following newspaper companies: The New York Times, Co Dow Jones, Gannett, The Washington Post Co. , and the Tribune Co. The authors contend that the domination of information flow is undemocratic. While pursuing their profits and being pressed to serve advertisers, media companies disregard their public service. This idea was clearly articulated by Herman and McChesney in the introduction: "Such a concentration of media power in organizations dependent on advertiser support and responsible primarily to shareholders is a clear and present danger to citizens' participation in public affairs, understanding of public issues, and thus to the effective working of democracy. " (E.
S. Herman, W. McChesney, 1997). I think these words may serve as a warning for the world community about anti-democratic results of media commercialization. The processes taking place in media today were also thoroughly analyzed by Edward S. Herman, Robert W.
McChesney in their book On Media Centralization and Commercialization. The book On Media Centralization and Commercialization also repeats the idea about the domination of powerful transnational companies which has affected the sphere of media industry in the world. In addition, the authors of the book provide with a historic overview of the development of the first massive medium. They start with its historic predecessors, such as pamphlets, arises, gazettes, annals, then go to the appearance of the first newspaper editions. Accordingly, Herman and McChesney finish their overview with the emergence of such innovations as television and internet. Finally, the researchers analyze the active forces of the global media market and examine the strategy and funding of huge media corporations: Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation, which originally started with the productions of big film and television.
Not less important is the idea, expressed by Herman and McChesney, that poor developed regions in terms of communications and information experience are more vulnerable for negative effect of entertainment culture created by modern media. Consequently, the political and cultural media landscape of these countries is strongly influenced by the operation of media and political systems developed and dominating countries, for example, such as the U. S. A. Further, Herman and McChesney noted: All countries are moving, each in its own way, towards the US model, and as we have observed, this process is being reinforced; global media cross borders, they make alliances with local firms, they create an impressive political force and growing commercial sectors (Edward S.
Herman, Robert W. McChesney, 2004). The similar points of view can be found in the book The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony edited by Lee Art and Yahya R. Kamalipour (2003). In this book the authors state that social inequalities, for instance class conflict, occur when local cultural and media practices are displaced by dominant media firms. These social inequalities refer to the consumers of commercial media when the cases of confrontations between opponents and proponents take place. (Joseph Man Chan, Journal of Communication, 44 (3), pp. 112 - 131, 1994) Lee Art and Yahya R.
Kamalipour, in order to provide their readers with the full picture of media globalization and the variety of its consequences, study the cases from five continents: the effect of telecommunication programs and technologies promoted by government in Canada and Britain; the influence of MTV in Asia; the propaganda of pan-Latin ideology by television variety show in Mexico; the work of Islamic pop radio in Turkey and so on. Each of the cases analyzed by Lee Art and Yahya R. Kamalipour offers a new sight into the expanding of corporate hegemony and the contradictions of media globalization that emerge on a national background. Also, the topic of national and cultural conflicts in media globalization was discussed at the conference the 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA dedicated to Mass Media, Globalization, and Asian Sexualities. A great amount of research work was done by a group of scientists in order to examine the impact of commercial and globalized media on the formation of cultural identity of Asian people. Thus, Tom Boellstorff in Dubbing Culture: Mass Media and Gay Subjectivity in Indonesia investigated how the three forms of mass media (gay print media, general print media, and the Internet) express gay subjectivity erotics in Indonesia.
An increasing number of Indonesians operate the Western term "gay, " drawing from state discourse to imagine their community as a "gay archipelago" simultaneously national and transnational. (Tom Boellstorff, The 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, March 912, 2000). But these Indonesians mostly learn about Western gays from printed literature and rarely meet them in their lives. This culture of Western gays imposed by globalized media induces some of Indonesians, who have been once identified as gay, to create their own magazines. Such magazines then circulate in small print runs.
Also, a growing number of Indonesian gays assert themselves by communicating through the Internet. Thus, Boellstorff resumes that sexuality, that most embodied of domains, is highly mediated in gay Indonesia. (Tom Boellstorff, The 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, March 912, 2000). Another participant of the conference, Ralph Litzinger, dedicated his research to the problem of the relationships between failed sexual intimacy and the popular imagination. In The Privacy Rage: Discourses of Intimacy and Suffering in 1990 s China Litzinger discussed the case when in 90 ies the journalist of the Beijing Youth Daily, An Dun, interviewed young women and men about their views on marriage and love. These interviews were compiled and edited in 1998 under the name - "Absolute Privacy" (Juedui yin).
The book soon became a bestseller and the commercial success of the journalist plus her conviction articulated as "to the common persons anxieties and pain in a highly commercialized era characterized by unrestrained desire and degenerate morality" (Ralph Litzinger, The 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, March 912, 2000) prompted the appearance of an avalanche of similar books. Afterwards, the Chinese book market was loaded with endless series of privacy narrations: "The Privacy of Single Life, "The Privacy of Sexual Passion, "Extreme Privacy, " and so on. Ralph Litzinger concludes this case with the following words: While An Duns work was seen as a new form of social realism, the official press denounced these books for turning personal suffering into the newest hot commodity. (Ralph Litzinger, The 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, March 912, 2000) The author of the research focuses on the issue of privacy and inspects the shifts of the boundaries between social and private, occurring under the influence of media globalization. In conclusion I would like to say that having studied the amount of more than ten sources on globalization, I become convinced that globalization as a phenomenon should be studied and understood by every member of community. Neither of the authors mentioned in this essay claimed that globalization can be stopped or eliminated, though every research analyzed has more or less anti-globalization coloring. Moreover, I have found out that media globalization produces many negative effects.
Firstly, commercialization does not allow media to fulfill its direct functions: to spread information and to report news freely without objectivity. Secondly, it eliminates democracy in media and reduces its liberating potential. Thirdly, globalization of the media market conflicts national cultures and is harmful for cultural identities. I have also found out, there are alternatives to the production of globalized media, for example, the Alternative Journalism. And I hope that this approach together with others, offering similar alternatives in the rest of media industry spheres, will fight media globalization in the near future. Bibliography: Edward S.
Herman, Robert W. McChesney. On Media Centralization and Commercialization. Reviewed by Tatiana Tapavicki Duronjic.
Media online. ba Dec. 22 2004, June 4, 2005, < web > Hemant Shah, Journalism in an Age of Mass Media Globalization. IDSNET. ORG, May 18 2005, June 4, 2005 < web > Hemant Shah, "Modernization, Marginalization, and Emancipation: Toward a Normative Theory of Journalism and National Development, " Communication Theory 6 (2): 143 - 166, 1996. Joseph Man Chan, "National Responses and Accessibility to STAR TV in Asia, " Journal of Communication, 44 (3), pp. 112 - 131, 1994 Lee Art, Yahya R. Kamalipour The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony, State University of New York Press, September 2003.
McChesney R. W. (2000) Global Media, Neoliberalism Monthley Review, vol 52 n 10, March 2001, June 4, 2005, < web > McChesney, Robert W. Herman, Edward S. (1997). The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell. Ralph Litzinger, The Privacy Rage: Discourses of Intimacy and Suffering in 1990 s China.
Session 118. The 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, March 912, 2000 < web > Shatzkin M. Consumer Publishing Today: A Model Under Threat? "Publishing 2001: Attitude to Technological Change." The Idea Logical Company, Inc. 2002, June 4, 2005 < web > Tom Boellstorff, Dubbing Culture: Mass Media and Gay Subjectivity in Indonesia. Session 118. The 2000 AAS Annual Meeting, March 912, 2000 < web >
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