Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett

An exploration of the political economy of media, and to what extent global communications and popular entertainment continue to serve elite interests.

In Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire, an international team of experts analyzes and critiques the political economy of media communications worldwide. Their analysis takes particular account of the sometimes conflicting pressures of globalization and “neo-imperialism.” The first is commonly defined as the dismantling of barriers to trade and cultural exchange and responds significantly to lobbying of the world’s largest corporations, including media corporations. The second concerns US pursuit of national security interests as response to “terrorism,” at one level and, at others, to intensifying competition among both nations and corporations for global natural resources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 20, 2007
• ISBN: 9780861969142

Book preview

Chapter One

Globalization, Media and Empire: An Introduction

Oliver Boyd-Barrett

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The act of communication in itself is an arguably insufficient object of study: communication is no more nor less important than the universe of both silence and noise from which communication emerges and which gives it shape, just as the spaces between objects represented in a painting have vitality no less essential to the scope for meaning of the whole. To understand communication we must understand that which is not there. To communicate is simultaneously not to communicate; to enlighten may at the same time obscure; to inform may deceive. From such a premise, we should conclude that the title of this book is much less than the product of its silences.

For many decades from its inception during the first half of the twentieth century scholars advanced the study of media when more correctly they may be said to have promoted a propaganda of public opinion and pluralism; they concentrated on the place of media within the nation rather than media’s role in construction of the nation. In dealing with the administrative entity that we call the state, and the cultural product to which it lays claim and that we call the nation, they understated the dependence of these upon the play of symbolic power through media. Their focus on media within the nation took insufficient account of the play of international interests, technologies, finance, and ideologies in shaping media; and marginalized the adventures of national media on international markets, and the role of media in securing the compliance of populations both domestic and foreign with the international political and economic ambitions of domestic and transnational elites. Transnational dimensions of media activity were first presented (in the 1960s) in the context of benign discourses of modernization and democratization, or discourses of cultural protection for local (often elite) cultural products, in preference to malign discourses of imperialism, whose relevance should surely have been acute in the decolonization context of that period. When in the 1970s scholarship did seize on the importance of media as tools of political, economic and cultural subjugation of nations, classes, genders and races, in competition for the earth’s resource and for the precious time and trusting fealty of citizens, subjects and employees, discussion soon reverted to audiences and the nebulous processes by which human beings struggle to make meaning from texts on the basis of limited cognitive and cultural resources. The political economy of media as agents of both imperialism and resistance, was further diverted, hijacked even, during the 1990s, by discourses of globalization that focused on markets and regulation more than interests and social classes, on discontinuities between modern and pre-modern more than continuities, on the surface chatter of trade and cultural policies more than long-term strategies of power. Discourses of globalization, attending to interdependencies, networks, transformations of space and time, transnational corporate networks, the seductions and utilities of corporate products, constant assurances of goodwill for mankind and a better future, stand in sharp opposition to the discourses of imperialism, with their attention to hubris and control, victimage and justice, and the critical interrogation of media as vehicles of product promotion, distraction, and self-exculpatory consolations for, diversions from and denials of an incessant savagery and enslavement that, with particular intensity these past few hundred years, has visited alike colored and white, man and woman, and the very earth itself, its creatures, forests, oceans, and air. Neither set of these incompatible narratives is complete: globalization theories focus on the benefit of liberal markets and understate the continuance of protected markets (e.g. US government subventions and favorable tax policies in such areas as agriculture and movies). Imperialism theories excoriate the nefariousness of the empire’s cultural product yet are reluctant to acknowledge the potential for liberation in exposure to new informational and entertainment paradigms and technologies.

Globalization, as I argue in Chapter Four, is not new; if it is remarkable this may be because many of us have been reared within the walls of the nation state, a recent innovation. Many things we profess to find surprising about globalization, such as homogenization and hybridization of cultural forms, complexity of trade relations, human mobility, the undermining of local authority are in fact ancient. Think, if you will, of world religions such as Catholicism that over fifteen hundred years ago exercised a highly standardizing impact on the most intimate beliefs and behaviors (e.g. sexual relations), while subtly accommodating previous cultural forms, over many thousands of miles, through complex networks of agents (priests, monks and nuns organized into national and international orders and administrative units) and mass media (e.g. the systematic production of bibles and books of learning by teams of monastery scribes using manual, illustrated lettering). Or recall the silk road that for three thousand years established trading connections stretching from the Mediterranean to China via Central Asia and Kazakhstan, permitting the flow of silk from China, precious stones from India, silver goods from Iran, Byzantine cloths, Turkic slaves, Afrasiabian ceramics (Anon., 2006). Consider, too, the demographics of Southern California in the middle of the nineteenth century including numerous indigenous tribes; the descendants of missionaries and soldiers from Mexico City, many of whom had originated in Spain; gold prospectors from every part of Europe and Asia, including large numbers of Chinese; whale hunters from Russia; traders from South America. And as for the undermining of local sovereignty one has only to recollect the province of Israel and the subservience of its rulers and priests, through Pontius Pilate, to Caesar at the time of Christ. If contemporary globalization has a claim to distinction it is in the combination of the scale to which the different countries of the globe are participants in the global economy; the role of transnational corporations rather than governments in activating such participation (albeit subject to regulation by intergovernmental bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization); and the role of advanced media and communications technologies in supporting the global economy, for example by enabling instantaneous informational, entertainment symbolic exchange almost regardless of distance.

This descriptive conceptualization, however, has more than a few flaws. It may imply that the global economy operates neutrally for the general benefit of all, when some would prefer to argue that it is driven by transnational corporations headquartered in a handful of western countries, for the benefit of wealthy elites. It implies that the exchange of information and entertainment is essentially egalitarian and benign, when some would prefer to argue that much of the information and entertainment comes from the western world, predominantly the United States of America, often highly unbalanced in its representations of the world and world issues. Discourses of globalization render largely invisible the fragility of a global economic system that threatens to exhaust the earth’s productive resources, is overwhelmingly dependent on soon-to-be extinct gasoline energy, under conditions of global warming and other forms of incipient human-induced natural catastrophe, that may yet reverse the process of globalization back to a dominance of the local. The troubled history of these discourses is itself much older than many of their adherents appreciate.

Chapters in Part One pose the question as to the extent to which global media are global extensions of (a few) national media or represent a media universe in which all human groups are well represented. In Chapter Two, Graham Murdock shows that the dualistic conception of globalization as either progressive interdependency or intrusive invasion, either a liberal project of cosmopolitans or an acquisitive design of conquistadores, was acknowledged at least as far back as the writings of Immanuel Kant in 1795. Murdock shows how this dialectic has been transformed by the changing relations, under contemporary globalization, between transnational and local media in their struggle for a claim to truly indigenous cultural product, within a market template that both share and that reduces the authentically national or local to a marketable, symbolic commodity. Competition also often yields to interdependent collaborations between transnational and local. These enhance the commercialization and marketability of media product and undermine older, state-supported or public service media. Thus they advance the inevitability of the internationalization of capitalism, both through classic advertising and newer, more comprehensive strategies of product promotion, including product placement. Both glorify the moment of purchase and pleasure of ownership, while hiding from view the conditions and externalities of processes of production. What has changed in recent decades, Murdock argues, is the role of nation states, which used to be major impediments to the internationalization of capital, as in the case of both India and China during the Cold War. Neither country wanted to buy into western conceptions of the modern. Now, with the entry of these giants to the global economy, capitalism has achieved what Murdock calls a mobile consumerism, its success fed by an expanding middle class, and consumer-oriented youth cultures.

Sources of resistance remain, in particular the rise of fundamentalisms. These mobilize pre-modern sentiments even as they leverage the tools of modernity to achieve their ends, which usually have to do with nationalist, ethnic or religious purity. While this suggests an opposition between mobile consumerism and fundamentalism, Murdock argues there is a complicating, third force at work, namely critical cosmopolitanism. This is represented by forces that do not uncritically buy into the consumerism project, but remain aware of and concerned about the externalities and conditions of the processes of production. They make extensive and imaginative use of new communications spaces that become manifest when technology evolves faster than the capability of regulators to control it. While access to the resources and possibilities of the Internet are unequally shared, and its overall influence possibility limited, critical cosmopolitanism often makes effective use of it to foster a global, moral consciousness and citizenship.

US representation of itself and the other through Hollywood film is likely a paradoxical factor that helps provoke fundamentalist resistance to mobile consumerism, even if Hollywood imagery has mostly and positively served US interests through the promotion of western modernity. It is a truism of media research that local audiences prefer local product, yet Hollywood is still the foremost example of US-based media imperialism. In Chapter Three, Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell note that although non-US film makers of color make most movies, the public history of film is largely the history of Hollywood. Hollywood movies dominate screen entertainment around the globe, accounting for between 40–90 per cent of the movies shown in most countries, and sucking up most global investment in film. While the industry likes to account for its success as a perfect example of the operation of market response to popular demand, Miller and Maxwell argue that precisely the opposite is true, that Hollywood is sustained not by the market but by state subsidies, whether of the US itself or of other nations competing for movie production dollars. State interests are fourfold: movies promote American goods and consumerism, directly or indirectly; movies are effective propaganda – the authors refer to American movies teaching American values to Japanese moviegoers after the US dropped H-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; moviemaking serves the military, both through propaganda, and in the transfer of animation skills to battlefield training software; movie production has positive multiplier effects for local economies.

Another truism of media research is that the explosion of television outlets through terrestrial, cable, satellite, video and DVD distribution stimulates local entertainment production. Yet as a source of movies shown on all these channels, Hollywood has grown more rather than less influential in most countries, while its once strongest rival, European movie production, has declined. Europe remains Hollywood’s most valuable overseas market. Through much of its history, Hollywood has all but wiped out local film industries, and now dominates in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Egypt that once had strong domestic industries. Vertical integration, Fordist production principles, and innovation, have played their part in this saga, but so too have state subsidies. State-supported Hollywood imperialism is represented through subsidies for overseas export activity, inducements to make use of cheap non-US labor, and outsourcing. With China and India in the global economy, Hollywood relishes the prospect of penetrating the countries that account for two thirds of the world’s screens. Even while Chinese import controls restrict entry of Hollywood movies to a mere handful, these nonetheless account for substantial percentages of revenues earned.

In sum, one might conclude from Miller and Maxwell’s analysis, as from most other contributions to this volume, that Giddens’ claim (2005) that media imperialism makes no sense, really demonstrates a profound misconception of the relationship between aggressive territorial and cultural interventions by nation states – often in alliance with economic elites – and communications media. Media imperialism theory is the specific focus of Chapter Four, where Boyd-Barrett analyses the importance of information and communication technology (ICT) industries in supporting US global economic dominance in the period 1975–2000. He argues that ICT represented a focus of US response to the comprehensive swirl of threat that it confronted in the 1970s, and an arena for the application of deregulatory, neo-liberal policies in the 1980s. The break-up of AT+T, in particular, heralded a shaking-up of telecommunications, facilitating the mass application of networked microprocessor technologies (NMT) throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Boyd-Barrett charts NMT-supported US global hegemony at the turn of the 21st century, and the strong representation among US and US-allied transnational corporations (TNCs) of knowledge-based and ICT industries. Simultaneously, he charts a strong relative decline in the strength of US global dominance, also represented by a decline in its lead of ICT, mainly at the hands of Indian and Chinese competition. Assessing the implications of the growth of ICT in India and China, Boyd-Barrett inclines to the view that although interdependencies are thereby established between the USA and Asia, these may be less significant in the long term than mutual perceptions of the intentions of each of these major powers with respect to the leveraging of their economic power for the pursuit of national security and ambition. Concerns that feed such ambitions embrace estimations of future conflict in competition for global energy supplies during the difficult upcoming transition from a gasoline to a post-gasoline energy era, in the face of mounting ecological and environmental sources of global catastrophe. Such a view helps explain neo-conservative politics. Neo-conservatism is a response to the prevailing weakness, from a US point of view, of neo-liberalism which, while underwriting US dominance for a quarter century also nurtured its relative demise by accelerating the rise of Asian powers. Once again, globalization has everything to do with imperialism; and communications media likewise have everything to do with imperialism, and resistance to it.

Discourses of imperialism, I have suggested, are more likely than those of globalization to focus on the specific agents and agencies that make things happen. Part Two of the book focuses on issues of regulation, and the cultural dimensions of regulatory issues, especially in the interaction between national media development and regional or global regulatory agencies. In Chapter Five, Granville Williams explores the activities on the one hand, of the CEOs of media conglomerates and their lobbyists and, on the other, of citizen activists. He identifies two prevailing models of broadcasting, established early in the 20th century in the USA and in the UK: the commercial and the public service broadcasting (PSB) models respectively. Under globalization, he argues, PSB came under intense attack by corporate lobbyists who claimed that PSB was unfairly privileged in the market place. They favored the unregulated growth of private television services that paid lobbyists their fees. Like Murdock, however, Williams finds evidence of redemption from corporate power through citizen campaigns. These resist the colonization of communications space by for-profit, advertising-driven entertainment, in favor of a broadcasting that informs and educates for citizenship and democratic choice. Williams explores the arrogance and hubris of corporate power in his case study of Time Warner, whose CEOs in the 1990s implacably opposed any kind of government quotas or restrictions on their bid to control both media content and global distribution across a wide range of different media. They saw themselves marching towards a new world order in which global business would reign supreme over government, education or nonprofits. The takeover of Time Warner by AOL near the peak of the dot.com bubble turned into a farcical, if tragic, saga. One thing the merger had in common with many other aggressive acquisitions was a debt accumulation so crippling that few of the merger’s touted advantages were achieved. Williams traces how media corporations, through their lobbyists, paid intellectual firepower and bribes, emasculate threats to their ambitions from politicians and regulators. In Europe, organizations as diverse as the Association of American Chambers of Commerce, the International Communications Round Table, the European Publishers Council, and Association of Commercial Television in Europe resolutely attacked pro-PSB stands and directives such as the European Union’s Television Without Frontiers. Yet in both the USA and in Europe, citizen movements successfully resisted the private grab for public communications space. For example, in the USA, the FCC failed in its 2003 attempt to further weaken controls over the concentration of media ownership, and in Europe, attempts to eliminate public funding for the BBC and prevent renewal of its charter floundered.

Globalization in its most recent manifestation has three sub-phases. The opening phase was the adoption from early 1980s of neo-liberal, deregulatory policies by the Republican government headed by President Ronald Reagan in the United States, and the Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. Such policies aggressively responded to multiple threats to international capitalism in the 1970s, including strong trades unionism at home, the emergence of Third World, non-aligned power centers and trade cartels (demonstrated by OPEC countries during the oil crisis). The outcome was sharper power conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union. The Western world, under the leadership of the USA and Britain, set itself against conciliatory international political and economic negotiation. In macro-economic terms deregulatory polices served western interests at the cost of exacerbating divisions of wealth within and between nations. Negative externalities of globalization, and the protests they inspired, surfaced with greater frequency and intensity during the 1990s, during a second phase of globalization. This was represented by such episodes as the Zapatista uprising on the start of implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the collapse of the Mexican peso later that same year, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, and the Seattle riots in 1999. The third phase was marked by China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, signal that the world’s most populous country had joined the capitalist global economy. By this time it is was apparent that the other great Asian power, India, was well embarked on a similar economic odyssey, breaking from the socialist legacy of Gandhi and Nehru. As Chapter Four demonstrates, these transformations, from the neo-liberalism of the 1980s to the emergence of the Asian economic giants at the turn of the 21st century, were accompanied and in part driven by the dialectics inherent in the development and application of ICT.

In Chapter Six, Jia Lin explores the implications of China’s accession to the WTO for China, and for accessibility to the domestic Chinese market for foreign ICT capital. She examines China’s delicate balance between media commercialization, on the one hand, and political and cultural integrity, on the other. In only 20 years, the world’s most populous country moved from outright rejection of foreign cultural products, through restrictions on their importation (while often conniving at rampant piracy), to international trade pacts that facilitate foreign direct investment. Lin traces the development of a regulatory framework during the 1990s that governed the importation of audio and visual goods as well as regulating foreign participation in local production and distribution. She notes how official regulation was often obscure, and not necessarily implemented, creating an ambiguity that allowed greater activity by western investors prior to WTO than might otherwise have been supposed. Chinese central authorities were determined to push certain sectors of public industry, including state-owned media, towards self-reliance through commercialization, and in response the media often looked to partnerships with western investors as a way forward. These partnerships typically were dominated by the local partners. Foreign investment and foreign expertise seemed a worthwhile exchange for local personnel, contacts and infrastructure: for western investors, the reward was access to the mouth-watering immensity of the Chinese market. Not all these collaborative ventures were successful; many investors grew frustrated, even alienated, by the restrictiveness and unpredictability of official Chinese policy or its implementation. But most big western names stayed the course even at the price, for example, of self-censorship and other modes of adaptation such as product localization. Their patience was to be rewarded with the prospects that opened up in China’s market following accession to WTO.

Part Three of the book moves from a specific focus on regulatory issues, to broader questions of how competing interests at global, national and local levels are articulated and negotiated, and the implications for individual media agencies. In Chapter 7 Xin Xin examines a national Chinese media conglomerate, Xinhua news agency, as a case study of the interaction between the global, national and local. Xin argues that the opening of a national market to foreign investment should not necessarily be considered a manifestation of weakness, or undermining, of the nation-state, as some earlier theories of globalization implied. Rather it is a process that develops through interaction between the global, national and local; of these, the national is the level at which domestic media conglomerates typically accommodate market forces in part by negotiating with the State for a reconfigured relationship between the nation and the global and local levels. Xin notes how recent central government policy in China has fostered market competition between local forces while maintaining central power intact. This involved central encouragement of the local proliferation of profit-driven media. The center restricted their expansion, however, in order to buttress and protect the role of national media, including CCTV and Xinhua. These remained pliable agents of central government influence. National media have not been spared the imperative to commercialize, nor the pressure to engage in competitor-collaborative relationships with local media, yet have been unable to achieve complete independence from government. Their need for continuing government subvention, protection (e.g. of their intellectual property rights) and approval of whatever innovative entrepreneurial activities they may propose, and the government’s need for media that both have national/international reach and are also pliable, serves the system of centralized authoritarianism that has characterized Chinese government for two thousand years.

Among other things, national media serve the center by acting as gateways for the infusion of international products into China. Global players may establish direct relationships, but given the absence of a secure and predictable legal framework (as Lin makes clear in the previous chapter), it is safer and more convenient for them to work through strong (centrally approved or enabled) intermediaries at national level. These intermediaries gain their power in a combination of ways: financial muscle, where they depend on large advertising-supported business on the domestic market, and political muscle where they leverage large audiences (primarily domestic, but also foreign) as political capital that may be invested in return for government subvention and protection. The return that they derive from these benefits, however, also leashes them to the needs and objectives of the state. Because central financial support is only partial, the national media conglomerate must still compete for revenues on the domestic market (albeit from a privileged position) with global, national and local suppliers.

A number of chapters explore further permutations of the relationships between global, national and local. A prevailing theme of research on media and globalization, one that is illustrated in the chapters on China by Lin in Chapter Six and Xin in Chapter Seven, is the advisability and often the necessity for global corporations to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with local companies, an approach that typically reduces risk and uncertainty for both partners while enhancing local acceptability of global product and strategies. These partnerships are not limited solely or even most significantly to manifest content. In Chapter Eight, Geetika Pathania-Jain explores the localization strategies developed by transnational media for penetration of Indian markets during the 1990s. Focusing on both content and non-content dimensions, she explores homogenization in the modes of production and distribution. Specific practices of localization that she identifies include (a) localization of programming content, which includes (i) splitting satellite beams; (ii) ceding creative autonomy to locals; (iii) creating culturally specific made-for-market programming (through local language, cultural iconography, humor, cultural sensitivity); (iv) enhancing visibility of local artists; (v) basing local programming on American formats; and (b) the cosmetic localization of programming through (i) dubbing, (ii) sub-titling, and (iii) using local hosts to link programming. She notes that it is only in the larger cultural-linguistic markets that we see customization take place.

Depending on whether one regards localization as merely a minimal, strategic, revenue-optimizing gesture, or as a refined and respectful assessment of the local cultural preferences that must be served in order to attract viable audiences, one may find in India evidence either of a barely disguised media imperialism or of a carefully nuanced and diversified accommodation to complex cultural formations. Chatterjee in Chapter Nine considers the impact of foreign media in India on representations of local values. Many theorists of media and globalization focus on processes of homogenization of cultural product that often attend commercialization. Commercialization is a way of readying local business for integration into the global economy, and for competition from foreign media penetration. Chatterjee argues that commercial, foreign media influences may have provided more scope for representations of competing ideas of national cohesion than had previously been feasible when Indian television was limited to a state sanctioned monolith (Doordarshan) of public service broadcasting. Tracing the development of different models of national integration in India, he identifies secular and non-secular versions of centralized nationalism, as well as alternative ideologies of accommodation through diversity. Doordarshan initially espoused a secular modernization based on the role of media as agents of modernization, notably in the dissemination of applied agricultural science. Low priority was accorded potentially divisive issues such as culture and religion, a strategy that, by default, seemed to authenticate Hindi as the hegemonic language.

There was a pronounced shift in the 1980s towards more middle class, business-friendly programming and more nationally-relevant but consensual representations of culture. The development of religious, mythological soap operas in the late 1980s arguably initiated a new era of symbol politics. Commercialization of television at this time coincided with a revitalization of community symbols, in response to vigorous democratic political, cultural and social movements at state and national levels. The newly liberalized environment might have increased the dangers of economic and cultural domination, except that the filtering influences of national and sub-national social and political institutions actually encouraged a diverse representation of national and local objectives and values. Both foreign and domestic private television suppliers as well as public service broadcasting responded to the new diversity at both national and state levels. Transnational media institutions entering India tried to acknowledge and represent the country’s regional, cultural and linguistic diversity. They incorporated diverse cultural symbols, religious themes and national objectives in order to win the attention of targeted political and social segments. This suggests that global media organizations are not necessarily as cohesive as the previous generation of transnational media, rooted as they were in their home markets. Additionally, pressures of deregulation and competition for revenues forced Doordarshan to address the decentralizing demands of regional audiences and cultural institutions by establishing a network of regional language channels. The growing power of the regional elite at the national level also added to this pressure. In conclusion, it appears that the influences of global commercialization and the entry of transnational television materialize along lines already set by domestic social and political conditions, offering diverse implications for domestic value systems.

Discussions of transnational media in the context of globalization generally focus on the activities and impacts of media that are ultimately owned and controlled by identifiable US corporations. Within discourses of media, cultural imperialism and globalization, other media do occasionally achieve a presence, notably British (largely on account of the BBC and Reuters), and French media (largely on account of Agence France Presse). Britain and France have a shared history of territorial imperialism; their influence on pre-independence and post-independence growth and development of media comes under the umbrella of media or cultural imperialism. The phenomenon of media as agents of imperial, economic or political control by one country over another or of resistance to such control is even more widespread. One has only to think of the influence of German media in Nazi Europe, and the strong contemporary influence of German-owned media interests in Austria or Central Europe; or of Russian media in Eastern and Central Europe during the Soviet era; of Hong Kong media in mainland Chinese media in the last few decades before Hong Kong was returned to mainland China by the British in 1997; of Thai media in Cambodia; of diasporic media serving expatriate populations, such as Indian film and television distributed to Indian communities worldwide.

The case of Hispanic media is addressed by Mercedes Medina in Chapter Ten. She asks whether it is possible to talk about a global Spanish media market. Motivations for Spanish media expansion are similar to those of US media: to increase revenue, compensate for saturation of domestic markets, diversify risk, maximize resources, achieve synergy and economies of scale. Their strategies usually include the formation of mutually beneficial, strategic partnerships. While movement is often from Spain to South America, a unique feature of Hispanic media imperialism is the staging point advantage. This is the advantage, for the Spanish, of using partnerships with Latin American concerns as a point of departure to gain entry into the exceptionally wealthy US Hispanic market or, alternatively, the advantage for media businesses of either North or South America in using Spain as a point from which they may gain entry into Europe, as in the case of Mexican Televisa’s Galavision and telenovelas. It is useful for North American media corporations to link with South American and Spanish media to better enable North American media satisfy the programming needs of their domestic Hispanics. Difficulties and limitations of Hispanic media collaborations include the sharing of the same language. Differences between different kinds of Spanish may inhibit automatic access to local audiences. Medina notes that only the bigger, wealthier Hispanic markets are involved. She considers the concept of a global Spanish market, a claim that she suspects may be pretentious. She finds that Hispanic media products do add value to the diversity of available product worldwide, and concludes that Hispanic products help complete rather than compete with Anglophone media globalization.

Part Four of the book looks at the relationship between communications media and the dynamics of economies generally at national, regional and global levels, not least through the importance of media as targets of, and vehicles for, international advertising and public relations campaigns, and the implications for citizenship and the public sphere. Previous chapters (e.g. Jain) helped demonstrate that the transnational export and extension of media influence is not limited to and may be much more profound than the dissemination of mere media contents. Just as Jain’s examination incorporates the adoption of western business practice, either by Indian media or joint ventures between western and Indian media, Gershon’s focus in Chapter Twelve is the near worldwide adoption of the neo-liberal model and its application in the media realm, with specific reference to telecommunications. Neo-liberalism is often motivated, he argues, by perceived inefficiencies of centralized planning and government protected monopolies. His chapter includes a strong summary of the philosophy of deregulation and its intended benefits, and a frank acknowledgement of the limitations of that philosophy in application.

The new model places its faith in the market as the basic engine of growth and prosperity; and the market, by definition, is open to unrestricted trade and competition. Transitioning to the new model, in many countries, involves the selling off of previously state-owned enterprises and re-investment of resulting resources. What results, according to the advocates of this model, is a world whose economy is centered on a collaboration between governments and transnational corporations and within each of these categories. In practice there is great