The Handbook of Global Media Research

Ingrid Volkmer

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781119061120, 9781405198707
• eBook ISBN: 9781118255308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Handbook of Global Media Research

"Ingrid Volkmer has collected an admirably rich, thought-provoking, and diverse collection of views to guide critical scholarship as our topic ('the media' and 'media cultures'), methods (which must now be comparative), and the knowledge we produce are all transformed by globalization"
Sonia Livingstone, author of Media Regulation: Governance and the Interests of Citizens and Consumers

"In this handbook, leading academic and practitioner analysts give us valuable insight into globalized forms of communication, their diversity, the global/local dialectic, and the challenges of critical historical and comparative study of transnational media and communication."
Robin Mansell, author of Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation, and Governance

"With a stellar list of contributors and an engagement with the global that both traces and transcends its boundaries, Ingrid Volkmer's volume is the cardinal chart of our media worlds."
Mark Deuze, author of Media Life and Media Works

"This is a long-overdue volume. The distinguished contributors to The Handbook of Global Media Research have produced a challenging and authoritative guide to understanding the latest developments in global media."
Thomas R. Lindlof, University of Kentucky

As new forms of media proliferate, and communication becomes ever more global, transnational media is increasingly capable of both enhancing political, cultural, and economic globalization and shaping worldviews and civic identity.

Research into the development of transnational media is therefore an essential element of understanding the changes created by advanced globalization. The Handbook of Global Media Research explores and articulates the key themes and competing approaches of this dynamic and developing field. Bringing together the ideas of more than 40 internationally respected authors from around the world, it provides valuable and varied insights into a globalized media landscape, setting the agenda for the future of transnational media and communications research.

Part 1

History of Transnational Media Research

1

Comparative Research and the History of Communication Studies

John D.H. Downing

This brief historical survey opens with a framing of its narrative. It then addresses three early classics of comparative media studies: Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm 1956); The Passing of Traditional Society (Lerner 1958); and Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit/Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1962/1989) (later referred to as Four Theories, Passing, and Public Sphere). Thereafter the survey ­trifurcates comparative research studies into those with a regional focus (e.g., Latin America, East-Central Europe); those with a medium-specific focus (television, cinema, networks); and those addressing media and society more generally, focusing on politics and policy, and minority-ethnic media.¹

Framing Comparative Communication Research

Given the relative paucity of comparative media research, it is tempting to promise the reader a rather cursory chapter evaluating its history. Yet given the paramount importance of comparative studies for developing cogent theory, a critical survey is needed. If ­communication media research is to have heft, it must never be permitted to slumber inside a national cocoon. Max Weber’s sociological studies of religions, Barrington Moore Jr’s six-nation study The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966/1993), Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963/1989), the Princeton School’s influential cross-national studies of “modernization”, the four-volume Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986), and the long-established journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (1958–): these and others, whatever the ­judgments on their specifics, have helped to define properly ambitious research.

Yet a substantial number of the texts reviewed below date only from the mid-1990s, evincing the very slow expansion of this field’s comparative focus until recently. Both holistic and segmented² media theorizing – Öffentlichkeit (public sphere), egemonia (hegemony), “mediatization”, cultural hybridization, functionalism, “cultural industries”, cultural capital, agenda-setting, priming, framing, and the rest – have indisputably been stunted by the failure to routinely compare and contrast between nations.

Worth underscoring, moreover, is the typically unacknowledged dismissal of the need for comparative research found in US and UK Media Studies texts, where findings drawn are repeatedly presented and cited as telling us something worth knowing about “the” media, that is, implicitly all media everywhere. It is a common flaw in many national studies, but given Anglo-American ascendancy in media studies this fallacy has damaging consequences (Stam and Shohat 1994; Curran and Park 2000).

Generalizations about media as such based upon the United States or the United Kingdom are automatically rendered flawed because of the near-implausibility of ­replicating them on a wide scale. Despite certain easily identifiable differences between British and US media and societies, in many ways Britain and the United States may be said to have a great deal more in common with each other than with most of the nearly 200 nations recognized by the UN: language, Protestant brands of Christianity, ­affluence, political stability, imperial pretensions and cultures. These are comparable but atypical nations. Many other countries have even more extreme class inequalities and entrenched exclusion of women from the political arena, and suffer from acute political instability, civil or sectarian strife, heavy dependence on foreign powers, the petroleum and minerals traps, unaffordable education, illiteracy, and ruthless regimes. As a consequence, the societal roles of their media vary sharply.

Comparative research need not only be across nation states. Highly populated nations such as China, India, and Brazil palpably offer significant internal regional variations in media practice and uses. Population size alone understates this variety. “Sub-national” nations, such as Catalunya, Québec, and Scotland, nations with linguistic–religious–regional divisions, such as Belgium and Sri Lanka, and substantially multi-ethnic nations, such as Nigeria, offer very substantial scope for comparative media research within a single nation state.

Valuable, too, are cross-national comparisons within global regions, despite the ­frequently negative framing of such work in response to the late Samuel Huntington’s misconceived The Clash of Civilizations (1998). This chapter will review some ­comparative work on Latin America, East Asia, and East-Central Europe. The notions of ­geo-­linguistic and geo-cultural proximity (e.g., Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham 1996, pp. 11–14), framed initially to analyze trade in cultural products, are germane to this dimension of comparative communication research.

Thankfully, though, the comparative media studies scenario is now changing and even picking up a little speed. Research on media in a number of nations other than the US/UK duo is finally becoming fairly routinely available, at least permitting comparative study from secondary data. Yet even so, research on global South nations is often ­dominated by global North scholars or by researchers strongly stamped by ­Anglo-American (or Francophone) paradigms.

There are many continuing challenges. Cross-national research may be expensive and often requires cross-national teams. Furthermore, it is easy to acknowledge the language impediment in conducting comparative research, given that many researchers are ­monolingual, but unfortunately the hurdles cannot be reduced to that single practicality.

For example, imperial and post-imperial mentalities are evident in the way that even English language communication research routinely goes unnoticed and unreviewed in the United States and the United Kingdom, if published in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and other countries with a significantly Anglophone academy. The hurdles are still more visible when research is on and especially from ­countries outside a tiny elite circle in the global North. EU funding has often required multiple national partners following the accession of new East-Central European nations, which is to be welcomed, but still operates within Fortress Europe.

One caveat: as Gunther and Mughan (2000, p. 412) very importantly stress, media “is a plural noun”. Yet comparative media research has tremendously favored news media of various kinds over all forms of entertainment media and, no doubt in part for archival reasons, print media over others. The tendency to use “media” as a singular noun ­efficiently lures us into fogging vital distinctions and often claims the part (news, ­journalism) in synecdoche for the whole. Three further caveats must be issued: (a) the focus here is on overall contributions to comparative media research, so many tempting targets for specific empirical critique will reluctantly be passed over; (b) not reviewed here, though of great potential value, are comparative longitudinal studies within nations; (c) this chapter does not venture into intercultural communication studies, interesting and important as their focus potentially is and despite their comparativist bent.

Lastly, let us note a constructive but complicating factor in comparative ­communication research, namely the growth of interest in aspects of globalization. Positive in principle, obviously, but it complicates the task here inasmuch as many studies of globalization and media inevitably incorporate comparisons, whether fleeting or substantive, in support or critique of propositions concerning globalizing media trends.

Four Theories, Passing, and Public Sphere

Both Four Theories and Passing represented a critical step forward inasmuch as the ­former study set out the first clear schema for analyzing media in different nation states across the planet, and Lerner’s (1958) work incorporated, admittedly from a pro-US Cold Warrior’s perspective, the global South and global regions as a crucial terrain for media research. Indeed, at the same time as Lerner’s fellow researchers in the United States were mostly insisting that media changed little or nothing in “society”, he was ­concluding they could be significant agents of change in “society” outside the United States through spreading commoditization and entrepreneurialism (“psychic mobility”).

Siebert and his colleagues (1956), in a media studies field dominated then as now by an extreme obsession with the present moment, sought to balance historical evolution and contingency with an acknowledgement of the role of differing state-forms in shaping media structures. Their model firmly eschewed media-centric analysis of media, and did not fall into the trap of concluding that research findings on US media applied to all nations. However, while they made it clear that by the “press” they intended to ^­designate all media technologies and did give some attention to a variety of media formats, their primary focus was on news, journalism, and censorship practices. This is not in itself a critique, as research needs to delimit, but it did anticipate the strong emphasis on these issues in subsequent comparative research.

On the debit side, Siebert and his colleagues wobbled uneasily between two approaches. At times they derived the societal organization of media historically and structurally from “the system of social control” (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1956, p. 1). For ­example, they identified what they termed “libertarianism” with the emergence of European ­capitalism and scientific reasoning. At others, they sought to explain media structures in idealist terms, by recourse to the ascendancy of particular normative theories. These they defined as

certain basic beliefs and assumptions which the society holds: the nature of man, the nature of society and the state, the relation of man to the state, and the nature of knowledge and truth (Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1956, p. 2, my emphasis).

The notion that an entire nation would subscribe to one or other of these positions – Lockean liberalism, Stalinism, “social responsibility of the press” (á la 1947 Hutchins Commission) – implausibly homogenized national belief-systems and enthroned them in a smoothly functionalist model.

Contestation of media structures only appears in their argument in connection with liberalism’s attack on authoritarianism and, glancingly, in connection with the “social responsibility” paradigm, their solution to the negatives in monopolistic media ­ownership (e.g., Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm 1956, pp. 5, 85). Otherwise their implicit image seems to be that of four theories, born from different socio-economic formations, which then, depending on the nation in question, become normatively elephantine, “the ­dominant ideologies” generating ongoing media performance of four different kinds. In the case of the “social responsibility” paradigm, however, this framework implicitly broke down since they argued it to be a trend in the process of becoming dominant, but had no explanation of why contemporary US media should follow a “social responsibility” model other than as a result of the high ethical principles of those owners, executives, and journalists who shared their vision – idealism, then, in both senses of the word.

Later proposals based upon this model and initially summarized by McQuail (1994) added development communication and democratic-participatory communication to these deontic categories. As a step toward complicating the picture, this was to be ­welcomed, although in practice much media performance conducted under the aegis of “development” was distinctly authoritarian in one mode or another, and democratic-participatory communication practice evinced a much larger variety of formats than ­conventional mainstream media, so this designation begged many questions. The latter category also destabilizes Siebert and his colleagues’ implication of a homogeneous, uncontested normative paradigm.

Christians et al. (2009) have recently proposed a substantial departure from the “four theories” schema, focusing only on democratic regimes and on news, and generating three major categories, namely normative traditions, models of democracy, and media roles, each with four sub-categories. In the case of media roles, the sub-categories are defined as monitorial, facilitative, radical, and collaborative. This approach is less ­ambitious globally and does not pivot strictly on the normative, but repeatedly runs the risk of being overly schematic.

Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society was cross-national but also regional in focus, although he derided the “Western invention” of the term “Middle East” to denote the region (Lerner 1958, p. 403). He and a team of eleven conducted interviews in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iran in 1950–1951, with country summaries updated subsequently. They sought to understand the conditions for the emergence of “­modernity”, which Lerner defined at one point as achieving “public power and wealth for private ­comfort and fun” (Lerner 1958, p. 79). Among those conditions he argued that literacy and radio were destined to be central in promoting a growing class of what he called the “Transitionals”, people who embraced what he variously termed “psychic mobility” and “empathy”, namely “the spread of curiosity and imagination among a ­previously ­quietistic population [through which] would come the human skills needed for social growth and economic development” (Lerner 1958, p. 412) along capitalist lines.

These were not the only decisive elements of his analysis. He also emphasized shifting definitions of old age and female gender; styles of political leadership; the importance for political stability of a slow and steady increase of Transitionals rather than a sudden rush in their numbers; the roles of marginalized subcultures in developing media; and the dichotomy, which haunts contemporary Orientalist discourse to this day concerning the Islamic world, of “Mecca or mechanization” (Lerner 1958, p. 405).

This was all a mixed bag, to say the least, but in principle represented an approach to comparative media research, which, although ethno-centric, was not media-centric; which sought to identify key determinants without homogenizing their operation; which was alert to sub-national as well as national variations within a regional context; and gave full weight to the dynamic of social change rather than presuming political stability to be the norm.

Between them, these two early US studies set out a series of parameters for ­comparative media research that were in many ways constructive, at the very least in pushing ­researchers’ attention toward extending their national horizons and in eschewing ­media-centric analysis of media. Celebration of their own nation’s culture, explicit in Lerner’s case, implicit in the case of Siebert et al., certainly sullied their claim to ­academic neutrality but did not extinguish their contributions.

Habermas’ Public Sphere (1962/1989) consisted of a comparison between the rise and decline of public debate on political matters in Britain, France, and Germany. The delay of 27 years in its English language publication as a full text rather than fragments meant that many Anglophone researchers came to it late. His historical analyses have been challenged, notably re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: History of Transnational Media Research
• Part II: Re-conceptualizing Research across Globalized Network Cultures
• Part III: Supra- and Sub-national Spheres: Researching Transnational Spaces
• Part IV: Identifying Spheres of Comparison in Globalized Contexts
• Part V: Comparative Research and Contexts of Challenges
• Index