Media Imperialism

Oliver Boyd-Barrett

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473911437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How does control of media resources serve political and economic ends? What is the impact of media concentration and monopoly in the era of technology convergence, with not just traditional and 'new' media but also consumer electronics, telephony and computing industries? Revisiting the classic concept of media imperialism, Oliver Boyd-Barrett presents a thorough retake for the 21 st century, arguing for the need to understand media and empires and how structures of power and control continue to regulate our access to and consumption of the media. It?s no longer just Disney and Dallas - it?s also now Alibaba, Apple, Facebook, Google, Samsung and Huawei. Examining the interplay between communications industries and the hierarchies and networks of political, corporate and plutocratic power in a globalized world, the book explains:

• the historical context of the relationship between media and imperialism;
• contestation and collaboration among new media empires;
• the passion for social justice that inspired the original theories of media and cultural imperialism, and how it has been embraced by a new generation.

Digging deeply into the global landscape and emerging media markets to explore how media power works across transnational boundaries, this book gives a clear and sophisticated argument for why media imperialism still matters.

1

Redefining the Field

MEDIA IMPERIALISM

What does it mean to talk of “media imperialism?” The expression implies that certain forms of imperialism are directly related with the media in some way. At least three forms of relationship are implicated. Firstly, processes of imperialism are in various senses executed, promoted, transformed or undermined and resisted by and through media. Secondly, the media themselves, the meanings they produce and distribute and the political-economic processes that sustain them are sculpted by and through ongoing processes of empire building and maintenance, and they carry the residues of empires that once were. Thirdly, there are media behaviors that in and of themselves and without reference to broader or more encompassing frameworks may be considered imperialistic. These may be international (as in the unequal news exchange relationships imposed by western international news agencies on national agencies throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) or national (as in the case of powerful entertainment and news media that exercise inordinate commercial and political influence in given national markets – the influence of Rupert Murdoch in the United Kingdom comes to mind). In the literature on media imperialism, all these inflections and others are to be found. Sometimes the term is ascribed a theoretical status, as one or more theories within a much broader range of existing theories about international communication. The literature that specifically addresses media imperialism represents a relatively small body of work when compared with broader literatures that, while they are relevant in important ways to the topic of media imperialism, do not invoke the term itself.

In this book I propose as a starting point that the term “media imperialism” designates, first and foremost, an area of study, an area that deals with the range of relationships and interconnections between phenomena that scholars label “imperialism” and those that they label “media,” an area that is available for empirical investigation. Within this area of study, previous and surely future scholarship proposes research questions or hypotheses that manifest characteristics of “theory” in social science. For example, drawing on primary or secondary data, or both, they may hypothesize that the interactions of two or more phenomena, dimensions, factors or variables that connect imperialism and media demonstrate consistency over time or place, yielding predictive value. While any such finding might be thought of as contributing, whether in endorsement or refutation, to a theory of media imperialism, I prefer to avoid the presumption that within the empirical field of media imperialism study there should be only one theory as opposed to an open-ended range or chain of such theories.

Within the field of media imperialism study one may identify quite different theories about the nature of this relationship. This is not the place for a substantive or exhaustive exegesis, but for the purposes of illustration and introduction we can identify four separate theories that were current from the 1940s to the 1970s. Harold Innis (2007 [1950]) identified what he believed were distinctive relationships between the physical properties of communication systems (e.g. stone, papyrus or paper) and the structures and capabilities of power in ancient civilizations. Herbert Schiller (1992 [1969]) called attention to what he considered to be an intensifying dependence of media political economy on new, transnational methods of electronic communication (notably the satellite). These embedded the media ever more closely within a regulatory system that served the US military industrial complex, first and foremost, while wedding them to business models that coincidentally also facilitated the global extension of US economic and political power. Extension of US power occurred as a result both of the direct sale of US commodities through advertising and, less directly, of the demonstration – through entertainment – of enviable consumerist modernity. Together, these forces helped shape popular consciousness by means of a hegemonic, ideological frame that was at least consonant with the role of the USA as superpower. Like Schiller, Jeremy Tunstall (1977) was also intrigued by the role of media in sustaining and extending US power but thought of this largely in terms of comparative market advantages. The USA was a large and prosperous media market. By recovering the costs of production at home US media could easily compete with local communication products in what were generally much smaller overseas markets: they could afford to tailor their prices in any way necessary to ensure market dominance, except where local regulations restricted foreign imports. Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1977a) extrapolated from three media phenomena of the 1970s, each supported by ample empirical evidence. First was Anglo-Franco-American dominance of an international or systemic network of global, regional and national news agencies. Second was the dominance of Hollywood studios in the international supply of movies and television entertainment production such that in many developed and emergent markets during the 1960s and 1970s local cinema and television were heavily dependent on US imports. And third, from his observations of post-independence Ireland he noticed the continuing influence if not market dominance of the UK over national Irish broadcasting and printed media. These led him towards a theory of media imperialism that centered on the inequalities of media power between countries, sometimes involving the direct exercise of market supremacy by media of powerful countries on media of less powerful countries, as in the case of Hollywood intervention on local movie markets (e.g. by imposing deals on local theatre chains to ensure that they continued to favor Hollywood product) and its suppressive consequences for local movie production. But in a separate work (Boyd-Barrett, 1977b) he also traced the role of media as agents of colonial resistance to British, French and Spanish imperialism in the long run-up to the achievement of the formal (but problematic) political independence of these territories.

MEDIA

I will not assume that the principal terms of my subject are everywhere comprehended in the same way, so some discussion of basic terms is in order. Let me start with the somewhat plainer term “media.” While this term also has significations that lie outside of the study of technology-mediated communications it is with this arena that we are principally concerned. Several generations of research lend confidence to the observation that in this field it has generally been understood that the term was intended to refer to technology-enabled means of communication from the few to the many. These included books, newspapers, recorded music, film, radio and television. More recently, it has become universally appreciated that to this classic list of media should be added computer or digitally-enabled Internet and the World Wide Web. These fuse traditional few-to-many media with the one-to-one communication capabilities of telephony or radiophony and introduce facilities or forms of communication that did not previously exist (e.g. Internet browsers and portals, search engines, social network media) and are carriers of digital versions of all previous media forms. Particularly through the development of social network media, the Internet has considerably extended and enriched the scope for all kinds of communications among groups and networks, from very small to very large.

I see no particular merit, therefore, in limiting the discussion only to the so-called classic mass media or mass communication. A principal characteristic of mass communication is that communication content is formulated by the few for delivery to the many. A characteristic of both mass communication and technology-enabled interpersonal communication is that governance and operation of the technological, administrative and business infrastructures that give shape to and set the conditions for both these forms of communication are controlled by the few, with limited active involvement, if any, by the many.

Previous media scholarship centered predominantly on content – the production of content and the consumption or use of content by audiences, receivers or even interpretive communities. I propose in this book that in addition to an interest in point-of-consumption content (seen in previous research in terms of either the decoding of messages or collaborative meaning-making) we must also be concerned with the technological, administrative and business infrastructures that enable the production and dissemination of point-of-consumption content, including the range of devices through which that content is produced, delivered and received (hardware) and the protocols and operating systems they incorporate (“software”). Naturally, the relationship between software and hardware is symbiotic: hardware shapes and gives tone and texture to software, while software inspires the design of hardware. The onset of digital communication, which enables the delivery of a vast range of communication activity and content through the same device or range of devices, has highlighted the increasing significance of media concentration, the process whereby single media corporations acquire interests across all major forms of communication in processes of vertical and horizontal integration and extra-media conglomeration. Digital technology and the infrastructures that enable it (including cable, satellite and wireless networks) massively enhance communications activity across local, national, regional, international and even global markets, and compel us to understand the term “media” as encompassing all technology-enabled forms of communication, irrespective of time or space.

In approaching media with an outlook that emphasizes the importance of technology I shall try to avoid the attendant seductions of technological determinacy – the fallacy of attributing to technology some of the consequences of media that should more appropriately be attributed to the people, interests and social formations that gave rise to the technology. Certainly, once formulated, a technology may have highly significant consequences for determining who gets access to the means of communication for the creation, dissemination or reception of communications and the kinds of communication that are possible. Some of these consequences may be different from or go beyond what was initially intended by the originators and developers of the technology.

I cannot do justice in one volume to all the relevant issues of media and technology that relate to broader concerns of imperialism and resistance to it. Issues that deserve further treatment, but for reasons of space I have not developed, include but are not limited to those of Internet governance and the Internet Governance Forum, intellectual property legislation and issues of “piracy,” the politics and weaponization of “surveillance,” and the significance of the World Summit on the Information Society meetings of 2003 and 2005.

If I limited the discussion only to technology-enhanced communication, however, I would not do justice to the importance of more fundamental aspects of communication. These have to do with the always context-suffused processes of the generating, sharing, storing and retrieving of meaning, with or without the aid of technologies that go beyond the human body. This includes, of course, all aspects of human language, verbal and non-verbal, upon which almost the entirety of all media processes are dependent and which are every bit as accessible to discourses about imperialism as are the media. More broadly one can say that this realm of consideration invokes and is inseparable from an appreciation of culture(s) understood in the Raymond Williams’ sense as way(s) of being (Williams, 1958). There is nothing about media that we can or should say that is not in some way or another embedded in a broader and deeper context of culture.

IMPERIALISM

While the term “media” must assuredly have a range of normative and other associations for any who would use it, it is a concept that readily lends itself to a working separation, in the hands of scholars, of its sense of media-as-empirical-tool from normative precepts or prescriptions as to how those tools should be used. This is less true, by an order of magnitude, of this volume’s second key term, “imperialism,” which presents itself with an even heavier weight of historical and ideological baggage. I surmise that the term is more often used with negative than with positive connotation, although certainly there are some who regard at least certain manifestations of imperialism as being benign or having long-term benign effects (a view that is likely more common among agents of imperialism, the imperialists, than those they colonize).

This problem notwithstanding, I choose to retain the term with all of its baggage and imprecisions. First of all, it usefully invokes the idea of power and unequal relations of power, particularly in the context of power exercised by some tribes, communities, and nations over others. Secondly, it is a term that in the study of media has now acquired a heritage of at least half a century’s thinking, research and debate. Thirdly, it is incontestably the case that virtually all scholarship recognizes the phenomenon of “empire” as a long-established historical and institutional reality, and the term tends to be least controversially applied in the case of geographically identified centers of power such as Carthage, Crete, Athens or Rome that have extended political and military influence and control over wide swathes of territory for appreciably long periods of time in a process that is invariably accompanied by profound changes in commercial, social and cultural activity. Any inquiry into the role of media, albeit in the form of stone, papyrus or paper in relation, say, to the supply of armies, records of administration and trade, propagation of imperial edicts, ideology and religion, not unreasonably may be considered aspects of media imperialism (Thussu [2006] cites several such examples from antiquity in his textbook on international communication).

Western scholarship has had no difficulty in recognizing the existence of ancient empires whether in the west or in the east; nor has it scrupled in recognizing as empires the far-flung territories acquired, for various periods of time within the last few hundred years up to and beyond the Second World War, by ruling elites of countries as diverse as Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Ottoman Turkey. European land-acquisition extended to the far Atlantic coast, igniting a process that led to the formation of the USA – which quickly joined the imperial club – and to vast regions of the Gulf, Africa, Asia and South America. The relinquishing of colonies (in Africa, the Middle East, Pacific and Far East) by Britain (in particular), Belgium, France and Portugal within the two decades following the Second World War – even if in most cases the imperialist’s apparent departure was hastened by highly motivated local movements of independence or liberation – has created considerable confusion in many minds, scholars’ included. Whether the motives for “giving up” colonies were idealistic (in altruistic celebration of the principle of national self-determination), diplomatic (e.g. comprising part of the settlement of “peace” terms by the victorious powers at Yalta towards the end of the Second World War in 1945), propagandistic (presented as representative of western liberal “civilization” and intended to stand in stark contrast to communist or fascist “totalitarianism” and barbarism) or in other ways self-interested (as in: dispensing with the pain, costs and other “burdens” of empire in the face of liberation movements and/or in order to better sustain political and capitalist “stability” at home), it seemed indisputable at the time that the “winds of change” heralded by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in Cape Town, 1960, did indeed portend the passing of the age of empires. The Soviet bloc or what we may call the empire of State communist Russia (originally conceived as a kind of imperial anti-empire) survived several more decades. Its implosion, starting in 1989, was the consequence of a mixture of internal contradictions (heavy investment in infrastructure yet an inability to respond to the growth of consumer expectations and the clamor for greater regional autonomy) and external pressures (including the 1980s occupation of Afghanistan). It was also a voluntary policy choice, one undertaken by a section of the Russian elite, under the leadership of President Mikhail Gorbachev, with a view to unblocking the systemic sclerosis of Soviet bureaucracy.

Throughout the Cold War (but also, long before and persisting long after the Cold War) there were many superpower and particularly US interventions (my interest is primarily in the USA in this book) in the supposedly sovereign affairs of other nations and territories that did not involve their territorial incorporation within the formal political apparatus of the hegemon. I shall argue that these kinds of intervention are best understood as a continuation of classic imperialism in relatively new (but also some quite old) forms. Their goals are not always to do with territorial acquisition; they are to do with securing – by any means possible, including violent coercion, provocation, bribery, threat, subterfuge – the foreign policy goals of the USA and of those parties or interests that have had most access to the shaping of these goals. The latter often, if not usually, include large multinational corporations based or originated in the USA or among the most powerful allies of the USA. Given the wide discrepancies between the declared motivations that are proffered by governments in justification for intervention (especially in the context of a supposedly “post-imperial” world), and “real” aims (typically representing a consensus of convenience struck between otherwise diverse interests), interventions require significant manipulation of public opinion through control of or influence over the media. Superpower interventions are therefore of critical importance to scholars of media imperialism. Later chapters will trace some of the key forms of imperialist intervention and its justification not only in the period since World War Two but since the emergence of the USA as a world power which is to say, almost from its very birth as a nation in 1776. Frequent objectives at play have included territorial acquisition but even more routinely involve discourses of national security and, behind or through such discourses, consolidation of political leverage in international relations and favorable terms of access to raw materials and to all kinds of markets, from the sale of debt to the provision of arms.

CRITIQUE AND COUNTER-CRITIQUE

While never disappearing from the research literature, the media imperialism tradition fell out of favor among those who criticized it for being either over-simplistic or out of date (e.g. see Straubhaar, 1991). The actual phenomenon of media imperialism, on the other hand, has never disappeared or ceased to be important. I shall propose that this field of study is sustainable, has evolved, and has never been more relevant than in the current, so-called digital age. It is central to considerations of media and power and although questions of power do not by any means exhaust the questions we may have about the media, there is a critical urgency for issues of power to be returned to center place in the field. In outlining reasons for the reinstallation of a concern for media imperialism, I prefer the term “media” to “cultural” imperialism. Although there are clearly many important and dialectical interrelationships between media and culture, I use the idea of “media imperialism” to focus attention on the political economy of the communications industries which is where I propose the analysis of media and power in a global context should begin.

Several critics, and even some who work within the tradition of media imperialism studies, confine their attention mainly or solely to manifest media content. Content tends to be judged by such considerations as whether or to what extent it is locally produced or imported (or the degree to which it is “hybridized”) and its generic status, often in the context of fears of cultural homogenization and what that might mean. This may be to the exclusion of other vitally important variables including transnational transfers of media-related capital, ownership, advertising, expertise, technology, formats, patents and royalties. Even at the level of content, analysis is too often unsophisticated, with little work expended on how issues are framed, the ideological premises (with respect, for example, to the neoliberal agenda that has been promoted by the USA and its major allies), sources cited, degrees of consonance with domestic or foreign state policies and corporate interests. Some of the original models of media imperialism (e.g. Schiller, 1992 [1969]; Boyd-Barrett, 1977a) specifically emphasized components that went beyond manifest content. Some more recent work (e.g. McChesney and Schiller, 2003; Boyd-Barrett, 2006) has tried to broaden the field of relevant media in the era of technology convergence, embracing not simply “old” and “new” media, but consumer electronics, telephony and computing. These media are important both in and of themselves and also because, increasingly, electronic access to both “old” and “new” media forms is determined by electronic hardware (including cable, satellite and te...