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Research into International Television Flows: A Methodological Contribution 21

regional, sub-regional or even national surveys must be preferred, in order to
obtain findings of a sufficiently high quality.

Notes

1. Read (1976: 18) explicitly tries to distinguish between ‘international’ and ‘transnational’.
Mowlana (1986: 4) defines what has here been called the general commonsense understanding
of transnational or international: ‘International flow of information is defined here as the
movement of messages across national boundaries between and among two or more national
and cultural systems’.
2. For the sake of convenience I primarily associate transnationalization with individual
countries in the following presentation of the outline of a conceptual framework for the first
level of analysis.
3. To take three examples, one can think of (1) the usefulness of being able to compare
coefficients of utilization (the share of supply consumed) related to public and private
investments in technical facilities for providing a supply of the categories used here; or (2) the
need for (international) competing broadcasters to keep track of the sources and thus the
nature of the competition; or (3) that it is easy to imagine that politicians will ascribe different
‘values’ (‘threats’ or ‘promises’) to the transnationalization of supply or consumption caused
by nationally, bilaterally or multilaterally distributed television.
4. It appears to be primarily a question of definition whether to include co-production as
adding to T(n)-S. The issue may be of some practical relevance if co-produced television
hours continue to grow. Unfortunately, the solution to the problem ideally seems to depend
on the country under observation and the nature of the co-production.
5. This dominant ‘measure’ in existing research is unsuitable and often misleading.
6. This measure is unsuitable and often misleading.
7. In research on international communication flows much attention has been given to the
ownership of media capital. This aspect of transnationalization may benefit from the use of
a parallel to the three dimensions of transnationalization suggested here. Besides that, it is
necessary to develop a much more precise approach than has been applied so far. One of the
main problems has been to establish a relationship between ‘second-level’ effects and the
potentially multidimensional role of media capital.

References

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Garnham, N. (1979) ‘Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass Communication’. Media,
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