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The Mythology about Globalization 27

concentration and overlording in the media global village (e.g. Time-Warner Inc.,
Bertelsmann AG, News Corporation Ltd) with all their consequences for public
discourse and diversity. 6
While the Japanese presence in Hollywood – Sony (formerly Columbia)
Entertainment Industries and Matsushita MCA/Universal – provides further
evidence of media globalism, it also testifies to widely shared corporate strate-
gies of cross-national synergy, vertical integration and economies of scale (in this
case, aligning video hardware and software ownership for future HDTV profit).
Thus, ‘Big is Better’ in the media and culture industries provides further ammu-
nition for critiques claiming that globalization represents nothing more than
corporate transnationalization at a higher level of magnitude (see, for example,
Schiller, 1991).
However, what that categorical imperative overlooks is the extent of personal
hubris behind corporate media expansion as the image of the global mogul took
hold (e.g. Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, the Saatchi brothers). As free
marketeers pursued ever wider horizons of hyperbole and investment, a sym-
biosis developed: the selling of globalization to the market became a part of the
phenomenon itself. Thus, the myth-makers came to believe their own over-
7
extended metaphors, until their financial bubbles burst. Now as agencies and
media groups juggle their debt rescheduling in the 1990s, ‘Big is Better’ on a
global scale may be losing some of its hold on the corporate mind.
This myth is cautionary and raises questions about the preordination of ‘Big’
as the foundation for economic globalization. It may be that corporate expansion
on a world scale is riskier for some cultural (or material) industries than for
others, just as it is clearly riskier in destabilized or rapidly changing national or
regional contexts.

The Myth of ‘More is Better’

This myth firmly places a central tenet of free market economics, the universal
benefits of competition, in the context of the 1980s’ ethos of excess – excessive
deregulation, investment and consumption. Thus, ‘More is Better’ provides the
cornucopia or utilitarian justification that makes ‘more’ a public good in and of
itself: the perfect rationale for the public policies, private practices and corruptive
vanities of the ‘greed decade’ documented in legislation, factual and fictional
accounts, television and film. ‘More’, then, revolves around the market forces’
proposition that increased competition, unfettered by ownership or trading restric-
tions (e.g. in airlines, telecommunications, media or finance), equals increased
benefits for all; QED, increased profits, consumer choice and satisfaction.
In the wider media policy arena this myth favoured privatization and prolif-
eration of off-air, cable and satellite television channels (and to a lesser extent,
radio) and transnational programme trade (and transcultural migration of
values) to fill expanding schedules. We need only to recall how ‘More’ served an
expansionist, deregulating broadcast industry on both sides of the Atlantic –
television providers in Western Europe and cablecasters in the USA. 8