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French structuralism, semiology and sociology of religion (e.g. Lévi-Strauss, 1969; Barthes,
1973; Eliade, 1968), and McLuhan’s (1968) global vision of electronic media. For recent
work that builds on notions of television’s mythic role in shaping cultural form and
symbolic content, see, for example, Bird and Dardenne (1988), Carey (1988) and Silverstone
(1988).
6. Many have a dual agenda: to maintain their press oligopolies by maintaining their power
leverage over political and corporate allies whose public media images they control
(Bagdikian, 1989: 811).
7. See ‘The Flight of Icarus’, in The Economist (16 March 1991: 65) with respect to the struggles
of the Saatchis and WPP to extricate themselves from the global marketing debacles.
8 Legislation enshrining the doctrine of ‘more choice’ includes Britain’s 1990 Broadcasting
Act and the US 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act.
9. For the outraged response of the US government and audiovisual industry to the threat of
EC television quotas, see Brown (1991). As McQuail (1991: 54) affirms, the real import–export
battle is between the old public service broadcasters with strong domestic production bases
in place, e.g. Britain’s BBC (85 percent) and ITV (90 percent), Italy’s RAH (75 percent) and
ZDF’s (80 percent), and the new commercial broadcasters, e.g. SAT 1, BSkyB, RTL plus,
‘with ratios of homemade to imported product usually reversed’.
10. See Variety (15 April 1991: 228–9) article, ‘Local Fare Fattens Upstart European Webs’, for
profiles of these and other markets.
11. A typical keystone policy document of this genre was Instant World (Information Canada,
1971), but similar reports reside in many trade and technology policy archives of the
advanced economies.
12. Zolberg (1987: 45), for example, ponders McLuhan’s global village and whether the ‘preva-
lence of television makes it possible for an event taking place in one part of the world to
have an instantaneous effect elsewhere’, a notion that extends itself to investigation of the
role of audiovisual media in the political deconstruction of Eastern Europe and the former
USSR (aka ‘Democracy for Export via American TV’).
13. For example, re-enacted when we celebrate a new year, a new house, a new child; in this
way myths are both historical and psychological, capturing our desire ‘to enter a new
History, in a world reborn’ (Eliade, 1968: 33).
14. For an evaluative critique of media effects and manipulative intent, see all the entries
under the latter in McQuail (1987).
15. As to the ideological status of globalization as a new form of politico-economic determinism,
replacing historical materialism as the engine of world history, we may look to earlier
critiques of philosophies of history or ladders of progress (see, for example, Gellner, 1964)
and to cautions against forcing social reality into ‘transhistorical straight jackets’ from
whence come prophetic visions of a promised land (Mills, 1970).

References

Albrow, M. (1990) ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–13 in M. Albrow and E. King (eds), Globalization,
Knowledge and Society. London: Sage.
Bagdikian, B.H. (1989) ‘Lords of the Global Village’, The Nation, 12 June: 805–20.
Barthes, R.J. (1973) Mythologies. St Albans: Paladin. (Translated from the French edition, 1957.)
Barton, N. (1991) ‘Reuters Holdings plc – Company Report’, Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, on-line
data, University of Maryland McKeldin Library, 24 April: 1–5.
Baudrillard, J. (1985) ‘Child in the Bubble’, Impulse 12–13 (Winter).
Bauman, Z. (1990) ‘Modernity and Ambivalence’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7(2/3): 143–69.
Bird, E.S. and R.W. Dardenne (1988) ‘Myth, Chronicle, and Story: Exploring the Narrative
Qualities of News’, pp. 67–86 in J.W. Carey (ed.), Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and
the Press. London: Sage.
Brown, D. (1991) ‘Citizen or Consumers: US Reactions to the European Community’s Directive
on Television’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8(1): 1–12.