Page 45 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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TWO

Americanization, Globalization,
and Secularization

Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems
and Political Communication

Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

Apowerful trend is clearly underway in the direction of greater sim-
ilarity in the way the public sphere is structured across the world. In
their products, in their professional practices and cultures, in their sys-
tems of relationships with other political and social institutions, media
systems across the world are becoming increasingly alike. Political sys-
tems, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly similar in the patterns of
communication they incorporate.
We will explore this trend toward global homogenization of media
systems and the public sphere, focusing particularly on the relations be-
tween media and political systems, and on the industrialized, capitalist
democracies of Western Europe and North America. We will organize
our discussion of how to account for this trend around two pairs of con-
trasting perspectives. Much of the literature on homogenization sees it in
termsofAmericanization or globalization: that is, in terms of forces ex-
ternal to the national social and political systems in which media systems
previously were rooted. Other explanations focus on changes internal to
these national systems. An important distinction can also be made be-
tween mediacentric perspectives, for which changes in media systems are
autonomous developments that then influence political and social sys-
tems, and those that see social and political changes as causally prior to
media system change.

AMERICANIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION
The phenomenon of homogenizationinworld media systems was first
emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of
the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory

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