Page 46 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

of external influence (e.g., Schiller 1969, 1976; Boyd-Barret 1977). It saw
homogenization as a result of cultural domination. The global expan-
sion of mass media industries based in advanced capitalist countries
and particularly in the United States resulted in the destruction of local
cultures and their replacement by a single, standardized set of cultural
forms tied to consumer capitalism and American political hegemony.
Europe occupied an ambiguous middle position in this literature. Euro-
pean media were seen as part of the dominant Western cultural influence
on developing countries; at the same time, the early cultural imperi-
alism literature also raised the issue of U.S. influence over European
culture.
The idea that media system change can be understood as a process
of Americanization is still very much alive, and there is obviously much
truth to it. American programming still dominates many media markets,
in some industries – film for example – perhaps as much now as ever
before. And at a deeper level, in terms of the kinds of media struc-
tures and practices that are emerging and the direction of change in
the relation of media to other social institutions, it is reasonable to say
that homogenization is to a significant degree a convergence of world
media toward forms that first evolved in the United States. The United
Stateswasoncealmostaloneamongindustrializedcountriesinitssystem
of commercial broadcasting; now commercial broadcasting is becoming
the norm. The model of information-oriented, politically neutral pro-
fessionalism that has prevailed in the United States and to a somewhat
lesser degree in Britain increasingly dominates the news media world-
wide. The personalized, media-centered forms of election campaigning,
using techniques similar to consumer-product marketing, which again
were pioneered in the United States, similarly are becoming more and
more common in European politics (Butler and Ranney 1992; Swanson
and Mancini 1996).
It is clear too that direct cultural diffusion from the United States
has played a role in these changes. American concepts of journalistic
professionalism and press freedom based in privately owned media, for
example, were actively spread by the government-sponsored “free press
crusade” of the early cold war period (Blanchard 1986), and reinforced
in later years by a variety of cultural influences, ranging from profes-
sional education and academic research in U.S. universities and private
research institutes (Tunstall 1977; Mancini 2000) to internationally cir-
culated media such as the Herald-Tribune and CNN and products of

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