Page 47 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Americanization, Globalization, and Secularization

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popular culture such as the film All the President’s Men. American cam-
paign consultants are active in Europe (Plasser 2000), as are American
firms that advise television companies on the production of commer-
cially successful news broadcasts. One important recent illustration of
American influence is the transformation of the Labor party in Britain
under Tony Blair, which involved a shift in the party’s structure toward
one more suitable for a media-based campaign, drawing on Clinton’s
earlier experience (Butler and Kavanagh 1997; Jones 1997).
Recent scholarship has tended to subsume the kinds of influences
originally identified by cultural imperialism theory under the broader
and more complex concept of globalization. From this point of view,
attention is focused not on a single country to blame for exporting
and imposing a single social imagery, but rather on a complex set of
interactions and interdependencies among different countries and their
systems of communications (Tomlinson 1991; Thompson 1995). The
concept of globalization is clearly more adequate in that it makes it
possible to integrate the analysis of external sources of influence with the
internalprocessesofsocialchangethat,asweshallsee,areclearlyessential
to understanding change in European media and public sphere. It is
certainly possible to affirm that many of the structures and routines that
dominate an increasingly homogeneous global communication system
were tried and tested in the United States. Their diffusion around the
world cannot, however, be attributed to the action of a single agent.
It has not been a unilateral process: where European countries have
borrowed American innovations, they have done so for reasons rooted
in their own economic and political processes, often modifying them
in significant ways (Negrine and Papathanassopoulos 1996; Farrell and
Webb 2000).
Two important elements of globalization clearly rooted within
Europe – though also influenced by developments in worldwide po-
litical economy – should be noted here. One is European integration.
With the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1989, the European
Union (EU) embarked deliberately on an attempt to create a common
broadcastingmarket,anobjectivethatrequiredharmonizationofregula-
tory regimes across the continent. This and other elements of European

1 Rieffel (1984) for example, notes the influence of the Herald-Tribune on French jour-
nalists (114), and recounts that L’Express changed its format in 1964 “` a l’imitation de
p´ eriodiques am´ ericaines” (33).

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