Page 59 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Americanization, Globalization, and Secularization

The most dramatic change, however, has clearly been the commer-
cialization of European broadcasting. There is no doubt that starting
with the end of World War II a process of progressive weakening of
the relatively separate national cultures had already commenced, faced
with the growing global flow of messages, products, and institutional
forms, mainly coming from the United States. An important restraint to
this flow, however, and one that also had consequences for other means
of communication, was the prevalence of the public service broadcast-
ing across Europe. Public service broadcasting was regulated by norms
and values firmly rooted in the distinct cultural and political paradigms
that prevailed in the different nation states of Europe. “Sustaining and
renewing the society’s characteristic cultural capital and cement” was in-
deed one of the central missions of public service broadcasting (Blumler
1992, 11). In important ways the public service system limited the social
and political impact of television, creating continuity between television
culture and the established culture of the wider society.
Regarding Italy, Bettetini (1985) used the expression “pedagogizing
palimpsest” (palinsesto pedagogizzante)todescribe how the primary ob-
jective of television programming was education and propagation, cre-
ating, among other things, a strong link between television language
and the language of traditional literature. Therefore, the great television
events of that period were mostly television transpositions of the most
important works of Italian and foreign literature, preserving continuity
with existing traditions. Another equally important example is that of
France where the extremely strong “prescriptive” nature of the public
television service tended in a similar way to favor the defense of na-
tional identity. French cultural and political traditions were in perfect
harmony with the ideal of the “grandeur” of General de Gaulle that per-
meated French society – and no less French broadcasting – of those years
(Vedel and Bourdon 1993). In a similar way, each system strongly tied
television to established political institutions.
Commercialization is now dramatically undercutting this system, dis-
rupting the connection between broadcasting and national systems, sub-
mittingelectronicmediatoglobalizingforcessimilartothosethatprevail
in other industries, and spreading cultural forms and professional prac-
tices, including those of electronic journalism, that developed originally
in the United States, though they now evolve in an increasingly global
way. Many of the characteristics commonly attributed to television in
discussions of the transformation of political communication – person-
alization, for example, and the tendency to focus on the experience and

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