Page 179 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

158 Critical investigations in political economy

Modernisation theory
A loosely affiliated group of scholars in North America promoted an account of
social and economic transformation in which the advanced capitalist economies
would lead the development of market economies in other nations by non-coercive
means. This account assigned a key role to communications and to the diffusion
of communications technologies, media content and media models derived from
the West. For Daniel Lerner (1969, quoted in Schiller 1989: 139)
The long era of imperialism (subordination) is recently ended: the campaign
for international development (equalisation) has just begun.
[ … ]

Under the new conditions of globalism, [international communication] has
largely replaced the coercive means by which colonial territories were seized
and held.
[ … ]

The persuasive transmission of enlightenment is the modern paradigm of
international communication.

Modernisation theorists such as Lerner, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Wilbur Schramm,
argued that the phase of imperialism was ending with the creation of newly
independent nation-states and that communication had a vital role in ‘training
for self management’ and promoting the aspirations of a modernised market
economy to both citizens and elites. Capital would have rich new seams of
cheaper labour and emergent consumer markets. Transformation would be
aided by the benign diffusion of enlightened values. ‘Backward’ and particularist
forms of thought would be replaced by more ‘universalistic’ values of enterprise
and possessive individualism. In reality, the media systems in many developing
nations supported authoritarian power rather than popular emancipation and
education and on this the US modernisers were ambivalent, paying little attention
to how media pluralism could be secured (Curran and Park 2000b).

Cultural imperialism

Radical scholars advanced the concept of cultural imperialism in the 1960s and
1970s. Its major achievement, argues Nordenstreng (2001) was to challenge the
then dominant, benign account of Western modernisation; radical scholars
argued instead that ‘Western culture’ was being imposed on newly independent
states in the ‘third world’, eroding cultural autonomy. Their core claim was that
the imperialism had not ended with decolonisation; rather colonial powers had
found other means to sustain relations of dominance, including the unequal
exchange of cultural products, technologies, skills and resources (Said 1993;