Page 180 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 159

Boyd-Barrett 1977). Scholars drew on dependency theory, grounded in neo-Marxist
political economy, which argued that core nations maintained peripheral nations
in relations of economic and political dependence. Transnational corporations,
mostly based in the North, exercised control over developing countries in the South
through setting the terms of global trade and exchange, aided by the active
support of their respective governments. Dependency theories were developed
by Latin American scholars in particular but influenced and joined a broader
swathe of subaltern and anti-imperialist work. These analyses also informed the
work of CPE scholars in North America (Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller,
Hamid Mowlana) and Europe (Karle Nordenstreng, Peter Golding).
Leading authors of modern critical economy such as Herbert Schiller and
Dallas Smythe were trailblazers for international media analysis. They set out to
understand global geopolitical and economic forces and their relationship to
communications and cultural exchange. They also made efforts to understand
the increasingly complex relations between transnational and national cultural
production. However, to reduce their work to the stock features of what is
labelled, and critiqued, as the cultural imperialism thesis is misleading. Criticisms
can certainly be made of their analysis but they invariably engaged in more
sophisticated ways than the standard critique allows with the patterns of an
emerging transnational political economy and its cultural implications. Schiller’s
work, in particular, examined the growth of transnational media corporations in the
period after 1945 and the transformation of US national firms into ‘huge, integrated,
cultural combines’, that controlled the means of producing and distributing ‘film,
TV, publishing, recording, theme parks, and even data banks’ (Schiller 1991: 14).
Such concerns were supported by studies of global television markets showing
that programming flows were dominated by US production. A UNESCO report
found that more than half the countries studied imported over 50 per cent of their
television, mostly entertainment and most imported from the US (Nordenstreng
and Varis 1974; Straubhaar 2002: 194). Calculating an ‘index of dependence’
based on the proportion of imported television programmes, one UNESCO
study in 1972 found that 40 per cent of Latin America television broadcasts
came from the US; Guatemala had an index of dependence on US television of
1
80 per cent. Another focus was the ideological encodings of internationally
distributed (mainly Western) media and advertising, and the importation of
forms, models and practices derived from Western commercial media and
advertising. In How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Ariel
Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1975) argued that Disney texts promote Western
capitalism, caricature and denigrate ‘third world’ cultures and consistently carry
messages of how such people should aspire to live.
Cultural imperialism (CI) emerged in the context of the wider struggles crystal-
lised in demands for a new world information and communication order, which
arose against a background of decolonisation (Mattelart and Mattelart 1998:
137–38; Mosco 1996: 75–76). Pressure to remedy inequality in information and
communication flows was an important but always relatively minor aspect of