Page 184 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 163

power’ (Nye 2005) promoting strategic and popular support for US-led global
capitalism.
What is labelled the ‘cultural imperialism thesis’, was in reality a short-lived
formulation which was criticised ‘from within’ by critical scholars such as Tunstall
(1977) and Mattelart et al. (1984), within a revising tradition of critical political
economy. Armand Mattelart argued for recognition of growing complexity in
cultural flows (Mattelart et al. 1984: 22):

One could easily continue to accumulate evidence of the dominant position
of American firms. But in so doing we run the risk of enclosing ourselves
within a condemnation without perspective.
[ … ]

For just a few illustrations will … show that there are nuances to the map of
global ‘one-way traffic’.

Tunstall (1977: 40) both confirmed and challenged the CI thesis; focusing on TV
exports, the ‘television imperialism thesis ignores the much earlier pattern of the
press and news agencies which quite unambiguously did have an imperial character’.

Cultural globalisation
Three kinds of criticism, in particular, informed what became the ‘revisionist
orthodoxy’ of cultural globalisation theory in the 1990s and beyond (Curran
2002: 171). Multiple flows: the notion of predominantly ‘one-way’ flows from the
West to the rest, was challenged by evidence that global flows were always but
increasingly ‘multidirectional’ and so, it was argued, not reducible to a dependency
model that conceived influence emanating from ‘core’ nations to ‘peripheral’ ones
(Sreberny-Mohammadi 1996). Media audiences: the second main area of critique
focused on the failure to analyse and appreciate audience reception and meaning
making. While much can be said about media and cultural flows, the implications
for those who consume them remained largely obscure. Early studies assumed
that the transnationalisation of cultural production led to transnationalisation of
reception (Madger 1993). In his nuanced critique, Thompson (1995: 171) argues
that Herbert Schiller ‘tries to infer, from an analysis of the social organization of
the media industries, what the consequences of media messages are likely to be
for the individuals who receive them’. Such inferences are speculative and ‘dis-
regard the complex, varied and contextually specific ways in which messages are
interpreted by individuals and incorporated into their day-to-day lives’. Media
consumers are active and creative in selecting and appropriating meanings,
argued Liebes and Katz in their reception study of Dallas, the global TV export
phenomenon of the 1970s (Gripsrud 1995). The affective as well as inter-
pretative relationship of audiences had been neglected (Ang 1991). Cultural