Page 187 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

166 Critical investigations in political economy

valued by audiences worldwide (Tunstall 1977). American popular culture has
become the ‘central bank of international mythologies, circulating two major
dreams: the dream of freedom and the dream of wealth’ (Gitlin 2002: 22–23).
Key political economic factors have been the size and wealth of the domestic
market in the US, allowing products to be sold to other markets at lower prices. In
the 1980s the cost of acquiring one hour of Dallas would pay for approximately
one minute of original Danish drama production (Gitlin 2002: 25). Economic
resources also helped to create the formats, production values that cultivated
audience tastes and expectations.
Another key factor was the active role of the US state in promoting its cultural
industries abroad (Hesmondhalgh 2013: 271–72). Yet the notion of American
cultural exports has always been vulnerable on empirical and theoretical
grounds. What is ‘American’ about them? For some critics of domination theories,
part of the attraction of US productions is that they are oriented to appeal to a
culturally rich and diverse audience at home, qualities that help explain their
wider global appeal (Hoskins et al. 2004). Large-scale film and television
productions engage international teams of cultural workers so that locating
‘Americanness’ is problematic. In response, for Schiller (1996), the critical charge
is not the export of American culture but ‘transnational corporate cultural
domination’. An essentialist notion of ‘Americanisation’ has been replaced by an
emphasis on the reach and influence of commercially driven transnational
corporations.
Radical accounts such as Herman and McChesney (1997) examine ‘a world
communication order led by transnational businesses and supported by their
respective national states, increasingly linked in continental and global structures’
Thussu (2006: 64). This is not an Americanisation thesis; McChesney (2002: 157)
writes, ‘the notion that media are merely purveyors of US culture is ever less
plausible as the media system becomes increasingly concentrated, commercialised
and globalised’. Instead, the global system is better understood as ‘advancing
corporate and commercial interests and values and denigrating or ignoring that
which cannot be incorporated into its mission’ (McChesney 2002: 157). Globa-
lisation here is largely conceived as a process driven ‘from above’, by the activ-
ities of transnational communication conglomerates supported by neoliberal
states and supranational institutions such as the WTO and the EC. Herman and
McChesney (1997: 9):

regard the primary effect of the globalization process … to be the implan-
tation of the commercial model of communication, its extension to broad-
casting and the ‘new media,’ and its gradual intensification under the force
of competition and bottom-line pressures.

The focus is on the nature and influence of corporate transnationalisation and
links to commercialisation of culture. Commercialisation of media systems
around the world has created new private networks that are primarily interested