Page 193 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

172 Critical investigations in political economy

media. The first is critical, neo-Marxist, and highlights imbalances in the global
flow of communications output. The second, cultural globalisation, focuses on
reception and cultural identity formation and generally regards transnationalisation
more favourably (in some cases akin to the modernisation paradigm). Yet, both
tend towards a one-way unilinear model of change. Both ‘strong globalisation’
arguments tend to focus on processes eroding state-based media from above. An
alternative perspective argues instead that we need to be more discriminating
in assessing the nature and influence of transnational media flows. This might be
called ‘weak globalisation’ but that is misleading since the argument does not
revolve around the strength or weakness of global forces but rather on the need
to attend to how these are manifested differentially within and across media
systems. The objection is not to evidence of ‘strong globalisation’ but rather to
its generalisation and organisation into normative narratives of change. A better
term is internationalisation (Hesmondhalgh 2013).
Media internationalisation is pervasive but uneven. Globalisation is trans-
forming ‘media fiction and music’ (Curran 2002: 179) while production and
consumption (as opposed to gathering) of news remains largely organised around
the nation-state and locality. The audience for global news channels such as
CNN remains small and, with exceptions such as Al Jazeera, has remained pre-
dominantly elite. While terrestrial broadcasters’ audience share has certainly
eroded, this ‘has not to any significant extent been caused by the rise of a global
news service taking viewers for their national products as part of the growth of a
global public sphere’ (Sparks 2000a: 84). Cross-border press readership is mostly
small and elite (Hafez 2007), with the important exception of minority ethnic
and diasporic press readerships. Local media ownership tends to be relatively
independent of the global media operators described by Herman and McChesney
(Sparks 2000a: 86) and the overwhelming majority of news outlets target
national or sub-national audiences. The main categories of multi-region media
globalisation are:

mass market entertainment including audiovisual, audio, computer games,
music
news and information serving business elites (CNN, Wall Street Journal, etc.)
media serving diasporic communities
media serving specialist transnational communities of interest
subaltern media flows especially in news (i.e. Al Jazeera) but also in Third
Cinema and other contra-flows.

To analyse these complex flows requires attention to all the factors shaping
market supply and demand, which means political economic and cultural elements.
The analysis of television provision and cultural proximity is a good example of
the needtointegrate thetwo.AcrossWestern mediasystems,USpremium fiction
commands the greatest share of imports, but the maturation of commercial networks
in Western Europe ‘has dented the appeal of US fiction as audiences demonstrate