Page 196 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 175

Millionaire? has been sold to at least 106 countries, and the Pop Idol format has
been shown in countries as diverse as Iceland, Kazakhstan and Lebanon. France
earned ECU108 million ($136 million) in 2004 with worldwide sales of its ani-
mation series Totally Spies, including to Time Warner’s Cartoon Network, as well
as documentaries and dramas.
Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, a television show developed by a private channel in
Colombia RCN in 1999 and later also aired on Telemundo (one of the largest
Spanish-language American television networks) was licensed as a format
worldwide, including as Ugly Betty in the US. It was adapted by Sony for India,
where the show became hugely popular, with over twenty worldwide adaptions
including in Russia, Germany, Israel and Egypt, blending elements of the Latin
American telenovella, the US soap and localised features. The story of Betty,
rooted in the Ugly Duckling and other fairytales, had wide cultural appeal and
adaptability but also held appeal for businesses as a vehicle for brand promotion.
In China, Betty returned to her original work-setting of an advertising agency,
rather than magazines as in the US version, providing an ideal vehicle for brand
integration. Dove (skin care products) were brand partners for a fifty minute
episode in the first series in China in which Betty works on a pitch for the Dove
account. 2
As Arsenault and Castells (2008: 708) observe: ‘local and regional players are
actively importing and/or re-appropriating foreign products and formats while
corporate transnational media organizations are pursuing local partners to deliver
customized content to audiences’. Transcultural adaptions are creating hybrid
formats – rooted in local markets in which audiences have knowledge and
expectations of different genres, visual and narrative styles. With format licensing
amongst other transactions we see national firms ‘eagerly and actively enter into
strategic alliances with TNMCs to serve their local profit interests. Media
imperialism, which assumes the coercive domination of one national media
industry by another, is not the appropriate way to describe the global-local
relationship between TNMCs and NMCs’ (Mirrlees 2013: 101).

Conclusions
Cultural imperialism was too crude and vulnerable both to critique and to geo-
political and cultural changes. However, the orthodoxy of cultural globalisation
that supplanted it failed to address economic power and the detrimental influence
of global capital on cultural diversity, labour and democracy. What is needed?
Put simply, attention to economics, politics and culture. There is no need to
privilege economics or overstate its explanatory value in understanding cultural
texts, processes and reading. Yet efforts to explain media internationalisation
without adequate regard for economic and political aspects are non-starters and
should be challenged just as relentlessly as the caricature of cultural imperialism
chased off the stage by neo-modernisation theories. The rejection of ‘crude’
domination theories gave way to a reluctance or refusal to acknowledge power