Page 183 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 173
existing international order. In this paper it will be taken ‘as read’ that there is
substantial evidence to show that many weaknesses in the economies of poorer
nations are partly caused by and sometimes reinforced by the political and
commercial interests of the stronger economies. But no position will be taken a
priori as to the long-term inevitability of dependency, or as to the significance of
media communication in relation to dependency.

Outline of the argument
The purpose of this paper is first to look at the major different approaches to the
role of mass media in what, for the sake of convenience, will loosely be termed
‘Third-World development’. It will be suggested that these approaches reflect
different underlying ideologies. It will be seen that for both ideological and
technological reasons there is considerable debate as to what constitutes the
appropriate range of phenomena to which the study of the media and dependency
should confine itself. A brief account will then be given of the different ways in
which inter-cultural penetration is found to occur. Certain shortcomings in the
evidence will be discussed. It will be suggested that a key factor in any
evaluation of the role of the mass media in the process of ‘cultural dependency’
is the significance to be attributed to the power of any state or government
apparatus to combat this process. Many attempts at such evaluation tend, as a
result of the kind of questions they ask, to select or give undue weight to
evidence which will support a condemnatory attitude. A more fruitful line of
investigation may be to review and evaluate the kinds of claim which some
western consultants originally made in support of the harnessing of the mass
media to developmental objectives.

THE POLITICS OF A CHANGING PARADIGM
Nordenstreng and Schiller (1979) identified three successive paradigms in the
study of the relationship between communication and development. In the first
of these the emphasis was on the contribution of the mass media to the
promotion of western-style (capitalist) development. I will term this the
‘missionary’ approach. A second paradigm sought to expose the more evident
elements of ethnocentricity of the first, and to relate the mass media to different
models of development. This may be labelled the ‘pluralist’ approach. But a third
and more recent school of thought took the view that there could be no real
understanding of the media unless priority was given to an understanding of the
fundamental relationship between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ economies, ‘the
international socio-politico-economic system that decisively determines the
course of development within the sphere of each nation’ (my emphasis). This
paradigm I will tag ‘totalistic’.