Page 189 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 179
State regulation and resistance
An historical trend which suggests the necessity for a less deterministic model
than that suggested by Nordenstreng and Schiller is the marked decline in direct
foreign ownership and control of national media systems in many parts of the so-
called developing world. This in itself suggests one reason why research interest
has shifted to less obvious transcultural media influences. The shift in ownership
and control highlights two factors: the importance of state regulation of media
control and the declining diversity of media outlets in many ex-colonial territories.
Very many of the colonial countries actually enjoyed a wider spread of media
diversity than was later allowed by post-colonial regimes. In many British,
French and Dutch territories, for instance, there had developed strong anti-
colonial or at least indigenous press media pursuing religious, racial, nationalist
or more diffuse political and cultural objectives. Many leaders of the first wave of
independent states came to power on the back of political news-sheets that they
themselves had founded and/or edited. Once in power, many regimes
experimented with a measure of press diversity and decontrol, but such
experiments hardly anywhere survived for long without severe modification and
restriction. Even where foreign interests did retain an ownership presence, their
freedom with regard to political and social comment was greatly constrained by a
gamut of devices, examples of most of which are to be found in Lent’s (1978)
description of Asia’s ‘completed revolution’, namely, the achievement of state
control over the mass media.
Even with respect to many of the less direct forms of trans-cultural media
influence, the possibility of state regulation is clearly available. Katz and Wedell
(1978) provide instances of countries actively and successfully engaged in
reducing the proportions of imported television-fare or foreign radio music on
local media networks. Even some of the most subtle of cultural imports (for
example, the ‘import’ of the standard western television schedule) are not self-
evidently beyond the reforming capacity of any determined government
convinced of the desirability of change. Nor is state regulation of media self-
evidently inhibited by fear of the loss of advertising revenue, especially where
there are few competing outlets for advertising.
But some influences are especially difficult to eradicate. For instance it is argued
that television technology inevitably distorts local culture in nonwestern
societies. Television cannot easily accommodate the cultural diversity common
to marry such societies. ‘Authentic’ local cultural expression requires the full
social membership and engagement of those who participate in it, while
television permits only a passive viewing of selected elements. Governments of
new nation states are often more concerned with the construction and diffusion
of a nationally-integrative culture which may borrow familiar elements of
traditional cultures but which is designed to transcend their boundaries. Such
governments may actively resist attempts to preserve what they may see as the
politically destabilizing vitality of diverse cultures. There is, in any case, a