Post-Globalization, Cultural Power and International Broadcasting

Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of

Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Political Economy v. Globalization theories

• Is the relationship between political-economic and cultural power a strong or weak one?

• Has power become more diffused internationally, or is Western hegemony paramount?

• Can dominant ideologies be reconciled with active/productive audiences?

The vexed question of power in media studies

• Power has often been a term that is widely used but insufficiently explained.

• Des Freedman: four paradigms of media power:– Consensus– Chaos– Control– Contradiction

• Cultural studies debates: dominant or contested meanings?

‘Active audience’ debate in communication and cultural studies

‘The field of Cultural Studies has perpetually oscillated between an emphasis on ‘power’ in terms of the imposition of ideology through culture, on the one hand, and ‘agency’ in terms of the relatively freedom of the consumer, on the other’.

(Gibson, 2007, p. 167)

International expansion of state broadcasting

• A key feature of global media since the 2000s has been the expansion of state broadcasting internationally

• Almost all major international news broadcasters are predominantly state-funded: CNN as major exception

• Expansion of international reach frequently justified in terms of cultural diplomacy, or “soft power”

Soft power debates• Soft power as ‘the ability to get what you want

through attraction rather than coercion or payments’ (Nye, 2004, p. x), and the associated ‘ability to shape the preferences of others’ (Nye, 2004, p. 5).

• Term can become ‘a synonym for anything other than military force’ (Nye, 2011, p. 81).

• What is specifically cultural about this power?• How is culture being used in these definitions?

Culture and power internationally

• Soft power and cultural imperialism discourses bear a strong resemblance (Sparks, 2016)

• Cross-cultural communication studies as well as audience theories suggest that influence of imported cultural product can be overstated

• Does imported media content sit at the centre or margins of national media systems? (Tunstall, 2008)

The “distribution fallacy”• Culture is understood as things/objects/events rather than as

processes• Transmission model of communciation• evidence of reach is taken to be synonymous with influence

e.g. claims that CCTV covers ‘98 per cent of the world ... with 45 million subscribers outside China’(cited in Zhang, 2011)

• Distribution fallacy suggests that more will be spent on distributing content than assessing impact or influence

Cultural power and post-globalization• Political, economic and cultural power – interconnected

(critical political economy) or divergent (globalisation theories)

• How does cultural power intersect – or not – with political and economic power?

• How active are audiences in the shaping of cultural meaning?• What implications do new media have – “new public

diplomacy” debates• Continuing power of nation-states in global context – post-

globalization