Americanization and Globalization
The phenomenon of homogenization in world media systems was first emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory of external influence (e.g. Schiller, 1969, 1976; Boyd-Barret, 1977). It saw homogenization as a result of cultural domination. The global expansion of mass media industries based in advanced capitalist countries and particularly in the United States resulted in the destruction of local cultures and their replacement by a single, standardized set of cultural forms tied to consumer capitalism and American political hegemony. Europe occupied an ambiguous middle position in this literature. European media were seen as part of the dominant Western cultural influence on developing countries; at the same time, the early cultural imperialism literature also raised the issue of U.S. influence over European culture.
The idea that media system change can be understood as a process of Americanization is still very much alive, and there is obviously much truth to it. American programming still dominates many media markets, in some industries--film for example--perhaps as much now as ever before. And at a deeper level, moreover, in terms of the kinds of media structures and practices that are emerging and the direction of change in the relation of media to other social institutions, it is reasonable to say that homogenization is to a significant degree a convergence of world media toward forms that first evolved in the U.S. The U.S. was once almost alone among industrialized countries in its system of commercial broadcasting; now commercial broadcasting is becoming the norm. The model of information-oriented, politically-neutral professionalism that has prevailed in the U.S. and to a somewhat lesser degree in Britain increasingly dominates the news media worldwide. The personalized, media-centered forms of election campaigning, using techniques similar to consumer product marketing, that again were pioneered in the U.S., similarly are becoming more and more common in European politics (Swanson & Mancini, 1996; Butler & Ranney, 1992).
It is clear too that direct cultural diffusion from the United States has played a role in these changes. American concepts of journalistic professionalism and press freedom based in privately owned media, for example, were actively spread by the government- sponsored "free press crusade" of the early Cold War period (Blanchard, 1986), and reinforced in later years by a variety of cultural influences, ranging from professional education and academic research in U.S. universities and private research institutes (Tunstall, 1977; Mancini, 2000), to internationally circulated media like the Herald-Tribune and CNN and products of popular culture like the film All the President's Men.[1] American campaign consultants are active in Europe (Plasser, 2000), as are American firms that advise television companies on the production of commercially-successful news broadcasts. One important recent illustration of American influence is the transformation of the Labor party in Britain under Tony Blair, which invoved a shift in the party's structure toward one more suitable for a media-based campaign, drawing on Clinton's earlier experience (Butler & Kavanaugh, 1997; Jones, 1997).
Recent scholarship has tended to subsume the kinds of influences originally identified by cultural imperialism theory under the broader and more complex concept of globalization. From this point of view, attention is focused not on a single country to blame for exporting and imposing a single social imagery, but rather on a complex set of interactions and inter-dependencies among different countries and their systems of communications (Thompson, 1995; Tomlinson, 1991). The concept of globalization is clearly more adequate in that it makes it possible to integrate the analysis of external sources of influence with the internal processes of social change which, as we shall see, are clearly essential to understanding change in European media and public sphere. It is certainly possible to affirm that many of the structures and routines which dominate an increasingly homogeneous global communication system were tried and tested in the United States. Their diffusion around the world cannot, however, be attributed to the action of a single agent. It has not been a unilateral process: where European countries have borrowed American innovations, they have done so for reasons rooted in their own economic and political processes, often modifying them in significant ways (Negrine & Papathanassopoulos, 1996; Farrell & Webb, 2000).
Two important elements of globalization clearly rooted within Europe--though also influenced by developments in worldwide political economy--should be noted here. One is European integration. With the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1989, the European Union embarked deliberately on an attempt to create a common broadcasting market, an objective which required harmonization of regulatory regimes across the continent. This and other elements of European law have undercut the earlier multiplicity of communication policies and patterns of relationship between the media and national political systems. Closely related is a strong trend toward internationalization of media ownership. The search for ever greater amounts of capital to invest in new technologies and to compete in liberalized international markets has produced a strong trend toward the development of multinational media corporations (Herman & McChesney, 1997). Clearly such corporations, to achieve economies of scale and scope and to take advantage of market integration, tend to internationalize both products and production and distribution processes, contributing further to the homogenization of strategies and professional practices. The extra-national circulation of professionalism, the integration of company management within the same group and the universal circulation of the same products can only weaken those national characteristics that, at least in part, had made economic and entrepreneurial systems of individual countries different from each other.