Table Of ContentMEDIA
IMPERIALISM
C O N T I N U I T Y A N D C H A N G E
Edited by
OLIVER BOYD-BARRE T T
Bowling Green State University
TAN N ER M IR R LEES
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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Contents
Introduction: Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change 1
Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Tanner Mirrlees
PART I: CONTEXTUALIZING AND CONCEPTUALIZING EMPIRE
AND MEDIA IMPERIALISM
1 Media and Cultural Imperialism: Genealogy of an Idea 11
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
2 Historicizing and Theorizing Media and Cultural Imperialism 31
Marko Ampuja, Juha Koivisto, and Kaarle Nordenstreng
3 US Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A Reconceptualization and
Twentieth-Century Retrospective 45
Tanner Mirrlees
PART II: NEWS, WAR, AND PROPAGANDA
4 Western News Media, Propaganda, and Pretexts for Neoliberal War 63
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
5 “RussiaGate”: The Construction of the Enemy 75
Gerald Sussman
6 The Great Game for EurAsia and the Skripal Affair 89
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
7 Propaganda, Manipulation, and the Exercise of Imperial Power:
From Media Imperialism to Information Imperialism 105
Piers Robinson
iii
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iv Contents
PART III: HOLLYWOOD, WAR, AND MILITAINMENT
8 Socialism by Stealth? Governmental Subvention and Hollywood 121
Toby Miller
9 The US Embassy–Hollywood Complex: The Sony Pictures Hack
and Twenty-First-Century Media Imperialism 137
Paul Moody
10 Dispatches from the Militainment Empire 147
Roger Stahl
11 Global Executioner: Legitimizing Drone Warfare through
Hollywood Movies 159
Erin Steuter and Geoff Martin
PART IV: THE INTERNET, SOCIAL MEDIA,
AND PLATFORM IMPERIALISM
12 Guarding Public Values in a Connective World: Challenges for Europe 175
José van Dijck
13 Facebook’s Platform Imperialism: The Economics and Geopolitics
of Social Media 187
Dal Yong Jin
14 New Global Music Distribution System, Same Old Linguistic
Hegemony? Analyzing English on Spotify 199
Christof Demont-Heinrich
15 “Weaponizing” the Internet and World Wide Web for Empire:
Platforming Capitalism, Data-Veillance, Public Diplomacy,
and Cyberwarfare 213
Tanner Mirrlees
PART V: DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATION, GLOBAL DIVIDES,
AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
16 Cultural Autonomy in the 1970s and Beyond: Toward Cultural Justice 233
Cees J. Hamelink
17 Cultural Imperialism and Development Communication for Social Change 245
Mohan J. Dutta
18 Mapping Power in Women’s Empowerment Projects in Global Development 259
Karin Gwinn Wilkins
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Contents v
PART VI: RISING MEDIA EMPIRES: THE CASE OF CHINA
19 China: An Emerging Cultural Imperialist 275
Colin Sparks
20 The Empire’s New Clothes: Political Priorities and Corporate
Ambitions in China’s Drive for Global Ascendency 291
Graham Murdock
21 Not (Yet) the “Chinese Century”: The Endurance of the US Empire
and Its Cultural Industries 305
Tanner Mirrlees
Index 321
About the Contributors 335
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Introduction
Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change
Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Tanner Mirrlees
The term “media imperialism” was mainly fashioned by communication and media
scholars in the 1960s and 1970s—a period when the US and Soviet superpowers
battled for supremacy while the postcolonial non-aligned movement struggled for the
New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) at the United Nations.
Never was the concept of “imperial” in this context and research trajectory limited
only to forms of imperialism that depended on the annexation of territory. Some early
media-imperialism scholars were based in Latin American countries that were no lon-
ger colonies of any empire and had never been formal colonies of the United States.
Other scholars conducted their research from the United States, the United Kingdom,
and Canada. During this time, “media imperialism” was principally applied to the
media power and influence of the United States and was deployed in studies of the
considerable influence of US-based media corporations in and on the media systems
and cultures of other countries, especially those in the global South.
Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, a prevalent focus within media-imperialism
literature on the United States reflects an understandable preoccupation with the actual
economic, military, and media power of the United States. But scholarship on media
imperialism has also extended to the expansive media systems, industries, and prod-
ucts of older empires (e.g., British, French, and Russian) and once subalternized or
peripheral countries (e.g., China, India, Brazil, and South Korea). These little “media
imperialisms” spread from countries that evince considerable media ownership, dis-
tribution, and impact within a given geocultural zone but are themselves structurally
weaker than and shaped by stronger global imperial powers such as the United States.
Just as there is no reason why media-imperialism scholarship should be limited to only
one empire, there is also no reason why such research should be limited to only one
period or phase in the history of an empire.
For more than four decades, some scholars have preferred the term “cultural im-
perialism” to “media imperialism” (and these terms are often used interchangeably).
Sometimes, these terms were invoked to simply acknowledge that the media corpora-
tions (e.g., TV broadcasters) and media products (e.g., news stories and TV shows) of
some countries were significant vehicles for economic and cultural influence in other
countries. Other times, they flagged how the phenomena of imperialism extended well
1
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2 Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Tanner Mirrlees
beyond media industries and products to encompass economic models, patterns of
governance, education systems, languages, ideas, norms, and values—“whole ways of
life.” Overall, research on media imperialism—whether focused on the media itself or
the media within the broader compass of cultural imperialism—takes the “media” to be
a diversity of complex social institutions. While most of these institutions are owned by
corporations, some are also part of states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
That is to say, a wide and growing array of private and public media institutions are the
source of the “media” of “media imperialism.” Some of these include the corporations
that own the news, telecommunications, film and TV, advertising and public relations,
music, interactive games, and internet platforms and social media sites. Frequently,
these different media segments are owned by the same vertically and horizontally inte-
grated global media giants: as types of media diversify, ownership centralizes.
In any case, the study of media imperialism in the twenty-first century should focus
on the whole gamut of “the media” in the context of imperialism, old, new, and emerg-
ing. Points of focus when studying media imperialism may include media financing,
media ownership, and intellectual property control; media-corporate business models
(including advertising, subscription, sponsorship, and, increasingly, data aggregation);
the organization and management of particular internationalizing media products,
including cross-border media production, distribution, and exhibition; the integration
of new hardware and software technologies with older media models and forms; the
characteristics of specific media products (the form), as well as the cultural stories
and images they carry (the content); and, of course, the complexities of cross-border
media reception, interpretation, and use. Significantly, studies of media imperialism
ought to pay more and closer attention to the intermingling of the economics of media
corporations with the geopolitics of states, as well as to the global coordination and
clash of propaganda campaigns and information operations.
Too often literature reviews of media imperialism—whether sourced to its defend-
ers or caricaturized by its opponents—disregard the breadth and depth that this impor-
tant area of study enables and requires. The coeditors of this volume support holistic
research on the many dimensions of media imperialism. We have contributed to the
literature on media and cultural imperialism over an extensive period and through
many publications, and we are aware of and have given extensive thought to the many
debates surrounding the discourse of media and cultural imperialism, particularly
those that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the contributors to this volume
also engage with these important debates in international communication and global
media studies. While criticisms of the concepts of media and cultural imperialism
have helped refine our thinking, we remain convinced of the enduring value of these
concepts to critical research, even as we have, from time to time, sought to reconcile
them with their major and more recent competitors—principal among them, media
and cultural “globalization.”
We have also been impressed by the steady stream of research that continues to
find valence in the concepts of media and cultural imperialism. Not simply in our own
works (see, e.g., Boyd-Barrett’s Media Imperialism [Sage, 2015]; Mirrlees’s Global
Entertainment Media [Routledge, 2013] or Mirrlees’s Hearts and Mines: The US Em-
pire’s Culture Industry [University of British Columbia Press, 2016]) but in numerous
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Introduction 3
other works (see, e.g., Dal Yong Jin’s Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political
Culture [Routledge, 2015] and, most recently, Farooq Sulehria’s Media Imperialism
in India and Pakistan [Routledge, 2019]). While Jin documented the global domi-
nance of US-platform corporations and asymmetrical digital power relations between
countries, Sulehria’s study of the development of the TV industries of both India and
Pakistan demonstrated how so-called globalization ultimately exacerbated rather than
reduced these two countries’ dependency on the business models, technologies, and
content flows of globalizing media conglomerates, especially those headquartered
in the United States. Clearly, research on media and cultural imperialism is still im-
portant to international communication and global media studies, and it has flexibly
adjusted itself to new media developments.
When collaborating on this volume, we considered it more than about time to
invite our peers to revisit, complicate, and renew the concepts of media and cultural
imperialism. As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century—over half a
century since the publication of Herbert Schiller’s pathbreaking work Mass Communi-
cations and American Empire (Beacon Press, 1969)—our initiative is more than justi-
fied. This is demonstrated by a great deal of the evidence compiled and argumentation
advanced by the tremendous contributors to this volume. Some are long-established
scholars, while others are younger and have researched new aspects of media impe-
rialism scarcely dreamed of in Schiller’s time, yet whose findings lend support to his
concerns. That said, the researchers included in this volume do not speak with one
voice. The volume’s twenty-one chapters reflect a spectrum of diverse and sometimes
divergent perspectives, interpretations, and positions about the essence of media impe-
rialism and current debates in the field. Nonetheless, all the chapters augment a critical
study of media imperialism in the twenty-first century.
In brief, five of the main reasons for revisiting and reinvigorating the media-impe-
rialism concept are as follows:
1. The return of the United States and its major allies in and beyond NATO to more
explicitly aggressive (they would argue “defensive”) military interventions in the
affairs of other countries under the banners, variously, of “democracy,” “free-
dom,” “humanitarian intervention,” or “war on terrorism,” and whose purpose
is to support the foreign policy goals of the United States and its allies (and the
interests of their economic elites). All such interventions require expansive com-
munications technologies and propaganda campaigns that in turn depend on pliable
or co-opted media systems whose reach extends to the populations of the imperial
powers, their allies, and their adversaries.
2. The long-predicted decline of the United States (and its closest allies) as the globe’s
central empire, and its replacement either by China or by a bloc of Brazil, Rus-
sia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), while still conceivable, is still much
further from fruition than most “declinists” acknowledge. Even less likely in the
near future is the displacement of a US-led global media sphere by a China- or
BRICS-led media bloc. In chapter 21, evidence for the unparalleled global eco-
nomic, military, and media-cultural power of the United States is presented by one
of the coeditors, Tanner Mirrlees.
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