Media Imperialism Revisited
Self-Intro Video
• Due Jan. 31st ( 5 pm)• A self-introduction, using images, text, and
narratives (using a specific image or set of related images as the backdrop for your view of development)
• No more than TWO minutes (could be shorter)• Submit video on the wiki– Instructions posted (pay attention to file naming)
• Technical assistant – ask early!
Media Imperialism
• Key assumptions?• Why is this thesis so dominant in the media
and development literature over the last few decades?
• Is this popularity justified in terms of its explanatory power and empirical support?
• What accounts for the weaning of the thesis' popularity in recent years?
Context
• Development assistance, technology and skills transfer
• Research, fact finding and dissemination• Norm setting, principles and declarations
The McBride Commission Report (1985)
• Self-reliance and cultural identity• international character of the media, their
structures, world-views and markets• Globalization: concentration of media
ownership, monopolization of markets, and a decline in diversity
• Emergence of the information society
The New World Information Communication Order (NWICO)
• The Four “Ds” – Democratization– Decolonization– Demonopolization – Development
Media ImperialismKey claims:
• Negative impact of western media– Lost of identity - homogenization– One way flow of media– Widen the class structure– Profit making through exploitation• Reduce the diversity of programming and content in
favour of market logic • “greenwashing”
Media Imperlism• Mass media and reception– Agencies – Consent
• Unequal power• “The West and the Rest”• Representation • Essentialism • Culture as consumption• Mechanism of globalization
"Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person". Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story
A powerful counter-story of Essentialism
http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
A look at Francis Nyamnjoh’s work on Africa’s Media
“A powerful critique of Western liberal model of journalism based on individual autonomy and freedom that ignores the complicated patterns of ‘‘belonging’’ in Africa.”
•Liberal democracy and “the autonomous individual”
•“ideology of hierarchies of culture”
•Unequal power relations
•Profit motive over “creative diversity and cultural plurality”
•Conflation of State and “Market Logic”
•Ignore “personhood and agency”
• The West theorizing the Rest
• Western journalism as model
Critique of Western Media
New Media and Citizen Journalism
‘‘Africa’s creativity simply cannot allow for simple dichotomies or distinctions between old and new technologies, since its peoples are daily modernising the indigenous and indigenising the modern with novel outcomes’’ (Nyamnjoh, 2005, p. 4).
Politics of Scholarly Production
New technologies and excluded scholarship
“Ordinary people at the margins of focus of technology, use a combination of possibilities to relate and to exchange in ways that can be quite instructive about theory-building.”
“Journalism should be storytelling, but not in a hurry - that is why the ethnographic method is important.”
But is the Media Imperialism thesis overstated?
Rethinking Media Imperialism
• Is the power of the Western mass media overstated?
• What are the roles of state and local organizations?
• What are the roles of the “audience”?• What about local cultural contexts?
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