Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

BROADCASTING POLICY 89
largely by state funds and taxpayers’ contributions, European PSBs were
allowed to function in a nearly monopoly geared communications system.
Unlike in the US, where public service broadcasters have relied largely
on voluntary contributions, European PSBs have had relatively greater
freedom from market imperatives but with the price of dependence upon
and control by national governments. In the 1980s, with the wave of
liberalization of the broadcasting spectrum and the privatization of the
airwaves, private broadcasting corporations had two powerful arguments
on their side. The first was the lightness and glamour – comparable to
the Hollywood stories that postwar Europe grew up with – and the associated
symbolic power of non-state media as the ‘free’ media. This has
proved to be an undeniably powerful argument, particularly in the former
Soviet Block nations. The discourse of ‘liberty’ and ‘free media’ has been
used quite extensively in policy, to provide the normative justification
of the liberalization of airwaves, licences and other means of communications
transmissions, especially by neoliberal, right-wing governments
who played a significant role in this process.
Since the late 1980s, the governments of the US and the UK have
pushed hardest for the liberalization of broadcasting policy within the
EU. Media conglomerates of both nations are some of the leading and
most powerful corporate actors in the global economy. The US is the
largest global player in terms of the export of cultural products, and its
film industry remains culturally and economically dominant in most of
the world (Miller et al. 2001). The US is also the headquarters of some of
the most powerful telecommunications and cross-media industries in the
world. 4 Indeed, the majority of the British media is owned by US-based
media, which spread their enterprises to the newly liberalized markets of
former Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In Britain, although ownership is
shifting to American hands for the majority of the conventional media,
the market itself is booming. The strength of the British context lies in
the fact that London has the busiest and most central ‘hub’ of correspondents
and foreign media outlets in Europe. It is followed in significance
by Germany whose market functions as the indicator of audiences’ preferences
to US-originated material for the rest of Europe. Furthermore,
the BBC has a powerful presence across the world, with particular success
through its educational programmes.
Certainly, the imperial domination of an Anglo-Saxon model of media
culture is directly related to the political economic dominance of the
British communication systems in the last two centuries. The US media
have followed a comparable trajectory, where the notion of a commercially
based ‘free’ media associated with the New World stood in contrast
to a shattered postwar Europe.