Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 27
framework for the terms of domestic ‘development’. By the 1960s, the
Cold War was explicitly forcing national political elites in the Third
World to choose sides, and multilateral bodies such as UNESCO, the
World Bank and the IMF began to focus on communication, promoting
modernization and Westernization based on the already ‘developed’ experiences
of Western Europe and the US (Lerner 1958; Schramm 1964;
Tunstall 1977).
In the First World, the rise of the Fordist welfare state meant greater
state intervention in markets and welfare provisions, and a discourse of
discrete national economies as the object of national government regulation.
Fordism was characterized by a correlation between the geography
of economic regulation and the nation-state that legitimated the ‘central
state’s claim to be the penultimate source of power’ (Steinmetz 1999:
34). In terms of communication policy, the Fordist mode of regulation
reinforced a sense of national cohesion, as Graham and Marvin (2001)
write:
Strategies such as the New Deal initiative in the United States, which
did much to support the extension towards national phone, electricity
and highway grids, sought to use integrated public works programmes
to ‘bind’ cities, regions and the nation whilst bringing social
‘harmony’, utilizing new technologies and also creating much needed
employment ...Taking control over the supply of networked infrastructure
supplies to production, the territorial roll-out of networks
over space, and the application of new services to modern consumption,
were therefore essential components of the growth of the modern
nation-state itself. (74)
Mattelart (2002) has shown how the US took the lead in developing
‘strategies for organizing mass consumption’, not as a result of technological
advancement, ‘but rather because the media had, throughout this
whole period, become the very cornerstone of a project of national integration’
(71). State ownership of broadcasting and telecommunications
industries as practised in Western Europe, Canada and Australia and
state regulation of private monopolies in broadcasting and telecommunications
industries as practised in the US, created the terms of a ‘Fordist
class compromise’ of guaranteed employment for a highly unionized but
stable workforce. A gendered division of labour in terms of both production
and consumption complemented this era of mass production. For
instance, through the growing reach of network television, advertising
targeted white middle-class ‘housewives’ who were schooled in the practice
of mass consumption. 5 Scholars have compared national experiences
in communication and policy-making in the Fordist era, often assessing