Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe

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Understanding the Convergence of Media Systems and Political Communication in the U.S. and Western Europe

A powerful trend is clearly underway in the direction of greater

similarity in the way the public sphere is structured across the

world. In their products, in their professional practices and

cultures, in their systems of relationships with other political and

social institutions, media systems across the world are becoming

increasingly alike. Political systems, meanwile, are becoming

increasingly similar in the patterns of communication they

incorporate.

We will explore this trend toward global homogenization of media

systems and the public sphere, focusing particularly on the relations

between media and political systems, and on the industrialized,

capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We will

organize our discussion of how to account for this trend around two

pairs of contrasting perspectives. Much of the literature on

homogenization sees it in terms of Americanization or globalization:

that is, in terms of forces external to the national social and

political systems in which media systems were previously rooted.

Other explanations focus on changes internal to these national

systems. An important distinction can also be made between

mediacentric perspectives, for which changes in media systems are

autonomous developments which then influence political and social

systems, and those which see social and political changes as causally

prior to media system change.

Americanization and Globalization

The phenomenon of homogenization in world media systems was first

emphasized as a scholarly...

... middle of paper ...

... 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.

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