1. Media Imperialism Revisited

2. 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!

3. 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?

4. Context

5. • Development assistance, technology and
skills transfer
• Research, fact finding and dissemination
• Norm setting, principles and declarations

6. 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

7. The New World Information
Communication Order (NWICO)
• The Four “Ds”
– Democratization
– Decolonization
– Demonopolization
– Development

8. Media Imperialism
Key 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”

9. Media Imperlism
• Mass media and reception
"Power is the ability
– Agencies
not just to tell the
– Consent
story of another
• Unequal power person, but to make
• “The West and the Rest” it the definitive story
• Representation of that person".
• Essentialism ChimamandaAdichie: The
danger of a single story
• Culture as consumption
• Mechanism of globalization

10. A powerful counter-story of
Essentialism

11. http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

12. http://disney.go.com/theatre/thelionking/#/home/

13. A look at Francis Nyamnjoh’s work on
Africa’s Media

14. “A powerful critique of
Western liberal model
of journalism based on
individual autonomy
and freedom that
ignores the complicated
patterns of ‘‘belonging’’
in Africa.”

15. •Liberal democracy and “the autonomous
Critique of Western individual”
Media
•“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

16. 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).

17. 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.”

18. “Journalism should be storytelling, but not in
a hurry - that is why the ethnographic method
is important.”

19. But is the Media Imperialism thesis
overstated?

20. 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?

29. http://aljazeera.net/