Core Post 4 [Laurel]

While I like his concept of media capital and think it’s a useful way to think about global media flow, I feel like I want to push back a little against Michael Curtin’s assertion that media imperialism is a concept that we can completely disregard. With his principles of the logic of accumulation, trajectories of creative migration, and forces of sociocultural variation, Curtin has developed a way of accounting for the movement of media products that disregards, or at least downplays, the importance of national boundaries. However, just because the power structures initially theorized in media imperialism (like “the self-conscious extension of centralized power” [111]) have proven inadequate to fully account for global media flow doesn’t mean that media products and the power structures and imperial ideologies associated with them don’t travel.

In her post, Krystle mentions American programs in Vietnam, but the most accessible example for me comes from my everyday experiences with television in Canada. Curtin notes that Canada is a nation “thoroughly saturated by Hollywood media” (Curtin 110), and this relationship to American media is echoed in television, both in fiction and in news programming. It’s just as easy to catch the Fox or CNN nightly news broadcast as it is to watch the National on CBC, or to tune into Seattle’s Komo-4 as Vancouver’s local CityTV or Global station. Further, it’s just easier for CityTV to import Modern Family and black-ish than to create enough Canadian-specific programming to fill the week.

Tomorrow’s Global schedule, for example goes from MacGyver (a U.S. government agent), through Hawaii Five-O (the setting is literally in the name), through Madam Secretary (there is no Secretary of State in the Canadian government), to Stephen Colbert, compared to an hour and a half of Canadian news. And this is one of the few Canadian channels—which are easily overwhelmed by the multitudes of American channels available in cable packages. This sort of media dominance—even in “a wealthy developed nation like Canada” (109) (which nevertheless economically depends quite a lot on America)—has real effects on the construction of nationhood, politics, and social structures that Curtin seems to be pushing aside as he tries to move away from ideas of media imperialism.