The Media Are American

by Jeremy Tunstall

A British professor and journalist discusses the world media landscape, presenting it as an Anglo/American imperialism from the earliest days of news/entertainment/films/advertising. Also deals with "cultural empires" including the French cultural empire.

Genres: Sociology

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1977

Reviews

[Cerebralcortext · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tunstall's argument is straightforward enough: the media are American, by which he means that most—if not all—contemporary forms, technologies, and purposes of media have been inflected by Anglo-American historical processes. Much of the international media landscape, consciously or not, imitates or models itself after the paradigms established to greatest success in American film, radio, broadcast/print news, and television, with the exception of the latter all coalescing in the interwar period. American programming is set as the gold standard, and a discourse of modernity emerges in which any lacunae on that path can be filled through liberal doses of media imports, thereby furthering American dominance. But this is a subtle argument too, because Tunstall is not wedded to quantitative demonstrations (though of those there are many throughout the book). Rather, it is the piecing together of an international media landscape attuned towards American sensibilities and interests which most concerns Tunstall, and in this Part One is particularly important in demonstrating that this overweening influence was the outflow of colonial constructs which both carved the world into spheres of information extraction and regulated the flow of news through colonial wires. The prestige we might associate with the dominant agencies of the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse, which elevates certain forms, genres, and geographies of news at the expense of often subaltern and non-Western voices, is compounded by the pooling of news services which saw papers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post transcend what had been localized concerns and markets and, through their financial power and regional monopolies, exert a stranglehold on the highly-expensive reportage of international concerns. Together, these entities not only molded what Americans and the world considered newsworthy, they also, by dint of their strength and cultural cachet, contributed to a homogenizing of culture, inhibiting the development of independent/national media industries and high-quality local content and critiques.

Is a critique like Tunstall’s from 1977 still valid today? Tunstall acknowledged two divergent trends: (1) competition within (national) media environments engendering further Americanization, and (2) “the world…splitting up into smaller units and ethnic identities (273). Tunstall thus predicted a triadic structure of a primarily Anglo-American ‘international media’ at the top most attractive to the urban and the affluent, a secondary level of national media, and a tertiary level, “probably a bigger expansion, of the small, the local, the ethnic and the traditional” (274). It is worth considering briefly whether Tunstall was right in his prognostications. On one hand, Tunstall is mostly correct with regard to the uppermost level of international media, while the tertiary level has certainly expanded enormously if we include the explosion of social media content. At the same time, it is arguable if this tertiary level has really found its roots in the local, or if memes, trends, challenges, and now AI-content has instead further cemented a global culture which is Anglo-American in its undertones. And furthermore, it appears as if most ‘national’ media is being devastated by streaming and social media, even or perhaps especially in the United States, where NPR and PBS are no longer the cultural and informational lodestones that they were in the past. That is not even to mention lingering attitudes, such as how lack of recognition or acknowledgement for international thespians by leading Western awards shows like the Oscars is still seen as a systemic issue and discriminatory problem, while ignoring the implicit devaluation of other international awards organizations (such as the Golden Horse) which this critique implies. Not that the former is necessarily misplaced or ill-judged, but rather that few mainstream critics seem to be aware of its enormous condescension to the non-Western world.

Of course, the real crux of Tunstall’s argument is whether there is a stratum of the globalized elite to whose tune we all must march when it comes to our media consumption options, and there is likely room for lively debate whether the increasing popularity of the Korean wave or Afrobeats is an elite phenomenon or if it symbolizes a retreat in Western cultural imperialism. The more important question, perhaps, and one to which Tunstall pays uneven attention given his attempts to flank Marxist theses of media imperialism, is who are the types of people listening, streaming, and watching the types of media that are available? Framing today’s concerns and Tunstall’s book as a question of cultural and, more pertinently, economic accessibility, might be the key to understanding what the media is today. And if the colonial history of our media environment is properly understood, that’s just about how it has always been.

[Guestuser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even internet freedom, sold as a democratizing tool, often becomes another pipeline for American values, ads, surveillance, and soft power.

The U.S. doesn’t need tanks when it has Netflix, Apple News, and Disney.

media globalization is not neutral. It reflects who holds power, who writes the scripts, and who owns the platforms. Unless nations actively nurture independent voices, the future of global communication will continue to speak with a heavily American accent.