Modernization theory

Conclusion: the national versus the global media system as the lead player
It can be seen that the media have been influential in globalizing processes in contemporary societies and that media globalization chal­len­ges assumptions about the relationship between territory, politics and culture. There are many, though, who sound a note of considerable caution about theories of globalization in relation to the media, among them Tunstall (2007b), who argues that the strength of media globa­li­zation today has been exaggerated and that it is the national level that remains most important. Tunstall reminds us that the flood of globa­lization books began in the late 1990s – a time when US media dominated the world and Ted Turner and CNN2 were widely quoted as pio­­neers of news globalization – but even during that era of supposed ‘media globalization’ Hollywood and the US media were losing mar­ket share because of a huge growth in national media output that had been taking place since the 1980s. Tunstall writes that the national issue prevails and that national media are closely linked to national education systems, to national languages, to national political power and to national culture. ‘Most people prefer to be informed and entertained by people who look, talk, joke and think much like themselves’.
In an attempt to challenge the validity of media globalization theory, Flew (2007) noted that the presence of global media corporations in national markets does not always make them dominant in these markets, for empirical evidence suggests that there are only a few, most notably News Corporation, that have the ability to draw upon networks and institutional relations in a range of countries and therefore could be considered ‘global’ corporations in the countries where they operate. Flew (2007) developed a number of counterarguments to the thesis of media globalization. He urged that there was a need to rethink the relationship between communications media, the nation-state and cultural policy. He made a case for a twenty-first-century model of the enabling state, where the role of governmental authorities is increasingly promotional and informative, working with complex networks of nongovernmental authorities and agencies. Flew nevertheless challenged the idea that the modern state (the enabling state) still has the control over media flows within its territory that the regulatory and protective state used to have in the previous century. As will be shown in the next chapter, the notion of the enabling state or managerial state has been picked up by other scholars, such as Gray (2000), and by international organizations like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 1997). This discussion is very much associated with the shift from government to so-called governance.