By Craig Hayden
The title of this post comes from a Dec 1 New York Times article by Tim Arango, “World Falls for American Media, Even as It Sours on America.” Jeffrey Schlesinger, Warner Brothers’ head of international television at Warner Brothers, said ““Batman is Batman, regardless of if Bush is in the White House or not,” to suggest that global opinions about the United States do not necessarily translate to opinions about American entertainment media products. And, the recent successes of U.S. media products abroad have not resulted in positive opinions about the United States.
This disconnect is not new. Pollsters have been aware for some years what Arango noted, that Bush’s characterization, that others “hate us” for our freedoms and our values is simply not true. Arango’s piece also reflects on the ways in which Hollywood was courted by the Bush administration after 9/11 to join in a propaganda offensive. While such collaborations aren’t unprecedented (at least in the Cold War) – Arango’s article provides a new perspective on an old problem – what exactly are the effects of American media on the rest of the world?
The prevailing wisdom in media studies is that television media is increasingly local. Up until a few years ago, most audience research has found that while the U.S. still dominates in the global distribution of film, people tend to prefer television programing that was “culturally proximate.” (For an excellent summation of this research, see Joseph Straubhaar’s World Television). This finding was significant, because it complicated older conceptions of global media being exclusively dominated by Western content. Now, we find evidence of “contra-flow” – where local media producers provide content – stories, characters, and languages that people can relate to in their daily dramatic programming.
Or so we thought. If the data that Arango is citing is an accurate reflection of recent trends in global television markets, what does this mean? U.S. programming is more attractive again? I’m sure there are political-economic and organization reasons that could explain this move (the inexorable consequence of global media integration)… but what if it’s also a shift in the appetite of global media audiences? If this is so – why are American programs so popular and why does this not translate into at least some soft power dividend in opinions about the United States?
It could be, of course, that there are significant lags in the “effect” of American entertainment media. Indeed, ‘cultivation‘ theorists posit the “mainstreaming” effects of long-term exposure to television altered general perceptions on the prevalence of violence in the world. Media and cultural theorists more generally have long argued the impact of certain narratives on the hierarchy of ideological premises and preferences. I agree that narratives (the stories, the characters, the expected outcomes of social drama) do over time shape our expectations of the real world, and at some level orient our attitudes towards ideal social arrangements. So it’s safe to assume that the world our entertainment media represents over time gains some level of acceptance in the markets that consume this media.
And in this there is significant irony for public diplomacy advocates who might wish to enlist American cultural products to help America’s image. Political-economists argue that the success of Western and American media do much to spread normative aspects of consumer culture (individualism, pluralism, and more generally, a neo-liberal attitude towards the media industry). Their arguments echo concerns from dependency theorists and media imperalism thinkers from the past… our entertainment products crowd out local cultural alternatives to thinking about the media and, potentially, impact local cultures. Since we recognize the importance of media and narrative as a resource for our everyday lives, maybe the U.S. is spreading some kind of tacit acceptance of global modernity – but as thinkers like Appadurai have noted, this has not happened uniformly or without conflict.
As Marc Lynch has observed in his study of Al-Jazeera, the Arab media market became pluralistic, without becoming liberal per se. In other words – the growth of what we might call “American-style” media content may inculcate values and norms the U.S. government might like to promote – but not in predictable ways, and certainly not in ways where acceptance of certain values irrevocably leads to positive opinions about U.S. policies.
Such is the fickle nature of soft power. The values intrinsic to U.S. political narratives – freedom, equality, and so on – also carry other practical outcomes. We need only look to our programming to see them play out. Individualism also valorizes competition, potentially at the expense of social solidarity. At the risk of sounding like a political-economy scholar, the hyper-capitalist, neo-liberal world that is fantasized in U.S. media products may create a world that is competitive, combative, and not necessarily deferential to the “traditional” defender of Western values – the United States. The U.S. thought that it could do away with the USIA in the 1990s, because our media products would speak for us – but they did not. They spoke for values that would inevitably be filtered in local prisms of culture. We could not simply assume that the cultural promotion in our narratives would generate soft power, creating tacit acceptance that the U.S. was a credible, legitimate role-model. Media effects are far more complicated – what media does to us is as significant as what we do with, and to, media content.
So there is no obvious link between the success of U.S. entertainment culture and some sort of metric for public diplomacy… at least for now. Meanwhile, we perhaps haphazardly create the world we espouse with our value-laden media communication (and I’m sure someone can explain the ideological frameworks at work in CSI). If public diplomacy were truly to inculcate the values intrinsic to the United States’ own narratives – then the world would not uncritically defer to the whims of the United States and echo any propagandistic talking points. Global public opinion would instead be rife with those empowered to criticize, inform, and constructively engage in debate over policies and issues. People would feel free to talk, to organize, and to collectively assemble in support, protest, and even worship. So maybe, just maybe, the “goals” of public diplomacy aren’t so far afield as we might suspect. We just can’t expect that the proliferation of United States culture means support for the United States.
