American Media's Cultural Conquesnt

Watch our shows! Wear our cloths!

By Peter Mwaura

This form of imperialism colonizes the mind. There's a growing dominance of global media/entertainment systems, influenced mainly by the culture and interests of the US. The dominance results in the displacement or destruction of indigenous cultures.

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. The day celebrates press freedom and evaluates press freedom worldwide. Maybe, May 3 should also be a time to think about casting out the demons of cultural imperialism.

The UN General Assembly, when it proclaimed the day in 1993, forgot cultural imperialism, which has been around since the 1960s. Cultural imperialism, otherwise known as media imperialism, describes a situation where one country, or countries, dominate others through exports of their media products, such as television programming and news.

To speak of casting out the demons is, therefore, an allegory for decolonising the mind. There is a growing dominance of global media systems and entertainment products, influenced mainly by the culture and interests of the United States. The dominance results in the displacement or destruction of indigenous cultures.

Much of the dominance comes from the American media system. The US exports more media and entertainment products than any other nation and three of the most important transnational media corporations — AOL Time Warner, Disney and News Corporation (owned by Australian Rupert Murdoch, who acquired American citizenship) — are American.

At the same time, English remains the predominant language on the Internet, even though it is not the native language that most people in the world speak. There are, for example, three times as many native speakers of Chinese as native speakers of English.

In cultural imperialism, nations with dominant media systems impose their beliefs, values, lifestyles, and ideologies on others. America’s dominance in the entertainment industries makes it difficult for African countries to produce and distribute their own cultural products.

Add to that the growing popularity of Mexico’s romantic soaps, and the competition becomes tougher. Cultural imperialism prevents the development of native cultures and has a negative impact on the natives, who reject their own culture in favour of a foreign one.

The story of the women of Fiji is illustrative. Women with fuller figures are traditionally admired. Then television was introduced on the island in 1995 and Fijians started watching American shows like Baywatch, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.

Over a three-year period, Anne Becker, director of research at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center of Harvard Medical School, carried out a study on the island to investigate shifts in body image and eating practices.

She found that the Western images and values transmitted via television led to an increase in disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

A survey of teenage girls found that 74 percent of them felt they were “too big or fat”. The girls had absorbed the Western ideals of beauty. “The teenagers see TV as a model for how one gets by in the modern world,” reported Dr Becker. “They believe the shows depict reality.”

Cultural imperialism can take many forms. John Tomlinson, author of the book, Cultural Imperialism, defines cultural imperialism as “the use of political and economic power to exalt and spread the values and habits of a foreign culture at the expense of a native culture.”

Herbert Schiller, one of the best known writers on media imperialism, defines cultural imperialism as:

“The sum of the process by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the Mind, gives many examples of cultural imperialism. “But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism,” he writes, “is the cultural bomb.”

The effect of a cultural bomb is to “annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves,” he says.

“It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland,” he concludes. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish.”

Cultural domination by the media was not something that was foreseen when on December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which Article 19 states that press freedom includes the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”