Americanization of Media

At a time when economic, political, environmental, cultural, social, and even religious issues are raised on a global scale, communication research is faced with the question of the media's power to influence these issues and their outcome. This question is usually phrased in terms of the overwhelming presence of U.S. media and their contents around the globe. Increasingly this power to influence has come to be recognized as the impact that the U.S. model of media production and distribution has on non-U.S. media and their reception—a process known as the Americanization of the media.

The debate over Americanization began around the 1800s within the context of cultural, technological, and economic exchanges between the United States and Europe, particularly Britain, France, and Germany. The United States embodied the essentials of modernity, democracy, progress, and freedom as it experimented with new and powerful ideas, values, knowledge, technology, and symbols. From both inside and outside its [Page 34]borders, questions were raised as to how to exercise control over these new and powerful social forces and to whom this control could be (or not be) entrusted.

While much of the pioneering work in developing modern mass media was done in Europe during the early 19th century (for example, the penny press in France), it was, as Jeremy Tunstall argues, in the United States and especially in and around New York City that most new media were first successfully industrialized and sold to the bulk of the population. While a developing mass-market economy and urbanization were contributing factors, the need to integrate and acculturate the surge of immigrants from countries other than those of western Europe between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries also acted as an agent for the pulling together of scientific, technological, financial, entrepreneurial, and even moral forces to create what was to become the foundation of the U.S. cultural industries—contemporary mass media. These were set up to Americanize the incoming mass of immigrants and to Americanize the population within the United States, whose divisive wounds of the Civil War had not completely healed. Even today the Americanization of the media is carried on within the United States when foreign contents are acculturated, either through narrative posturing or through editing, to better fit a preconceived and homogenizing U.S. worldview.

Over the decades and centuries, then, ideas, values, knowledge, and artifacts from the United States have traveled across time and space through the words and deeds of men and women in every walk of life: entrepreneurs, teachers, artists, missionaries, journalists, humanitarians, athletes, military personnel, tourists, intellectuals, politicians, ambassadors, students, scientists, and consultants. Each served as a representative of what the United States stood for and, more globally, what America stood for. The United States became identified with America, the American dream, and the American way of life, thus co-opting all the Americas (North, Central, and South) and all that they contain.

This spreading of things “made in America”—first into Europe, then into the other Americas and parts of Asia, and finally touching every region of the planet—was sometimes imposed, sometimes solicited, sometimes welcomed, sometimes resisted. Depending on the host country's economic, political, cultural, religious, social, and historical context and power structures, at times the elites would resist and the popular would welcome, or the contrary would occur. In many cases, the representatives of the United States would side, outwardly or through intermediaries, with those whose power to influence the outcome was decisive.

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