Television

Television is a mass medium with a global reach. Like all mass media operating in democracies, its function is to inform, to control, to educate, and to entertain. However, because television combines the visual with the aural, it possesses certain attributes that print and radio do not. One does not need special training to watch television, for instance; it is often said that children must be taught to read, but they learn television literacy on their own by watching television.

In most countries, television is the most widely used information and entertainment source; since June 1999, all nations on Earth have television. The small Himalayan country of Bhutan became the last nation on Earth to receive television when its king lifted the ban on TV sets. This measure marks both an important step to end the isolation of the country and the completion of a worldwide modernization process initiated in 1928, when the United States established the first mechanical television network. Table 1 shows the per capita television receivers by country at the beginning of the millennium.

Starting in the mid-19th century, new methods of communication, such as telephone, television, and the Internet, have continually fostered an increased interest in, and awareness of, other countries and their citizens and a greater openness toward them. According to Marshall McLuhan, the key breakthrough came when the international coverage of television overcame obstacles of space and time to shrink the world into a “global village.” Although there are a few truly global TV channels (e.g., CNN [Cable News Network] television, BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] World Service, Al Jazeera), they reach relatively small audiences by comparison with the hundreds of millions exposed daily to the news on national and local media. As Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart point out, mass communications in general and TV in particular have not become global (in the sense of each station covering all parts of the world) but continue to focus on local and national issues. However, national media all around the globe are in the process of becoming increasingly exchanged as they cross territorial borders and contribute to permeable and open media networks.

What exactly does global television mean, and how does it compare to international television? International television is the oldest of these supranational categories and basically implies the transferring of television programming between at least two countries. Multinational television is more complex and implies wider program transfer and the coproduction of programming. Global television, as the third and most recent category, stands for huge multinationalist enterprises trying to make all, or at least a great portion, of the world's TV audience available to a set of individual broadcasters.

With global television, we can identify four dimensions:

• 1.
  Global television stands for global coverage: Events and news are broadcasted simultaneously into hundreds of millions of homes around the world.
• 2.
  It is coverage on issues with potentially global impact and global interest, for example, Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin wall, the Gulf War, 9/11, the Olympic Games.
• 3.
  This, as a consequence, implies cross-cultural audiences: Millions of people around the world follow the coverage and, thus, must be addressed in a truly global language.
• 4.
  All this, of course, includes a technological component as well: Global television is represented by satellites and home satellite dishes, cable and a nearly unlimited number of channels, high-definition reception, virtual reality, and interactivity.