Review Essay
From Media Development 42:2 (1995): 44-47.


Books on global communication
become a philosophical tussle
between the right and the left


By Shelton Gunaratne
Moorhead (Minn.) State University



Stevenson, Robert L. (1994).
Global Communication in the Twenty-First Century. New York & London:
Longman. xvi+382pp.

Teaching international communication has become a popular and necessary undertaking in tertiary institutions in the Western world. Market globalization that brought about the World Trade Organization has also forced global thinking on the academe. The spate of books on international communication that has flooded the U.S. market in recent years provides clear evidence of the elevation of this field from the exotic to the necessary.

A number of books written from numerous angles are now available for anyone designing a single course or an entire program on international communication. The authors of these books are not necessarily neutral academic observers because they stack their evidence to prove their political and social philosophy. In U.S. political parlance, some are left-of-center and others right-of-center. They have an agenda to promote. A few adopt the noble middle path that Lord Buddha preached more than 2,500 years ago.

Stevenson falls into the right-of-center category just like Dizard (1994), Pool (1983), Read (1976), Righter (1978) and others. They promote the virtues of Anglo-American conservative thinking. They stand in contrast to the left-of-center group comprising luminaries such as Hamelink (1994), Luther (1988), Galtung and Vincent (1992) and Nordenstreng and Schiller (1993), among others.

Global Communication in the Twenty-First Century , Stevenson's 1994 product, is philosophically no different from Communication, Development and the Third World, his 1988 product. Both books extol the virtues of Anglo-American superiority in world communication -- something that Tunstall did in flashy fashion in 1977 when he opined that the media were American. The 1994 avatar of Stevenson gives much greater emphasis to culture because, he says, one cannot understand international communication in the 1990s without understanding something about culture. Thus he devotes the first 100 pages of the book to elaborate on five topics: the context of global communication, coping with culture, communicating across cultures, and English as the global language.

Global Communication ... is an extremely well-organized book. In this regard, it stands in contrast to Reeves' Communication and the 'Third World' (1993), which lacks a conceptual thread to unite the whole. After grounding his readers on culture, Stevenson takes them along on an armchair tour of the global media, which he attempts to place in the five conceptual niches -- Western, Development, Revolutionary, Authoritarian and Communist -- that guru Hachten (1992) built on the foundation of the original four theories of the press. Tour-conductor Stevenson takes his gawky tourists to only those places that gives him a chance to make his points -- just like BBC traveler Michael Palin did his "Around the World in 80 Days." He visits the English-speaking (sic) media, the Western media, the Communist media, the Authoritarian media, the Development media and the Revolutionary media. The tourists find out in the course of this tour that, despite the guide's eloquent testimony, placing the global media into neat conceptual niches -- with the ultimate aim of glorifying Western journalism -- is a relatively difficult task. Stevenson, thus, leaves the more comprehensive descriptions of the state of the media in the world's regions to those writers who contributed to Merrill's Global Journalism (1995), which also contains Stevenson's essay on "Freedom of the press around the world" (pp. 63-76) with views identical to those in his own books.

Four themes recur throughout Stevenson's new book: Anglo-American dominance of all aspects of global communication; resurgence of cultural identity as the basis for conflict; the beginnings of a global culture; and the triumph of independent journalism. They provide the "framework" (p. 1) of his study of global communication. If one were to infer a theory on which he placed this framework, it looks like a composite of libertarianism, free-market capitalism and U.S. cultural values -- individual liberty and opportunity, democracy, etc. -- that one may justifiably call "occidental cosmology," a term that Galtung and Vincent (1992: 13-17) have popularized.

Stevenson confessed in his 1988 book: "On the whole, I defend Western (and American) mass media" (p. xiv). His 1994 avatar implicitly does the same. His faith in the inherent strength of Anglo-American culture and media is implicitly reflected in his writing just as in the case of communication specialists Hudson (1990) Dizard, Pool and others. Stevenson (1994: 15, 186, 213) makes no bones about the high regard he has for the conservative views of Kirkpatrick (1990), who advocated cooperation with authoritarian governments but not with totalitarian regimes because the former had the capacity to move toward democracy; and of Fukuyama (1992), who used Hegelian logic to assert the end of history following the demise of communism. (Stevenson' however, consistently misspells Fukuyama's name thereby reflecting a degree of cultural unfamiliarity.) Stevenson pays no attention to Andre Gunder Frank's essay "No end to history! History to no end?" (Nordenstreng and Schiller, 1993: 3-27) which discredits Fukuyama's thesis by putting three widely held notions to the test of reality: the belief in the "magic" of "capitalism"; the "triumph" of electoral democracy (which signals Fukuyama's end of history); and the belief that market capitalism and political democracy are one and the same, if not inextricably linked.

One cannot help but believe that Stevenson's faith in Anglo-American culture is partly built upon the three popular notions that Frank logically disputes. Thus Stevenson's book, unlike that of Fortner (1993) who uses a mixture of systems theory and Innis's social control theory to analyze the history of international communication, lacks a scholarly theoretical framework as such. However, one can argue that his intention was to document evidence to back up his faith in capitalism, electoral democracy and other facets of occidental cosmology even though he finds the communist practice of stacking evidence in support of Marxism-Lenninism rather amusing. Frederick (1993: 187-218) mentions three types of contending global communication theories -- micro-level, mid-range and macro-level. Stevenson seems to be partly relying on the macro-level theories of political economy that eulogize liberal economics and modernization as opposed to structuralism and dependency approaches of the left-of-center school.

It is clear that Stevenson is targeting his book to a patriotic audience of U.S. scholars and students that he even deems it fit to speak in the first-person plural to identify himself with that audience, e.g.: "Eventually, the mainstream culture accommodated them (immigrants) and in the process became a little less Anglo and a little closer to the nation of nations many of us want our country to be" (p. 76). And despite his "personal experience in about 50 countries" (p. xv), he places himself unmistakably among the geographically confused U.S. scholars when he asserts that "the emerging third-world nations ... are mostly in the Southern Hemisphere" (p. 236) -- thus replicating the Fortner (1993: 188) blunder.

Sometimes, Stevenson (1994) appears to possess a high degree of cultural awareness. "The Chinese culture is one of the oldest and most sophisticated in the world. Gunpowder and printing with moveable type were invented there while Europeans were running around in animal skins" (p. 201). Yet, he traces the "second revolution in human communication" to "Gutenberg's invention of printing with moveable type in the mid-1400s" (p. 86). Again, he is quick to point out that "the New World's first university and first printing press were in Mexico City, not in Jamestown or Boston" (p. 219). Yet, he does not mention any good that came out of it except to point out the negatives: Mexico's "imperfect democracy" and "poor record of economic and social development."

Galtung, in his essay "Geopolitical transformations and 21st-century world economy" (in Nordenstreng and Schiller, 1993: 29-58), asserts that the U.S. economy has already moved into a depression because it has failed to keep three major economic factors within bounds: Q/P, the ratio between the quality of the product offered and the price; C/N, the degree of processing in a product from its raw nature (N) to processed culture (C); and F/R, the synchrony between the rate of growth of the finance economy and of the real economy. He points out that the United States is by far the most indebted country in the world today with the credibility of the U.S. dollar continuing its downward slope. None of that gloom seems to bother Stevenson, who apparently wants his readers to feel good about "our country."

Stevenson refers to four distinct areas that show Anglo-American dominance of global communication:

First, English as a world language -- an area that he elaborates in one whole chapter. The influence of English, he says, is a product of British and U.S. political and economic power in the past and also of its current use as the language of the emerging global economy and culture (p. 99). He adds: "Unless someone finds the Babel fish, we're going to need a single language, and English is the obvious candidate" (p. 91). This optimism contrasts with Galtung and Vincent's (1992: 104) view of "a general world transformation program to be implemented in all kinds of fields, thus ultimately ushering in the New International Language Order (with Chinese and Hindi)" and other new orders.

Second, the emerging global popular culture that looks thoroughly "American" -- a situation that has brought forth accusations of "cultural imperialism" (pp. 5-6). Anglo-American cultural values, he says, are popular because they encourage initiative and creativity and tolerate eccentricity (p. 142). Even Galtung (in Nordenstreng and Schiller, 1993: 42) admits: "The U.S. has been more successful than any other country in producing world culture, generally plebian and vulgar, but the most global there is, a major factor behind what remains of political clout." Rheingold (1993: 68) extends U.S. cultural influence to what goes on in cyberspace as well: "Net culture took on a global, youthful, often heavily American flavor as so many colleges worldwide came online, starting in the United States."

Third, the new communication technology that ranges from satellites and supercomputers to miniaturized consumer products (pp. 6-7). Stevenson devotes an entire chapter to discuss the communication revolution based on satellites, computers and digitization. He is elated by "the unexpected leap of the United States into global leadership of HDTV technology" following the 1993 announcements of the European Community and Japan that "they would cooperate in developing the new U.S. standard rather than continuing work on their own systems" (p. 329). What he avoids doing, however, is placing such technology against the gloomy economic factors -- the Q/P, C/N and F/R ratios -- in which the United States is bogged.

Fourth, the global news flow, which spawned the UNESCO debate in the 1970s. He says that the Western news organizations -- both in print and television -- remain the heart of the world's news system; and that the three truly global newspapers are all American. He asserts that "it is the Anglo-American media that dominate the global flow of information" commanding "the attention of the world's leaders and protesters" (pp. 7-8).
In a rare concession to the structuralists' center-periphery theory, he says: "Without question, the colonial system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was designed to the advantage of the colonial powers and had the effect ... of establishing a system of global communication whose benefits continue to accrue to a handful of Western nations" (p. 140).

Following the elaboration on Anglo-American dominance, Stevenson sums up the remaining three trends in global communication thus:

Resurgence of cultural identity as the basis for conflict: "As ideological competition between the superpowers recedes, the assertion of cultural identity has become the basis of more and more conflict. In many countries, particularly in the industrialized nations, this cultural identity focuses on language" (p. 18).

Beginnings of a global culture: "Despite the resurgence of culture as the basis of conflict, the first outlines of a global culture are emerging. This culture is promoted by a new generation of broad-based, communication-oriented corporations. Although the content of the emerging global culture still looks Anglo-American, more and more of it is produced and distributed by European and Japanese conglomerates that aim for global markets" (p. 18). [Even Galtung and Vincent (1992: 78) believe that more "South-South trading" may take place under the auspices of First World transnational corporations -- a positive assessment that doesn't rule out their cultural impact.]

Triumph of independent journalism: "The New World Information Order debate included calls for a new kind of journalism more supportive of third-world development than the traditional independent, critical media of the West. After a decade of practice, development journalism has failed, and the benefits of independent journalism are increasingly acknowledged. The dismantling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe also contributed to the triumph of independent journalism" (p. 18).

It is the supposed victory of Anglo-American news values, which Stevenson raves about in the last trend, that will cause consternation among those scholars who do not belong to the conservative right-of-center school. Galtung and Vincent (1992: 13-17, 21, 49-53), in discussing the structure of foreign news, convincingly argue how the Western news paradigm -- with emphasis on reference to elites (both nations and persons), personalization and negativity -- operates in a way entirely compatible with Western imperialism that, in turn, is compatible with the occidental social cosmology relating to space, time, knowledge, nature, persons and the transpersonal. Galtung and Vincent say that this cosmology, which forces its adherents "to see only that which is compatible with the underlying filters," reflects a form of censorship. They argue: "Clearly something has to be done about these massive biases; biases probably so massive that news can be better predicted knowing the sociocultural contexts than knowing actual events." They ask: "Why should the world labor under one monolithic recipe, an occidental tradition that has the gall to refer to itself as freedom, in spite of all the constraints under which operates?"

Stevenson (1994: 301-305) mentions elites and prominence, personal and human interest (personalization), violence and disruption (negativity), etc., as components of newsworthiness. However, being a thought prisoner of occidental cosmology, as Galtung and Vincent may put it, he accepts their validity. He says on elites: "Let's face it. Some people are more newsworthy than others ... (and) celebrities are newsworthy around the globe." And: "Except for the discredited communist and development press concepts, exceptional events -- coups, earthquakes, accidents, disasters, scandals -- are universally newsworthy."

Stevenson (1994: 231-257) says that the collapse of the communist media concept discredited much of the development concept except for one key element: the belief that mass media, especially, telecommunication, can stimulate economic growth and political stability, the core of modern Western culture. He has no dispute with development support communication, viz., information distributed to promote education, agriculture, public health, nutrition or family planning. His dispute is with development journalism or development news that aims to support political development emphasizing positive developments and protocol news. He cites extreme examples from China Daily and Pyongyang Times thereby equating his definition of development journalism with the communist concept. It appears that Stevenson is arguing on the basis of equivocation or false analogy to claim victory for Western (independent?) journalism.

Shelton Gunaratne in an essay titled "Media Subservience and Developmental Journalism" (in Martin and Hiebert, 1990: 352-354) says that media subservience to government is not a prerequisite for fostering development journalism; that the libertarian press concept does not fit the concept of developmental journalism; that the authoritarian and communist theories of the press are compatible with developmental journalism but with non-democratic limitations; that the social responsibility theory provides the most fertile ground for reaping the full potential of developmental journalism in keeping with the democratic political philosophy as well as the new thinking on bottom-up development and self-reliance. Stevenson, in contrast, does not see development journalism as consistent with the social responsibility concept; nor does he acknowledge the exemplary output of development journalism that continues to come out of Inter Press Service and similar agencies.

Stevenson (1994) also dismisses NWIO -- note the conscious omission of the C in NWICO as he did in his 1988 book -- as "rhetoric" concerning matters such as a collective right to communicate, social responsibilities of the media and harnessing of the media to support development (p. 223). Much of the rhetoric for the NWIO debate, he says, came from the global theory of dependency; and in the 1990s the NWIO "is mostly an artifact of history, seldom invoked even by critics of Western dominance and submerged in the recent global triumph of Western journalism" (pp. 308-309).

Perhaps Gerbner, Mowlana and Nordenstreng (1993), who published a collection of essays on the global media debate's rise, fall and renewal, need not have bothered. Stevenson does not hear their "rhetoric" or that of the MacBride Roundtable that has been meeting annually to promote aspects of NWICO that UNESCO under Federico Mayor has dumped in order to please the Anglo-American powers. Stevenson's view of NWICO is far different from that of Galtung and Vincent (1993: 18, 104)), who conceive it as a process that parallels the five elements relating to the New International Economic Order:

1. Better terms of trade for the Third World. (NWICO parallel: Better news ratios for the Third World -- meaning more news about the Third World in the First World and less about the First World in the Third.)

2. More Third World control over productive assets in their own countries. (NWICO parallel: Increased Third World control over communication assets -- control over which events news personnel are permitted to extract from the Third World and process into news, and local control over local media.)

3. More Third World interaction leading to increased South-South trade. (NWICO parallel: More news about other Third World countries in all Third World media and less about the First World.)

4. More Third World counter penetration -- investment in rich countries, etc. (NWICO parallel: Some Third World control in the First World over what events should be processed into news, and increased Third World control over local media.); and

5. More Third World influence in world economic institutions, such the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and UNCTAD, as well as in transnational corporations. (NWICO parallel: Some Third World control over world communication institutions, including U.N. agencies in the field, if established.)

It's a pity that Stevenson does not bother to take up Galtung and Vincent on this exciting operationalization of NWICO instead of dismissing his own interpretation of it as "rhetoric." Galtung and Vincent, on the other hand, believe that this process is already under way. They see tremendous increase in attention given by the Third World press to other Third World countries accompanied by a decline in news about the First World. They also see an effort to control the First World through selective access to information; and they expect that Third World interests to buy into First World media to ensure better control over the images.

Finally, a word about the "feel-good-about-America" syndrome in Stevenson's book. He points out that the level of newspaper circulation is positively related to economic development (p. 245). In many parts of the Third World, he says, newspapers are not thriving because literacy is declining, and illiterates are not newspaper readers (p. 115). Then he laments that the United States is not the world leader in newspaper readership -- not even close; the proportion of adults in the United States who read a newspaper "every day" dropped from 73 percent in 1967 to 51 percent in 1988 (p. 114). About half the U.S. population watches the evening network news on television. He says that the U.S. drop in newspaper readership may be the result of other choices available to Americans (p. 124). However, is U.S. economic development also going downhill? And, is U.S. functional literacy also going downhill? Pssst! That reasoning applies only to the Third World?



References:

Dizard, Wilson P. (1994). Old Media / New Media: Mass Communication in the Information Age. New York: Longman.

Fortner, Robert S. (1993). International Communication: History, Conflict, and Control of the Global Metropolis. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Frederick, Howard H. (1993). Global Communication and International Relations. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Fukuyama, Francis (1992). The End of History And Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Galtung, Johan, and Richard Vincent (1992). Global Glasnost: Toward a New World Information and Communication Order? Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press Inc.

Gerbner, George, Hamid Mowlana and Kaarle Nordenstreng, eds. (1993). The Global Media Debate: Its Rise, Fall, and Renewal. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp.

Hachten, William A. (1992). The World News Prism (3rd ed.). Ames: Iowa State University Press.

Hamelink, Cees J. (1994). Trends in World Communication: On Disempowerment and Self-Empowerment. Penang: Southbound Sdn. Bhd.

Hudson, Heather E. (1990). Communication Satellites: Their Development and Impact. New York: The Free Press.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. (1990). The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State - And Other Surprises. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press.

Luther, Sara Fletcher (1988). The United States and the Direct Broadcast Satellite: The Politics of International Broadcasting in Space. New York: Oxford University Press.

Martin, L. John, and Ray E. Hiebert, eds. (1990). Current Issues in International Communication. New York & London: Longman.

Merrill, John C., ed. (1995). Global Journalism: Survey of International Communication. 3rd ed. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman

Nordenstreng, Kaarle, and Herbert I. Schiller (1993). Beyond National Sovereignty: International Communication in the 1990s. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp.

Pool, Ithiel de Sola. (1983). Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Read, William (1976). America's Mass Media Merchants. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Reeves, Geoffrey (1993). Communications and the 'Third World.' London & New York: Routledge.

Rheingold, Howard (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: HarperPerennial

Righter, Rosemary (1978). Whose News? Politics, the Press and the Third World. London: Burnett Books.

Stevenson, Robert L. (1988). Communication, Development, and the Third World: The Global Politics of Information. New York & London: Longman.

Tunstall, Jeremy (1977). The Media are American: Anglo-American Media in the World. London: Constable.


©1995. All rights reserved.
This article first appeared in Media Development 42:2 (1995), pp. 44-47.

Send comments to Professor Shelton Gunaratne, mass communications department, Moorhead State University, Moorhead, MN 56563.