Neoliberalism, Media and Globalization

From the mid-1970s Western societies faced a "long downturn" from a circle of high profits, investment rates and productivity to years of recession and developing widespread unemployment caused by lower profits, investments and productivity. To counter this trend, policy makers in the US and Europe unleashed a vast market deregulation. This work analyses the role of the media sector throughout this transition period. Neoliberal policies resulted in a breathtaking development of big, transnational media conglomerates and internationalised advertising, thereby triggering the emergence of global television, the spread of Hollywood productions and eventually the homogenisation of the world as a single field of persistent interaction and exchange. While it is improbable that globalisation at its current level would exist without deregulated global markets, loose regulatory boundaries between broadcasting and new media, the internationalisation of media programmes and multinational media conglomerates, it is equally unlikely that Western states will reverse their policy approach: the Western world simply depends too much on the self-made economic power of international media industries.