Jihad vs. McWorld (19 page)

Projected onto a movie-house big screen, films reach only a small percentage of the world’s population for specified and quite limited periods of time. The new interactive systems will permit users to dial up films—entertainment and informational, hard data and hardcore, funny and functional—all on demand so that anyone can watch anything, and buy anything, any time she chooses. Through television, films thus speak potentially to every person on earth twenty-four hours a day.
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As movies and television have pursued common programming strategies, Hollywood’s creative monopoly over material has increased: indeed, the Americanization of global television is proceeding even faster than the globalization of American films. In England, where football (soccer) and cricket once dominated weekend sports broadcasting, viewers can now watch the NFL Game of the Week, and even in France there is an American football
jeu de semaine
, complete with an American-born announcer whose breathless French description of plays, rendered in an intentionally atrocious American accent, runs on with a gritty Yankee charm along the lines of “alors, quelle finesse! Regardez le quarterbacksneak de Dan Marino, ça marche vraiment parfaitment, n’est-ce pas?! Tiens! Touchdown! Eh, oui, je suis étonné! Quelle jeu! Quel grand show!”

The Anglophilia that characterizes so much of American high culture is reciprocated by the British in low culture. On the tube, Hollywood is the template, with imitations of
Gladiators
and Oprah (in the person of Crystal Rose) joining
Brighton Belles
(a licensed version of
Golden Girls)
and the goofily Amerocentric youth magazine show
The Word
, which features personalities like basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal, the porn star Jeff Stryker, and a policeman from Albuquerque who had his penis enlarged (though, regrettably, not on camera).
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Eastern Europe is chasing its neighbors to the West in the race to catch America in television along with everything else. According to Miklos Vamos, a Hungarian journalist, “Hungarians, Czechoslovaks and Bulgarians try to imitate everything that is American—and I mean
everything…
. [T]he state-run financing system of culture doesn’t exist any longer, but neither does any network of foundations and other private funds that can be used, as in the West, to support the arts. East European films and literature cannot compete with their American counterparts. If we keep going on like this, our small countries will gradually lose their national cultures.”
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In Budapest they are watching
The Cosby Show
on reruns—though in a German dub since Magyar dubbing is not yet available. In Yeltsin’s Russia, TV viewers can watch a rip-off of
Wheel of Fortune
called
Field of Wonders
on which lucky winners receive Sony VCRs into which they can load their pirated cassette versions of wildly popular American films.
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Poland does still better, having access to
Wheel of Fortune
itself (dubbed in Polish) along with its own licensed version
Kolo Fortuna
, which plays to 70 percent of Polish households on Thursday evenings. Twenty-five percent of Polish households have access to cable or satellite at relatively moderate cost.
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Where Jihad and McWorld collide on television there is little doubt about who wins: the Catholic Church may be reasserting itself in areas like abortion (banned in Poland in 1992) and the Communists may be making a political comeback, but the cultural wars are being won hands down by American television. The Church has conceded as much, and elsewhere in Europe is advertising on VH1 and MTV for converts to the priesthood, which is rendered as a kind of new, AIDS-safe form of cool.

In Asia, where wiring homes with cable or fiber optics is not yet financially feasible, satellite is making major inroads. Asian (now
Murdoch’s) Star satellite network reaches hundreds of thousands of upscale Indians pining for Western fare. Satellite dishes are showing up in China as well, in flagrant disregard of state laws banning their use in keeping with the war on “spiritual pollution.” In 1993, State Council Proclamation 129 prohibited both purchase and possession of dishes. Yet millions of electronic outlaws have installed them and current estimates suggest over a half million “heavenly threads” (the literal translation of satellite antenna into Mandarin) tie 15 million viewers to a side of capitalism the regime is not anxious to promote. Prime Minister Li Peng talks a tough line, but so far no dishes have been removed and it is hard to imagine him winning a war against McWorld, particularly since in other domains of the economy he is working so hard to join it.
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He has good reason to worry, however, for what the Chinese are seeing courtesy of their dishes is unadulterated Western fare including the BBC, CNN, MTV, and an English-language sports network. The communications firms that serve Asia have not been seduced into diversification by the daunting prospects of trying to find appropriate programs for India and China. On the contrary, as the spectator venues and the distribution conduits keep evolving and multiplying and the markets keep expanding, the messages and the products being churned out get ever more homogenous. The commercial purveyors of satellite TV are in any case interested in profits not politics, and Rupert Murdoch was not averse to pulling BBC news-programming from Star Television to placate the Chinese government.

The Hong Kong—based Star satellite network originally appeared as an independent Asian rival to Western companies, but four of its five channels are English-language broadcasts and toward the end of 1993 it sold out to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for a little more than a half billion dollars. The Australian-born naturalized American Murdoch owns, in America alone, Fox Television, Twentieth Century Fox Film,
TV Guide
, HarperCollins Publishers, and the
New York Post
. In addition to his global newspaper-and-magazine empire, he also controls Fox Television as well as a 50 percent share in British Sky Broadcasting (Europe’s dominant satellite broadcaster): with Star TV in his pocket, he adds another thirty-eight nations with a potential audience of two-thirds of the world’s population.
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That means that several billion Asian ears are cocked in his
direction. Yet the only thing we know for sure about Murdoch’s intentions is that they include neither the preservation of indigenous cultures nor the democratic and civic uses of media and telecommunication networks. He might seem a threat in China, where—as in Singapore—satellite dishes are forbidden (but manufactured by the army and widely used). But Murdoch agreed to withdraw the BBC World News from Star in return for less Chinese resistance, knowing perhaps that it is not CNN or the BBC but MTV that is McWorld’s real Trojan horse in alien cultures and hostile states.

MTV
OFFERS A
fascinating picture of the rapid changes that have given American television and music a global grip on audiences. The music television video was born only in 1981, an offspring (ironically) of performance art and experimental television on the cultural margin; the kind of work presented at innovative performance studios like the Kitchen in New York. Within five years, the MTV network had become a mainstream colossus, propelling its owner Viacom into a media limelight from which it has preyed ever since on a widening spectrum of rival media outlets. When its owner, Sumner Redstone’s Viacom, snatched victory in the war for Paramount from Barry Diller’s QVC teleshopping network, Viacom emerged as one of the world’s most powerful media monoliths. Meanwhile, though mauled by Viacom, QVC has continued to mall television. But the world’s largest electronic mall is neither network television nor the shopping network, but MTV itself that exists exclusively as a marketing tool for the music industry. As John Seabrook has written, “one of the reasons MTV is a landmark in the history of media is that the boundary between entertainment and advertising has completely disappeared.”
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By the mid-1980s when the group Dire Straits used MTV to launch its megahit “Money for Nothing” (with its own backhanded commercial tie-ins), MTV had gone international. In early 1993, its global audience stood at nearly a quarter of a billion households (60 million in the United States) with over a half billion viewers in seventy-one countries (see map, pages 106-107). The numbers esca
late day by day, eclipsing CNN, which, though it is in 130 countries, boasts far fewer viewing households and speaks to yesterday’s generation of the over-forty’s rather than tomorrow’s of the under-thirty’s. MTV Europe began broadcasting in East Germany two days before the Wall came down, which, in a certain perverse sense, almost rendered the latter event superfluous.
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Indigenous-language MTV programming is available in most countries, but although Orlando Patterson would like to think that “world musical homogenization” is simply “not occurring,” young watchers often prefer American, which is, after all, what MTV is promoting. Sumner Redstone, the owner of MTV and three times the average age of his employees there, sounds like Gillette chairman Zeien when he insists that “kids on the streets in Tokyo have more in common with kids on the streets in London than they do with their parents.”
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In Belgium, a Flemish-language MTV program was canceled and replaced by English as a result of complaints from local Flemish viewers.
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Anglo-American pop accounts for most of MTV’s music, and where local groups get airtime they generally imitate the Americans. Critic Helmut Fest complains that local European groups appearing on MTV are consigned to the “ghetto slot—a kind of ‘look-how-curious-and-quaint-these-continentals-are’ approach.”
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In Berlin, if you get tired of MTV, you can also get the best bands on David Letterman’s
Late Night
on another channel.

Asia affects to go its own way, and then marches in lockstep with America. The new Asia Television Network (ATN) is nominally pursuing cultural preservation, and it has started the first all-Hindi network on the subcontinent, but it is simultaneously broadcasting MTV-Europe in order to compete with its rival, Star.
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Star has its own Asian version of MTV (with plenty of American hits), so Indians and Malaysians and Pakistanis can now choose from two “indigenous” MTV channels that offer the same bland pop American musical fare—or local imitations thereof. Once new media are in place, however conservative the cultural intentions of users, the door is wide open to the outside world.
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MTV’s audience, united for all its ideological differences and cultural reluctance by satellite and the United Colors of Benetton, includes not just Taiwan but China, not only Israel but Iran and Saudi Arabia, secessionist Georgia as well as progressive Hungary, Brazil no less than Mexico, Bangladesh and Vietnam as well as India and Hong Kong, and, along with South Korea, North Korea too (see map, pages 106–107). Satellites have little regard for Jihad and are messengers for McWorld in the most obstinate of ethnic enclaves. One nearly hysterical Islamic youth confesses to an Iranian newspaper, “I can’t study anymore, I have become impatient, weak and nervous. I feel crippled … so vulgar and stimulating” are the images of Western TV and MTV being beamed down from satellites.
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Music Television’s Reach Around the World

Self-critical Americans worry about MTV’s “cultural colonialism,”
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but when the supposed targets in Eastern Europe are warned, they wave off the caveats insisting that rock music is about freedom—a weapon against both the old Communists and the new nationalists. And, of course, in the near run they are right: in today’s reactionary Beograd (Serbia), dissident radio stations like B-92 play Western rock music to signal their disdain for ethnic parochialism, much as Russian dissidents once wore jeans and smoked Winstons and spoke rock to power to unnerve their Communist masters. Just a few years ago, Bill Roedy, MTV’s European director, was writing about “being part of the process of democratization in Eastern Europe.” MTV, he enthused, “is more than a TV channel. For some audiences, we’re a connection to the rest of the world. We’re a window to the West with our free flow of information and freedom of expression.”
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Free expression, perhaps, but “information”? “Democratization”? German hate groups also groove to pop music, and supporters of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russia’s hard-line nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (which is anything but liberal democratic), established “Zhirinovsky’s Rock Store” for “hard-rock fans who have taken up the cause of Russian nationalism.”
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