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Spaces of autonomy and polarization: toward a theory of the globalization of economic and political cultures characteristic of American journalism

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Spaces of autonomy and polarization: toward a theory of the globalization of economic and political cultures characteristic of American journalism

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Spaces of Autonomy and Polarization:
Toward a Theory of the Globalization of Economic and Political Cultures Characteristic of
American Journalism

by

Mark Hannah

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of
The University of Southern California Graduate School
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Communication

The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

University of Southern California

December 2016

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Table of Contents

Chapter One: Toward a Theory of the Globalization of News Cultures …………………............2
Research Question & Scope…………………………………………………...….……… 3
A Note on Related Research Traditions………………………………………..…..….…10
Persisting & Resisting Journalism Cultures: from Print to Broadcast to the Internet.......15
Methodology…………………………………………………………………..…………17
Plan for the Dissertation………………………………………………………........…… 21
Charting the Spaces of Autonomy and Polarization ……..……………….………..........24
A Note on Public Media……………………………………………………............…....35

Chapter Two: The Spirit of Inquiry & Espionage – The Cultural Origins of the U.S. Media......37

Chapter Three: Free Flow vs. Fair Flow – The NWICO Debates Revisited…………….............53
The MacBride Report and the American Response…………………………………......57
A Cultural Analysis of the NWICO Debates……………………………………............66

Chapter Four: Czech Republic -- “Polarized Pluralism” Comes to Eastern Europe………….... 79
Post-Communist Transitions in CEE……………………………………………….........80
A Brief Cultural History of the Czech Media…………………………………………... 90
Political Marketing as an Autonomous & Polarizing Practice …………………...........100

Chapter Five: The Commercial Press with Chinese Characteristics...........................................113
Waiting Out the Barbarians: Chinese Resistance to Foreign Forces……………….......114
The Case of Southern Weekly…………….……………………………………................120
Guanxi: Networked Connections in a Professionalizing and Democratizing Press........128
“Public Opinion Channeling” - Openly Monitoring in a Closed Society…………........133
The Cycle of Economic and Cultural Liberalization Within the Chinese Media……....136
The Dawn of Chinese Media Politics………………………………………………......144

Chapter Six: Hybridizing the “Holy Space” in Cuba……………………………………...........150
A History or Transculturality Within Cuban Media………………………………........153
The “Revolutionary Identity” of the Cuban Media Amid Late Communism..................164
The Coming Battle of Ideas.............................................................................................177

Epilogue: Diplomacy by the Heat of the Fire We Didn’t Light…………………………..........184

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………....194

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For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the
storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the
conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the
hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be
denounced.
-Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist and publisher of The North Star

Chapter One: Toward a Theory of the Globalization of News Cultures
This dissertation is an attempt to describe and interpret the way in which specific facets
of the economic and political cultures characteristic of the U.S. press are currently manifesting
on a global scale. The “economic and political culture characteristic of the U.S. press” are broad
topics and their application to “a global scale” suggests a vast scope. This might seem like an
immodest endeavor for a doctoral thesis. As Arjun Appadurai wrote, in an introduction to one of
his books which tackled a global theme, “any book about globalization is a mild exercise in
megalomania, especially when it is produced in the relatively privileged circumstances of the
American research university” (1996, 18). Besides concerns over the perceived hubris of the
researcher, a dissertation is only successful if it (1) contributes new and useful knowledge to the
discipline and (2) provides a platform for an ongoing research program for a junior scholar.
Could a topic as broad as this accomplish both? On the first point, I am hopeful the observations
from my field work – or even new theoretical notions to which they gave rise – might contribute
in some small way to future scholarly conversations. This dissertation is a work of theory
building rather than hypothesis testing. As such, I hope this thesis represents the development of
preliminary ideas which, however tentative, contribute to an analytically useful theory about the
level at which certain media cultures are “going global.” On the second point, of providing a
platform for ongoing research, I anticipate this dissertation topic will set my research on a
trajectory which veers from the general toward the specific. It is imaginable that, over the next
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several years, I will further develop, apply, test, elaborate, and revise this theory of the press. I
appreciate this is unconventional and that many scholars begin their academic careers with a
relatively narrow research question, expanding it over time. I am grateful my dissertation
committee has approved the broad disciplinary and geographic scope of this project and am
hopeful this work product, which their trust has enabled, is a credit to them.

The Research Question & Scope
The research question at the center of this dissertation is:
In the current moment, how do the the economic cultures of production and
political cultures of consumption of news media in various countries share certain
distinguishing traits of the culture of the U.S. media?

Breaking this question into its component parts, the reference to the “current moment” is
meant to emphasize that my research is exploring a specific moment in time and seeks neither to
make an etiological argument nor a forecast of future trends. Still, an historical perspective is
important even if the work doesn’t take an historical methodological approach, since an
accounting of the “culture of the U.S. media” would be insufficient without understanding this
culture’s heritage and historical context. The next two chapters provide that context.
This research question implicitly conceives of communication as a networked and active
process. Thus, it contains an emphasis on both production and consumption within news media.
Communication is not a one-way process and this is as true of mediated communication as it is
of interpersonal communication. Often, a narrow focus on production (e.g., some political
economy research) is predicated on assumptions about how audiences respond to media content
and institutions. Similarly, analyses of audience reception (e.g., some media effects research)
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sometimes neglect the cultural and economic conditions of media production. By considering
both the messengers and the recipients – and, indeed, the way these categories are becoming less
distinct amid the proliferation of user-generated media online – this research is designed to take a
more holistic approach.
It is important to establish some definitions at the outset of this project. By “economic
cultures” and “political cultures,” I mean the sets of beliefs, attitudes and values shared by a
group of individuals that undergird, respectively, economic and political behavior. The objects
of my analysis are thus the beliefs and values possessed by news media producers (e.g.,
journalists, editors) and some consumers (i.e., audience members). Based upon the relevant
academic literature and discussions with key informants, I believe I’m beginning to see different
patterns related to the commercialization of media cultures in different parts of the world, but I
recognize the empirical basis of this work needs to be strengthened before a more definitive
theory can confidently be postulated.
There are significant methodological shortcomings to my field research and attentive
readers would be justified in arguing that the observations from my field research in specific
national contexts are not necessarily generalizable. Moreover, it is impracticable to sketch or
circumscribe something as intangible and slippery as an “economic culture” or “political culture”
with real precision. But scholarship can not justifiably evade topics simply because those topics
are elusive. Using more immersive field methods than mine, other scholars have explored
specific newsroom cultures. And using advanced techniques of public opinion polling, political
communication researchers have more thoroughly explicated political attitudes and beliefs across
different national contexts. My methods, by comparison, are more heterodox and, admittedly,
less systematic. Their limitations are discussed more extensively in the section, “Methodology,”
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later in this chapter. It suffices to note here that I conducted interviews with comparatively few
informants within the three countries during relatively brief research trips. My interviewees
represent a convenience sample which was undoubtedly skewed by language barriers,
connectedness to potential introducers and various psychological variables (e.g., willingness to
speak candidly with a researcher from a Western university). Put candidly, I was limited to
interviewing people who had some English language proficiency (and this likely over-
represented the number of interviewees who had a high level of education and/or cosmopolitan
outlook), who were willing and able to speak with me, and who were recommended to me, based
upon my research interests, by people I knew in their own government, in an international non-
governmental organization or in an American news network (and this level of connectedness is
liable to oversample news producers who had achieved a level and quality of reputation among
people within my own scholarly and professional networks). The sampling of news “consumers”
is arguably even less representative, given the broad population which qualifies for this
categorization. While my interviews with these news audiences were semi-structured, my
sampling was likely skewed toward individuals who were bound to be in locations where
Western visitors were likely to travel (e.g., downtown areas of major cities, restaurants, cafes,
etc.). If this dissertation were a work of hypothesis-testing rather than of theory building, one
which yielded concrete claims rather than informed speculation, a higher level of methodological
sophistication and more empirical data would be called for.
Also, I have referred broadly to the “news media.” The contours of the news media are,
of course, in constant flux. Although much of the focus of my interviews relates to traditional
media institutions, I conceive of the news media broadly and, in developing the theoretical ideas
herein, I consciously attempt to incorporate and account for the work of bloggers, online video
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journalists and other producers of journalism content. Here, the concept of “networked
journalism” is helpful in understanding the way in which journalistic practice is no longer
segregated into rigid hierarchies, and a variety of individuals and groups are active in
contemporary processes of developing sources, authoring commentaries and publishing feedback
(Van Der Haak, Parks & Castells 2012). Because of the need for conceptual cohesion, and
because theories such as that of networked journalism seem to warrant it, much of the analysis
within my case studies will fold these different types of journalism into an analysis of the culture
of a country’s “news media,” writ large. Still, given the ways in which new media technologies
are uniquely enabling, for example, liberal practices by some citizens and illiberal practices by
some states, these technologies deserve their own explication and discussion of their situatedness
within an historical process of technological transformations. For that discussion, please turn to
the section, later in this chapter, “Persisting & Resisting Journalism Cultures: from Print to
Broadcast to the Internet.”
In the following chapter, I propose there are two cultural traits which, at its inception,
distinguished the U.S. media system from most every other nation’s: its dual spirits of economic
and political independence from the state. To be sure, the U.S. media have substantially
benefited from subsidies furnished by the state (from early partnerships with the post office to
the licensing of public airwaves to private broadcasters). And it is true this culture of an
independent – or “free” – press has its intellectual roots not in the United States but in ideas
which gained currency throughout continental Europe during the Enlightenment. Perhaps
through nothing more than historical happenstance, the U.S. press was the first major media
system which arose as these ideas gained favor within the West. The American Revolution,
which would eventually codify the culture of the free press in the First Amendment of the U.S.
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Constitution, would likely never have garnered popular support without the mass indignation
which early printers and pamphleteers helped provoke. So it was a cultural revolution before it
was a political or military one. Until that moment, the press, as an instrument of widespread
public education (and amusement), was deemed too important to be left in the hands of private
individuals. Since then, at least in liberal democracies, it has been deemed too important not to
be left in those hands.
The crux of this idea is expressed in several phrases that I use interchangeably throughout
my analysis, including the “commercial culture of the press,” the “culture of the commercial
press,” “the culture of the market-oriented press,” etc. I treat these phrases as mostly
synonymous (varying them for emphasis) and I use the term “commercial” for its broader and
more classical connotation: namely, as a descriptor of media that are sensitive to market
pressures and incentives. This includes any media which are dependent upon revenue from sales,
subscriptions, advertising or any other non-governmental sources of patronage and sponsorship.
This is a deliberately inclusive definition, and isn’t meant to obscure the fact that, especially for
the past 120 years or so, American media have been overwhelmingly sustained by commercial
advertisers. Some scholars, as I discuss in the next section, “A Note on Related Research
Traditions,” demonstrate how this reliance on advertising revenue created a materialistic
consumer culture
1
and, accordingly, some academic traditions treat “commercial” news as
exclusive to the domain of popular or “low” culture. I depart from this tradition and this
departure can be seen as a matter of degree. Whereas some scholars refer to “commercial”
journalism as that in which profit motives outweigh and degrade any professional devotion to

1
It could be argued, conversely, that the mass production of consumer goods brought about by the Industrial
Revolution helped propel a consumer culture and this consumer culture contributed to – more than it was produced
by – commercial advertising. I suspect the relationship was cyclical but, without a clear consensus among empirical
accounts and without a need to establish causal precedence for the purpose of my research question, I abstain from
this debate.
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social responsibility, my definition includes any journalism, from New Yorker features to
National Enquirer exposés to most online journalism, which concerns itself with attracting an
audience in order to generate the revenue necessary to sustain and perpetuate itself.
2

Finally, when discussing the global scope of culture, this dissertation sometimes refers to
“global media cultures” and others to a “media culture” that is global. This toggling back and
forth between the singular and plural treatment of culture is, for the most part, a matter of
magnification. On a macroscopic level, there is no unitary global culture –– despite the dark
prophecies that globalization will lead to a bland homogeneity on a planetary scale (e.g., Levitt
1983). Rather, there are several cultures that have gained a global reach, and many of the
vehicles through which culture is constructed are now global. Scott Lash and John Urry wrote,
even before the era of widespread Internet access, “it may be plausible to suggest that there is not
a global culture, but that there are a number of processes which are producing the globalization
of culture” (1994, 306). Yet these processes are global in scope and the hybridization of these
multiple cultures does, itself, constitute a global culture. This hybridization is one of the three
“levels” at which, according to Castells, “a global culture… can be observed” (2009, 118). The
other levels are a growing cosmopolitanism where, within a “small but influential minority of
people, there is the consciousness of a shared destiny of the planet we inhabit” and a “culture of
consumerism” in which the global proliferation of capitalism, enabled by a “culture of
commodification,” has supported market values around the world (Castells 2009, 118). To be
sure, there is variation between the degree to which different countries experience these global
cultures. But given the economically and culturally networked nature of the world in the present

2
In the United States today, even much of the public media could be considered as belonging to a commercial
culture. As public funding from federal and state budgets has decreased in recent years, the majority of revenue now
comes from private individuals, corporate underwriters and mission-driven foundation sources (Ledbetter 1998). My
discussions with producers of public media within the United States reveal that these professionals are keenly
attentive to quantitative indicators of their “success,” such as their “market share.”
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moment, cultures of consumerism and commodification are inescapable for even those countries
that consciously attempt to resist them. Castells makes this clear when writing about the
integration of the global economy (and the same can be observed of economic culture):

“for the first time in history, the whole planet is capitalist or dependent on its connection
to global capitalist networks...the new economy is/will be predicated on a surge in
productivity growth resulting from the ability to use new information technology in
powering a knowledge-based production system.” (1996, 160-161).

Though there is no overarching global culture to which the world’s variegated beliefs,
customs, tastes and values have all submitted, there are “levels” of broader cultures (i.e.,
hybridization, cosmopolitanism and consumerism) which are also, themselves, cultures. Each of
these, individually, is then a global culture. It is in this vein that I offer a culture of the U.S. press
as both a global culture and a level at which various local, national and global cultures are
being informed. And yet the empirical portions of this dissertation are limited to three cases
which, while geographically diverse, all share a particular political and economic legacy (i.e.,
that of communism and socialism, respectively) which might limit the applicability of my
arguments. Still, this research attempts to situate itself within, and contribute to, the broader
scholarly conversations related to the globalization of culture, and it is not necessary the trends I
begin to describe from my case studies are limited to post-communist contexts. Karl Marx
argued that, “through the rapid improvements of all instruments of production” and “the
immensely facilitated means of communication,” capitalism “creates a world after its own
image” (Marx & Engels 1848). Marx’s theory was concerned with material rather than symbolic
10
goods. It is a high profile example of “economic determinism” because it anticipates that
economic conditions will spur social affinities (such as class identity) and political behavior
(such as revolution).
3
My research is rooted in a tradition that deviates from economic
determinism and rather, as mentioned, sees culture as a compelling force. If I might be so bold as
to offer a corrective to Marx, it might not be capitalism, along with its “immensely facilitated
means of communication,” which is creating a world “after its own image.” More precisely, and
this is the thrust of my argument and the key theoretical idea which has emerged from my
research: the new, global economic cultures of the news media (increasingly commercialized and
professionalized as they are) might just be remaking the world (or at least national political
cultures – pluralistic, internally polarized and nationalistic as they are) in their image.

A Note on Related Research Traditions
In recent decades, scholars have vigorously debated the role of U.S. culture in the
globalization of journalism. Some argue that news organizations’ international expansion and
consolidation represent macroeconomic activity that is typical of, or beneficial to, U.S.-based
multinational corporations. Others suggest international trade agreements thwart countries which

3
It is often remarked that the primary blind spot of Marx’s theory was its failure to anticipate that, when
commodities were so inexpensively produced and acquired, the working class would also become a “consumer
class” and a “leisure class” and thus would have a positive stake in the success of the capitalist economy. I’d also
add that he failed to see the potency of national cultures which valued capitalist enterprise as part of a shared
worldview (unlike his compatriot Max Weber who, half a century later, would incisively show how a “Protestant
ethic” infused a “spirit” of capitalism, and popularized an economic model even among people who didn’t
materially benefit from it). Weber, unlike Marx, saw how cultural attitudes and affinities could override economic
interests. Neo-Marxists are tripped up in a similar way. In the Atlantic article on which his book Jihad vs. McWorld
was based, political scientist Benjamin Barber writes of two opposing forces within “economic globalization”: that
of tribalism and of globalism, “the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets” (1992).
While this variation upon a “clash of civilizations” theme is popular and provocative fare, Barber fails to anticipate
how contemporary tribalism and parochial hatreds would exploit globalism’s universalizing markets (thus
complementing and not competing with one another). One need only consider how ISIL recruits jihadi fighters
internationally on facebook using professionally produced promotional videos (and reportedly sells its oil on a
global black market) to appreciate how Jihad is operating along the cultural logic of McWorld, and how people
whose cultures dramatically diverge in many other ways can share a common economic culture.
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seek to protect their cultural heritage against the incursion of American cultural commodities like
Hollywood movies and commercial television networks (Miller et. al. 2004; Schiller 1975).
Both of these theses fit within a “cultural imperialism” perspective, which has been accompanied
by a rich literature in the political economy of news organizations. By documenting how media
companies relentlessly pursue profits, apparently undermining the kind of democratic
participation that journalism is supposed to enable, this political economy research counters
earlier theories of a libertarian press which see media organizations’ “financial independence”
from the state as a “necessary correlate” to their ability to faithfully inform the public (Siebert,
Peterson & Schramm 1956, 51). Each of these vibrant discussions has generated a significant
amount of scholarship within our discipline.
Robert McChesney offers passionate and knowledgeable critiques of the commercial
media, identifying “serious antidemocratic tendencies,” and arguing that a decline in hard news,
the overbearing influence of advertising interests, and a concentration of media ownership are
symptoms of a broader crisis within commercial journalism (2008, 68). McChesney links his
own work to a “radical tradition of U.S. journalism criticism [which] has roots that reach back to
the origins of the modern commercial media system in the late nineteenth century” (2008, 70).
This criticism generally takes aim not at the shortcomings of individual actors, but at commercial
structures and “systems” of media production. Will Irwin provided an early example of this
radical media criticism when, in a famous 1911 essay entitled, “The Advertising Influence,” he
described the deployment of the phrase “the system” to describe the specialization and “complex
organization of modern society.” Irwin argued “the main handicap on American journalism in its
search for truth, in its presentation of that truth to its times, is precisely such a system” (1911,
121). Irwin observed how the American newspapers of his era shifted from a revenue structure
12
which was largely subscription-based to one which was largely advertisement-based. The
changing economic arrangements and imperatives, according to his analysis, made the
newspapers more sensitive to their advertisers’ interests than to their subscribers’ interests. It’s a
compelling and prescient analysis even if Irwin doesn’t explicitly account for the possibility that,
at least at the time of his writing, a large circulation might be among advertisers’ primary
interests.
Ben Bagdikian argues that the interests of economically and politically powerful are more
attentively served by the so-called adversarial press, and that this is readily apparent from the
content of the commercial media. He writes, “The imbalance between issues important to
corporate hierarchies and those most urgent to the population at large is obscured by the
neutralist tone of modern news” (2004, 25). This observation is echoed by McChesney, who
observes that “journalism today has much more in common with the elites it supposedly
regulates than with the public on whose behalf it supposedly speaks” (2008, 71). These ideas are
consistent with the “propaganda model” put forward by Herman and Chomsky to show how
corporate media organizations are complicit with the prevailing interests of the politically
powerful (1988).
While many of these scholars posit American media companies have a hegemonic
international influence, others claim the influence of American media is dwindling. Jeremy
Tunstall systematically demonstrates how audiences throughout the world are primarily
interested in local and national news, supporting the dominance of these national media products
in the face of American imports. According to Tunstall, “1990…marked a declining trend in
American news leadership” as the “Associated Press lost the world news lead to Europe’s
Reuters, AFP, EFE, and DPA” and “CNN increasingly lost its 24-hour all-news leadership to
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national news channels in Europe and elsewhere” (2008, 452). Media content throughout the
world is filtered through the lens of local and national political debates, cultural tastes and lived
realities, which has led to the rise of non-U.S. news agencies, the decline of American
dominance on the Internet, and the emergence of non-U.S. publishers who produce history and
politics textbooks containing various (i.e. not just Western) national perspectives.
These scholars have been influential, and their analyses are no doubt intelligent and
perceptive. Yet, from the vantage point of my research, this scholarship raises as many questions
as it answers, and adequately addressing each of these questions would divert me from my own
research question. For example, is it accurate to claim American media is in “decline” and use
the comparative ascension of other national and local media as supportive evidence? Can the
American media’s influence be measured simply by calculating the transnational market shares
of its content or, from a geopolitical or cultural perspective, is its influence more immaterial and
unquantifiable? When Bagdikian observes an imbalance between issues important to “corporate
hierarchies” and those “most urgent to the population at large,” to which issues is he referring
specifically (and at what stage are the business interests of citizens categorized as interests of
corporate hierarchies rather than the population at large)? When McChesney claims journalism
has more in common with elites than with the public, it’s unclear what journalism is supposed to
have in common with the public. Should journalists forego college education so they might
replicate the experience (i.e., living and working without a college degree) with broad segments
of the public on whose behalf they speak, and to avoid a common experience with elites? Should
a criminal record be a necessary credential for a crime reporter, equipping that reporter with a
special identification with people who are accused of committing crimes? Or might this reporter
understand and appreciate the rationale for criminal justice reform without having been subjected
14
to the criminal justice system? The exclusion of “elites” from the category of “the public”
appears to be underlay by ideological commitments rather than dispassionate classification.
Although more extensive engagement with this scholarship could, in the future, be
productive in helping disparate research traditions understand (and contribute to) one another, it
suffices for this section to note that these structuralist and political economy analyses offer
elucidating alternatives to readers who might be interested in the topics – but not satisfied by the
analytical approaches – of my research. After all, although this dissertation has been generally
informed by this influential scholarship, and it shares with it a broad concern over the
relationship between news media institutions and democratic society, it does not intend to
meaningfully build upon, contribute to, or attempt to refute this work. That is because this
dissertation does not examine culture through the lens, or as a straightforward consequence, of
economic hierarchies, political power dynamics or technological change. Rather, a core premise
of this research is that culture – i.e., the shared beliefs and values of a given population – is itself
determinative and generative. This outlook follows both Tomlinson, who offers a view of culture
as an existentially significant process of meaning construction (1999), and Castells, who
observes how, in an era marked by global flows of information and ideas, “cultures resist and
evolve on their own” (2009, 121). In other words, the shared beliefs and values which constitute
culture are largely autonomous and dynamic. So although shared beliefs and values might be
influenced by social affinities (e.g., membership in a certain race, religion or generation) or
economic affinities (e.g., membership in a certain class), they are not preordained by these
affinities. It is conceivable, indeed it is a point of departure for my research, that these social and
economic affinities are at least as likely to be shaped by individuals’ shared beliefs and values as
they are to shape them.
15

Persisting & Resisting Journalism Cultures: from Print to Broadcast to the Internet
I mention above that the contours of the news media are in constant flux. This is a stark
reality to those of us who have lived through the widespread penetration of Internet access, the
popular use of email and the ever increasing influence of social networking sites upon the news
environment. The term “the press,” which once narrowly described the people who produced
news using an actual printing press, has now become shorthand for any institutions or individuals
who gather and report news regardless of medium. Each successive media technology has carried
with it sets of proficiency requirements, professional practices and reporting affordances. A
prerecorded broadcast news interview is likely to include nonverbal information – e.g., facial
features and expressions or sartorial choices – which would not necessarily be included in a
newspaper article about the same interview. The consumption of a newspaper article is likely to
be enabled by traits within its readership – e.g., sustained and undivided attention and a high
degree of literacy – which are not always taken for granted with a television news audience. The
Internet privileges certain types of information which are “shareable” – e.g., humorous or
provocative content – and editors of online publication go to great lengths to ensure their
headlines don’t merely reflect the article content, but also reflect related search terms which are
commonly queried in popular search engines.
Even before the era of broadband Internet access, Neil Postman described a
“technocracy” as a society in which “tools play a central role in the thought world of culture…
[and] the social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that
development” (1992, 28). Postman’s thesis presaged the theory of mediatization, which posits
how social and political interactions are governed by the formats, timelines and capabilities of
16
modern media (and which is introduced more fully in the next chapter). Postman, the progenitor
of the media ecology tradition, was making observations about media broadly, but his
contradistinction between print (as emphasizing “logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity,
detachment, and discipline”) and television (as emphasizing “imagery, narrative, presentness,
simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response”) has implications
for the comparative technological conditions under which news cultures emerge (1992, 16). The
details of Postman’s analysis are certainly open to critique, but his broader conceit – that
technologies are not neutral, and certain information and communication technologies enable
certain types of content and encourage certain types of consumption behavior – must be
acknowledged at the beginning of this dissertation.
A key premise of my dissertation is that certain cultural traits characteristic of the U.S.
commercial press have persisted throughout periods of rapid technological change. This
assumption is underscored by the observation that we often understand new communication
technologies in relation to the media which preceded them (e.g., a television as a “radio with
pictures” or blogging as a version of “moveable type”). The collective beliefs and values which
motivate journalism have been updated for, and have adapted to, new technology, but there is
little evidence to suggest they have fundamentally transformed as a result of that technology.
Professional journalism is still being created, albeit in more variegated ways. It might be true that
different technologies constrain cultural production by privileging certain types of content over
others, but the ultimate effect of successive technological innovation is an extension of our
cultural capacities rather than a contraction. Manuel Castells writes of the shift from
industrialism to informationalism by observing “what has changed is not the kind of activities
humankind is engaged in, but its technological ability to use as a direct productive force what
17
distinguishes our species as a biological oddity: its superior capacity to process symbols” (1996,
100). Entire dissertations have been written on the specific cultural influences of various media
technologies from the telegraph to the smartphone, and from the advent of the pictorial press to
the emergence of satellite television and radio. And reconciling the way in which journalism
cultures have successively accommodated and resisted – and been accommodated by and resisted
by – these technologies is well outside of the scope of the present study. The important point is
that a commercial culture has relentlessly endured through various phases of technological
development within the U.S. press. This is a theme discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
But part of the persistence of this culture can be understood through the recognition of
technological change within the media not as a series of revolutions, but as the continuous
evolution of a network of overlapping and intersecting platforms, institutions and individuals.

Methodology
Gaston Bachelard once wrote, “One can study only what one has first dreamed about.
Science is formed rather on a reverie than on an experiment” (1938, 22). The more interesting
question isn’t whether imagination is more important than knowledge, as Albert Einstein once
quipped, but is about the ways in which these two human faculties reciprocally inspire and
inform one another. That is an eternal question, and one which this thesis is inadequate to
address. But, as if drawn to “study… what one has first dreamed about,” my research question
was informed by a looser sense of wonderment from watching locally produced television news
during professional trips to Bucharest and Beirut, and a personal trip to Paris. Glimpsing the
diversity of news content, the partisanship of political reporting and the slick production
qualities, I began to ponder the cultural change which might contribute to, and occur amid, the
18
commercialization of national and transnational media networks. Bachelard was writing about
the symbolic relationship between fire and human knowledge in the tradition of the Prometheus
myth and, indeed, synthesizing my own research with empirical and theoretical research of
others, I began to wonder whether fire might stand in as a critical metaphor for both the culture
of the commercial press and its ideal subject given, respectively,its alternately illuminative
(informative) and spectacular (sensational) nature. As certain aspects of the commercial, market-
driven culture of the U.S. media are becoming more prevalent around the world, I began to
suspect the production of journalism is similar (in both creative and destructive ways) to our
species’ instrumentalization of fire.
Of course I appreciate this critical metaphor might run the risk of seeming cliché. One
need not be armed with empirical data or sophisticated communication theories to comment how
a certain cable news report “sheds more heat than light” or a certain investigative report is “holds
a lantern up in the dark.” The analytical and interpretive value of such a metaphor is found not in
the observation of distinct metaphorical attributes – such as light and heat – but in the accounting
of the ways in which these attributes are expressed, inherited and, ultimately, whether they are
attributes which are well suited for democratic practices.
4
This was articulated well by Levi-
Strauss, who wrote in the first chapter of his book, The Raw and the Cooked, “certain categorical
opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things… can serve a
people as conceptual tools for the formation of abstract notions and for combining these into
propositions” (1970).
Developed and explained throughout the dissertation is an inchoate theory of the
globalization of certain cultures of the U.S. press, which arises from more than casual

4
These process are the subject of the section “Charting the Spaces of Autonomy and Polarization” later in this
chapter.
19
observations and dreamy, intellectual speculation. It arises from a three-pronged qualitative
methodology, which is comprised of: (1) a review of the extant academic literature related to
media and globalization, including research by communication scholars, sociologists, and
political scientists, (2) an investigation of the news cultures within three national contexts (Czech
Republic, China and Cuba), including semi-structured in-depth interviews of journalists, editors,
government officials, and journalism scholars – as well as less formal interviews with news
consumers – from these three countries, and (3) comparative analyses of media coverage of
politically charged events within each of the three countries studied. The three national cases
were chosen because each is in a different stage of transition from socialist economies and
centralized media cultures to more market-oriented economies and more commercial media
cultures. Although the theoretical ideas to which these cases give rise might be able to contribute
to an understanding of patterns within the globalization of culture broadly, these cases were
selected to help clarify the changing economic and political cultures of media which accompany
or propel the progression from statist to capitalist economies.
At first glance, my research method could be critiqued as “journalistic.” However,
whereas much journalism is motivated by the search to develop and convey news stories which
strive for narrative consistency and coherence, my research is motivated by an attempt to
recognize patterns of – and similarities between – various cultures and seeks analytical rigor
rather than narrative cogency. Journalists and social scientists both use interviews as an
exploratory method, and carefully consider issues associated with this method (such as source
credibility or representativeness). My interviews differ from those of most journalists because
they are designed not to extract information which could be used instrumentally, but to evoke the
thoughts, attitudes and opinions of the interviewees which are, themselves, data points for my
20
research. Put otherwise, my informants’ responses represent both my research subjects and my
research objects. They are therefore contextualized and interpreted as part of my analysis and not
simply and uncritically “cited” or “quoted” in the service of a story being reported (or, in my
case, a theory being developed).
To reiterate some of the primary limitations of this methodological approach, my field
work was limited to short research visits in each country. Although I attempt to mitigate this
limitation through extensive preparation (including background research on a country’s media
culture, and introductions and interview scheduling before the visits), my observations are
necessarily less comprehensive and tightly focused than those of the media sociologist who, for
example, conducts a field study of a newsroom over the course of many months or years.
Moreover, my lack of foreign language fluency limited both the sampling of my informants and
interviewees and the extent of my analysis of foreign language media content. Of course, new
technological tools can provide a researcher with assistance in translating text-based media
online. But the use of these automated services doesn’t (yet) approximate the quality of
translation, and the fuller understanding of cultural and connotative nuance, which is achieved
only with foreign language fluency.
Throughout the next several pages, my theoretical ideas are sketched, and their primary
debts to other scholars are disclosed. Despite the fact that these ideas are presented at the
beginning of this dissertation, it is important to emphasize they represent the culmination of, not
the point of departure for, the research contained in the remaining chapters. Much valuable
scholarship begins with a theory and proceeds to test or apply or elaborate it in new ways.
However, this work has been, as mentioned, fundamentally a process of theory-building. While a
vague intellectual hunch may have informed my research question and motivated my research,
21
this preliminary theory represents the synthesis of my work to date. The ideas outlined below
roughly illustrate and describe the processes through which the commercial culture of the press
operates as I’ve come to understand it.

Plan for the Dissertation
The primary speculation which emerges from this dissertation is that the political and
economic cultures characteristic of the U.S. press – specifically, commercialization,
professionalism, pluralism, polarization, and a nationalist-cosmopolitan dualism – have become
globally prevalent. This prevalence presents complex new topics for debates over media policy
and complex new challenges for makers of foreign policy. If tested and supported by future
empirical research, the theoretical ideas contained in this dissertation have implications for the
kind of news content and journalistic practices – both liberal and illiberal, democratic and
antidemocratic – these cultures spur. This content and these practices, in turn, might further
contribute to global media cultures in specific and cyclical ways.
A working model for the globalization of the commercial culture of the U.S. press is
presented in the next section of this introductory chapter. This model is based upon the research
contained in the subsequent chapters of this dissertation. It follows from a synthesis and
interpretation of my field notes and of the literature on globalization and culture, journalism
studies, media sociology and comparative journalism. However, the division of the culture of the
commercial media into the two metaphorical categories of “light” and “heat” is a typology that
has both an a priori and an a posteriori relationship to my research. It represents broad
conceptual categories which, to paraphrase Giddens, both structure and are structured by my
inquiry.
22
In the chapter two, I look back back upon the philosophical ideas which were influential
during, and formative for, the early development of the American republic in an attempt to
understand and analyze the origins of what is now regarded as a globally influential commercial
media culture.
Chapter three examines a recent historical case in which the culture of the Western,
commercial model of the press and the culture of a socialist, public interest model of the press
came into stark contrast. Specifically, this case consists of the international debates over the
“New World Information and Communications Order” (NWICO) which were hosted by the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) during the 1970s
and 1980s. These debates provided the political and economic rationales for and against the
commercial press and, more important for the purpose of this cultural analysis, they clarify the
various and competing beliefs, values and assumptions which animate ongoing debates. The
following three chapters contend with case studies involving national media systems which
recently transitioned, or are currently in a stage of transition, from the socialist, public interest
model of the press, and so a contemporary reflection upon the NWICO debates is bound to help
examine the stakes, and values at the root, of current debates over the globalization of media and
information industries.
Chapter four turns to an analysis of the Czech media, which underwent privatization in
the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. After analyzing broader patterns of post-communist
media transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), I put forward a brief cultural history of
the Czech media and then analyze a contemporary example of “political marketing” in the Czech
Republic. As political parties expand their use of public opinion polls and celebrity
23
endorsements, this chapter demonstrates how the commercial media culture has manifested and
evolved within this national context in the decades following the Soviet occupation.
Chinese journalism has been commercializing, in its fashion, over the past several
decades. While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still maintains an ownership stake in all
news organizations within China, the reduction of state subsidies and rise in commercial
advertising have coincided with new economic and political cultures within Chinese newsrooms.
This is the focus of chapter five. I provide a research note on the formidable challenge of
providing historical context in a country with such an interminable history before presenting a
study on a case in which one of China’s more commercial newspapers recently protested
government censorship. The chapter proceeds into a broader discussion of how a monitory
culture has emerged in an otherwise closed society and concludes with a modeling of economic
and cultural liberalization within the Chinese media and an analysis of the prospects for media
politics there.
Chapter six reflects my research on the Cuban media, including field work in Havana a
year before the Obama administration announcement that diplomatic relations between the U.S.
and Cuba would be normalizing. Cuba has a rich history of transnational cultural influences and
this is introduced and discussed before turning to the way in which the Cuban Revolution, in the
middle of the twentieth century, used some of the commercial media tactics it would later
prohibit to generate popular support. The chapter explains how Cuba is attempting to maintain a
revolutionary national identity amid the changing economic and technological culture of the
Cuban press, and the contradictions inherent in this effort.
Finally, in the epilogue, I discuss the applications of this research to foreign policy
making and international relations.
24

Charting the Spaces of Autonomy and Polarization
The understanding of the spread of the cultures of the commercial press which emerges in
the following pages might be called a theory of the “incandescent press.” Incandescence is the
process of producing light through the generation of heat. More colloquially, “incandescent” is a
synonym for “passionate.” In a metaphorical sense, the kind of commercial journalism that has
gained a global presence in the twenty-first century alternately radiates heat and sheds light and,
as I illustrate below, these can be concomitant and perpetual processes. Two of the most notable
attributes of the proliferating market-oriented media culture are certain “spaces of autonomy”
which media producers enjoy (e.g., professional journalists through their heightened economic
influence and social status, and amateur journalists largely through their use of digital tools of
production and distribution) and “spaces of polarization” which media audiences increasingly
inhabit (e.g., as the creation of, and competition for salience among, market niches magnifies
tribal or provincial identities or partisan affiliations even while they ostensibly represent new
forms of pluralism). These dual processes are depicted visually in Figure 1 here:

25

Let us begin with the way in which the culture of the commercial press promotes
autonomy and monitory, transparency-seeking practices within the journalism field. Each of
these processes, and the original and extant research on which they are based, will be described
in more detail throughout the dissertation and so these paragraphs are intended as an interpretive
summary. The beginning of this process can be understood through the way by which the
culture of mass market “print capitalism” produces a recognizable national identity, as Benedict
Anderson famously argued. According to Anderson, a nation is but “an imagined political
community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (1983, 6). A market-
oriented media culture molded a national consciousness in new ways, on a new scale, and at a
new pace. For Anderson, the development of nation-wide media markets facilitated shared
national identities. But lest anyone think this makes the case for economic determinism,
Anderson writes, “in themselves, market zones… do not create attachments. Who will willingly
die for Comecon or the EEC?” (1983, 53). Rather, the influence is rooted in the economic culture
Figure 1: Concomitant Processes of Autonomy and Polarization
26
of the “printer-journalist [which] was initially an essentially North American phenomenon”
(1983, 61). In his quest to reach readers, the printer-journalist “developed an alliance with the
post-master” and thereby “emerged as the key to North American communications and
community and intellectual life” who played “a decisive role” for providing “the framework for a
new consciousness” (1983, 61-65). Even if this new nationalism found its original expression in
the entrepreneurial economic culture of the American press
5
, it is not unique to the United States
and, as Anderson points out, every successful political revolution since the end of World War II
has defined itself in national terms. (More recently, the rise of radical Islamic transnational
movements, such as ISIL, are conspicuous exceptions to this pattern –– unless one considers the
call for a caliphate a demand not just for statehood but nationhood.)
Given that the market-oriented press constructs nationalist identities beyond the control
of the state, it’s no wonder, as Monroe Price points out, that one of the first things authoritarian
rulers do in order to “consolidate political power is to eliminate a competitive political press”
(1995, 38). Price builds upon Anderson’s conception of the culture of print capitalism to discuss
how more recent cultures of commercial television networks, in targeting transnational markets,
create a “vocabulary of images” that becomes “a language of non-loyalties, inherently subversive
of existing orders” (1995, 53-54). In this account, the proverbial marketplace of ideas has yielded
to a veritable “marketplace for loyalties.” These are cultural marketplaces where information is
currency, shared beliefs and affinities are variously forged and contested, and people are newly
able to identify with, compare themselves to, and make some sense of fellow citizens who would
otherwise remain perfect strangers.

5
this is a point upon which I expand in the next chapter.
27
At once, the culture of the commercial press forges a nationalist identity and facilitates a
cosmopolitan consciousness. This assertion might be accused of sidestepping an apparent
paradox: doesn’t a commitment to a globally inclusive society require a suppression of
nationalist loyalties and prejudices? Some of our most influential thinkers have been heralding a
“post-national” era,
6
unable to reconcile nationalism and internationalism, provincialism and
cosmopolitanism. Here I follow Craig Calhoun, who suggests “cosmopolitanism and nationalism
are mutually constitutive and to oppose them too sharply is misleading” (2007, 13). Other
scholars have empirically shown the diversity and vitality of national (and subnational) cultures
are sustainable even as the culture of the commercial media has catalyzed the global flow of
information and opened up new possibilities for cosmopolitan connection (Norris & Inglehart
2009). Yet, as mentioned, the growing cosmopolitan consciousness is most pronounced among a
“small but influential minority” of globally minded individuals. Ulrich Beck insists “a distinction
must be drawn between ‘global capitalists’ and ‘global citizens,’” but then quickly concedes that
“a plural world citizenship is soaring with the wind of global capital at its back” (2010, 228).
From my vantage as a student of communication, I would swap in “the global culture of a
commercial press” for Beck’s “global capital,” but his point is well made
7
nevertheless.
Nationalist identity and cosmopolitan consciousness do a similar thing: they connect
individuals (or smaller social unit such as families or towns) to larger social organizations within
which they have shared beliefs as well as shared goals. In other words, when we see ourselves as
part of a collective, we become aware of not only shared identities, but also of shared interests.

6
see Jurgen Habermas and the “post-national constellation,” Ulrich Beck’s “politics of post-nationalism” and
Kant’s “cosmopolitan condition,” which proposes an alternative between a world republic and a league of nations.
7
It’s well made in a secondary, meta- sense, given that it reached me in a compilation designed for, and marketed
to, a nonspecialist audience by a publishing enterprise (Polity) which was launched to make academic texts more
broadly intelligible and commercially attractive. The fact that Polity is a British publishing house whose sales and
distribution are managed by the New York-based Wiley and Sons is of little practical consequence to this reader
who purchased it on Amazon.com.
28
This joining together of identities and interests creates the very conditions for democratic
political action and populist activism. This isn’t to argue that democracy, as a form of
government, is spreading like wildfire across the globe and that authoritarian regimes will be
anachronistic anytime soon. And in fact, new evidence suggests some autocratic governments are
exploiting new, democratic international institutions to protect and promote their antidemocratic
policies (Diamond, Plattner & Walker 2016). But scholars have variously described how the
social practices within institutions are becoming more “reflexive” and responsive to new sources
of information (Giddens 1990), and how “a sense of our mutual interdependency combined with
the means for communicating across distance is producing new forms of cultural/political
alliance and solidarity” (Tomlinson 1999, 30). Sociologists have shown a clear link between the
kinds of democratization and populism to which the culture of the commercial press gives rise,
and recent research shows how popular social movements have been encouraged along by the
spread of democratic values (Tilly 2004). Informed by theories of a global public sphere
(Volkmer 2014) and of a network society (Castells 1996), subsequent chapters will show how
nationalism and cosmopolitanism are engendering democratic and populist activities in some
unexpected places and in unexpected and untidy ways.
8

One of the most interesting consequences of this democratic sentiment and populist
fervor is the rise of a culture of transparency. It is observable in the many open government
movements, and the worldwide proliferation of both international watchdog organizations and
freedom of information laws. The political scientist John Keane has described these as
instruments of a new style of “monitory democracy” which has taken “root within the domestic

8
In contemporary Russia, which is not included in the cases I explore in depth, democratic opposition to President
Putin has been rooted in a new nationalism which wants to “stop feeding the Caucasus.” This starkly diverges from
the “traditional expansionist nationalists,” including Putin, who once vowed to “die for the Caucasus” and the unity
of the Russian Federation (Popescu 2012, 49).
29
fields of government and civil society, as well as in cross border settings…” (2011, 212-23). The
commercial press is foremost among these monitory instruments, perpetually promising to pull
the curtain back on the politically and economically powerful, promoting open government
movements, partnering with watchdog groups, and profiting from freedom of information laws.
But monitory democracy did not simply appear out of nowhere. Michael Schudson attributes the
“rise of the right to know” to cultural sources, and a particular “structure of feeling”
9
that had
been building up throughout the middle of the twentieth century within the United States.
In Schudson’s research, I find the seeds of the idea that monitory journalism arose from
the culture of market-driven journalism, and the different cultural bonds and political concerns
which such journalism promotes. Schudson writes, “transparency-oriented regulations frequently
are market-oriented regulations, created in the belief that putting information in the hands of the
public will enable people to make informed choices that will lead to improved social outcomes”
(2015, 22). A luminous cycle is thereby established, in which the economic culture of the
commercial press engenders a political culture of transparency and monitory democracy that, in
turn, relies on and thus further stimulates the commercial economic culture of the press.
10

But there is another cycle to which the economic culture of the market-driven press gives
rise, a cycle might be characterized as generating heat more than light. This is similarly shown in
Figure 1.

9
Of course, Schudson attributes this phrase to its originator, British cultural theorist Raymond Williams.
10
Although the commercial press does appear to be emerging, to some extent, on a global scale, it is important to
acknowledge that there are culturally specific ways in which certain monitory processes take place and certain
taboos and spheres of privacy remain intact. Still, as long as powerful people and institutions have incentives to hide
information or jealously guard secrets, and as long as these incentives create societal problems associated with
information asymmetries and unaccountability, there will be a desire among some (of the people harmed by these
societal problems) to rectify these asymmetries. Some journalism scholars point out that a human desire for
information universally motivates the consumption of news (Shoemaker & Cohen 2006). Kwame Anthony Appiah
observes that “cultures produce a great deal of variety, but also much that is the same. Part of the reason for this is
that, in culture as in biology, our human environment presents similar problems; and societies, like natural selection,
often settle on the same solution because it is the best available” (2006: 96).

30
There was a maxim of twentieth century American journalism that there should be “a
wall” between the editorial staff and advertising sales people. This separation emerged to
insulate editors and journalists from the pressures of powerful interest groups and advertisers,
and was connected to a professional ideology that prizes objectivity and balance. However, if
one expands an analytical focus from the day-to-day business of news production to the broader
economic cultures in which this news is produced, it becomes clear that the market-oriented
culture informs the type of content that is created. An attentiveness to the tastes and preferences
of an audience fuels decisions about what type of news best attracts those audiences. Of course
this is a mutually constitutive and dialectical process: through their editorial decisions, news
organizations continuously shape the scope of their audience, and shape their audience’s tastes
and preferences at the same time they try to shape their content to that audience’s pre-existing
tastes and preferences. The point here is that the cultural logic of the commercial press is
characterized by attraction (rather than, say, promotion). This differs from that of state-owned
journalistic enterprises, in which news is developed as a public service or public utility and, thus,
its value is seen as largely independent of its popularity.
In the U.S., the commercial culture has informed content in various ways. In the early
days of the republic, printers and pamphleteers were determined to influence the political process
and advance their own ideas and interests. After all, as the cultural critic A.J. Liebling once
observed, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” (1960, 109). In
1720, when Benjamin Franklin’s brother James set out to publish the second newspaper in the
American colonies, his friends considered him foolhardy, given their appraisal that one
newspaper met the needs of the colonists. “But James, like so many American entrepreneurs who
followed him, plunged ahead nonetheless, driven not by shrewd calculation of ‘what America
31
needs’ but by what personal ambition and ego recommended and which local opportunities
seemed to beckon” (Schudson 2008, 28). As we’ll see in later chapters, the ambition and ego
that typified America’s early printer-journalists (and later its media barons) are on display
internationally today.
The politically driven commercial culture enabled a multiperspectival partisan news
environment in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But between 1870 and 1900, the news became
more advertising-centric as a rapid growth in the number of consumer goods with national
distribution provided media companies with a new base of revenue (Hamilton 2004, 40). The
emergence of “independent journalism,” in which some newspapers left behind political
patronage in favor of consumer advertising, was itself a commercial strategy designed to attract a
more ideologically diverse audience. And even those publishers who did retain a political
affiliation did so “as exercises in market segmentation” (Hamilton 2004, 47). In other words,
within the commercial press, even so-called objective news that seeks to provide information in
what it (and its audience) perceives as the public interest is inescapably a commercial product.
In a recent essay, Herbert Gans shifts away from talk of “tabloidization,” which he describes as a
“handy verbal weapon used by more educated people to disparage the culture of less educated
ones,” to an analysis of “popularization.” Gans notes the relatively recent integration of medical
and personal health stories into network television news as a kind of “audience incentive” which
even more august outlets develop to attract and retain audiences (Gans 2009, 17-24).
As content becomes more commercially attractive, the demand for news products
intensifies. With the economic culture of news production remaining market-oriented (i.e.,
revenue-seeking and entrepreneurial), news products proliferate to meet – and further stimulate –
this demand. Aside from the market-based motivations of publishers and producers (and the
32
deregulatory movements which enable those motivations), a second factor is responsible for this
proliferation: the increased opportunities for news production facilitated by new technologies. In
recent years, the Internet lowered the barriers to entry for would-be journalists and greatly
expanded the opportunities for publishing and publicizing news content. But before that, the
emergence of cable and satellite television, the telegraph and broadcast technology, and
moveable type all contributed successively to what the political scientist John Keane has called
the “communicative abundance” of the modern era (2013).
Amid communicative abundance, distinctions between “the media” and other institutions
are dissolved (2013, 23), “alternative forms of representation become attractive” and “unelected
representatives attract great media attention and public support” (2013, 57). Keane’s
observations bear a striking resemblance to the theories of mediatization (Livingstone 2009),
which broadly explain how modern institutions and shared beliefs are determined by the ways in
which modern experience is mediated.
11
The proliferation of the commercial culture of the press
has supported an abundance of news products and information throughout the world. However,
the fact that such information must fit within the available formats, professional customs and
cultural logics of the commercial media sometimes yields more sensation than insight, more heat
than light.
To recapitulate, the culture of market-oriented media gives rise to the commercialism of
news content which then, enabled by deregulatory and technological forces, leads to
communicative abundance and mediatization. Traditionally, this commercialization of content

11
In describing communicative abundance, Keane makes the following call, which I hope my dissertation, in its
heterodox/unorthodox way, answers: “it is tempting to interpret the new dynamics of communicative abundance
through terms inherited from our predecessors. The enticement should be resisted...What is needed are bold new
probes, fresh-minded perspectives, ‘wild’ concepts that enable different and meaningful ways of seeing things, the
democratic opportunities they offer and the counter-trends that have the potential to snuff out democratic politics.”
(2013, 21).
33
took the form of bundled content – newspapers and magazines bundled individual stories into
cohesive editions and television channels consisted of multiple programs designed and packaged
for their target audiences. Recently, digital distribution technologies (e.g., social networking sites
and Internet television) have enabled news producers to offer – and news consumers to circulate
– “unbundled” news stories and programs (Vanek Smith 2016). To some, this more atomistic
offering of news content offers more direct choice over news consumption because it allows
audience members to filter out content which (they believe/anticipate) won’t interest them. To
others, the reduction in opportunities to encounter information and ideas in a serendipitous way –
and not overly determined by pre-existing interests – closes down a tradition of “the commons”
upon which free speech is predicated (Sunstein 2009) and opens up opportunities for marketing
discrimination (Turow 2008).
The fourth phase in this cycle is the segmentation of markets and the corresponding
pluralism and polarization that arises within audiences. This is related to the unbundling
phenomenon. Markus Prior documents how “a proliferation of channels allows media outlets to
specialize their content to attract smaller, but well-defined audience segments, which advertisers
value because they can be efficiently targeted” (2007, 23). As with communicative abundance,
the rise of specialized content and the pursuit of audience “niches” is fundamentally driven by
(1) an economic culture that values intensive over extensive appeals and, to a lesser extent, (2)
by new media technologies which enable this pursuit (Turow 2008). Together, news
organizations which continuously seek to position themselves relative to their competitors – and
deepen their engagement with their target audiences – create a pluralistic media environment that
accounts for, and makes appeals to, people of diverse political perspectives, educational levels,
and social divisions. This might seem like a positive and democratic consequence of the media’s
34
commercial culture, and on some levels it is. But the quest for better delineated – even if slightly
smaller – target markets invites “partisan selective exposure” whereby audiences seek out news
that conforms with their preexisting worldviews. Scholars have shown how this process
simultaneously polarizes political beliefs while motivating democratic participation (Stroud
2011). These two phenomena, taken together, might seem like a recipe for fueling political
divisiveness. And indeed, recent social movements (e.g., Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
protests) and ultranationalist political movements (e.g., those which have generated support for
Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Nigel Farage in Britain and Donald Trump
in the United States) make sense in the context of partisan selective exposure. Whereas statist
media models draw upon Marxist ideas that “have placed an almost mystical value on ‘unity,’”
(Siebert, Peterson & Schramm 1956), proponents of a market-driven press often fail to anticipate
the adverse and unintended outcomes of its diversity.
In a global media environment, the diversity and divisiveness is not simply occurring
within nations but between them as well. The availability of foreign news sources to national
audiences can make cultural differences more visible even as they lead to mimicry within the
professional field of journalism. Editors at daily newspapers in a country like Argentina can and
do continuously keep an eye on the websites of major foreign newspapers like The New York
Times (Boczkowski 2009). In some cases, the attempt of commercial newspapers – from the
Wall Street Journal to Shanghai’s Liberation Daily – to deepen a connection with a nationwide
audience often yields narratives that starkly distinguish “us” and “them.” These storylines and
perspectives invigorate nationalism and patriotism in a way that is liable to spur more antipathy
than empathy, and complicate (and even mediatize) international relations.
35
It might seem counterintuitive that a commercial media culture, which is editorially
independent from the state, will stoke patriotic sentiment more than the culture of state-owned
media. However, my interviews in the Czech Republic (which has transitioned from a statist to a
commercial media culture in recent decades) and China (where a commercial media culture is
emerging under the auspices of official outlets of the Chinese Communist Party) indicate
precisely that. Toward the end of the dissertation, I explore the way in which the commercial
media culture strengthens national (and ethnic, and class, and other “audience-specific”)
solidarities and expands its adversarialism beyond political elites to any individual or group
outside of its solidarity group. And I speculate about the consequences for foreign policy if this
mixture of commercialism and nationalism complicate international relations.

A Note on Public Media
In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare wrote “all that glitters is not gold.” Within
national media cultures, it can be said that all that glimmers is not fire. My subject is the
globalization of the cultures characteristic of the U.S. commercial press and I will reflect, toward
the end of the dissertation, upon the democratic promise and diplomatic perils that attend it. But
the culture of non-commercial public media, which circulates information and ideas based on
news producers’ assessment of their importance more than of their popularity, is also
illuminative. Public media play an important role in shining a light on topics which might get
lost in the glare of commercial sensitivity to audience preferences or shadowed by consideration
of advertisers’ interests. They also might help to mitigate some of the polarization engendered by
a pluralist commercial media culture. The omission of public media from this analysis is merely
36
a matter of research scope, and my thesis should not be interpreted as suggesting public and
private media are somehow incompatible.

37
Chapter Two: The Spirit of Inquiry and Espionage – The Cultural Origins of the U.S.
Media

There was no more influential observer of the early institutions of American political and
cultural life than Alexis de Tocqueville. The French aristocrat whose ambitions were curbed by
his own country’s revolutionary upheavals traveled to the United States to discern and document
the distinctive features of American democracy. Scanning its commitment to equality, the vitality
– and apathy – which sometimes surrounded its civic participation, and the virtues and vices of
individualism, Tocqueville remains an influential chronicler of American society during the half
century following the country’s political independence. What he called “the liberty of the press”
was the subject of some of his most incisive commentaries, and his most ambivalent appraisals.
Tocqueville saw the American press as tawdry and, yet, essential for American
democracy. And he saw these attributes as representative of an inescapable trade-off. “In order to
enjoy the inestimable benefits which the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to
the inevitable evils which it engenders” ([1835] 2007, 150). Tocqueville saw, in the early
American press, a highly competitive and entrepreneurial culture, but because the breadth of the
competition precluded the possibility of steep profits, he observed, “the most distinguished
classes of society are rarely led to engage” in the business of journalism ([1835] 2007, 152).
The doggedly competitive economic culture of news production influenced not just the
types of people who launched news publications, but also the type of content those publications
would produce and the type of people who would write for them. Observing that commercial
advertisements were allocated very little space in France, Tocqueville marveled that, “in
America three quarters of the enormous sheet which is set before the reader are filled with
advertisements, and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial
anecdotes,” and largely neglected the discussion of intellectual or cultural topics that were so
38
common in the French newspapers at the time ([1835] 2007, 151). Whereas in France journalism
was highly esteemed as a noble and fundamentally literary endeavor, “journalists of the United
States are usually placed in a very humble position, with a scanty education, and a vulgar turn of
mind” and the “characteristics of the American journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to
the passions of the populace” ([1835] 2007, 152).
The American press’s appeals to people’s “passions” – as well its commitment to
“popular information”
12
– had its roots in some of the fashionable philosophical ideas of the era.
David Hume famously wrote that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” and
Claude Adrien Helvétius argued that “only a passion can triumph over a passion… the moralists
might succeed in having their maxims observed if they substituted in this manner the language of
interest for that of injury” (cited in Hirschman 1977, 24-28). Albert Hirschman links this popular
understanding of passions to the way in which the authors of the Federalist Papers deliberated
over the division of political power as they debated the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. The
anonymous author (likely either Hamilton on Madison) of Federalist 51 argued that “ambition
must be made to counteract ambition,” a phrase that leads Hirschman to suggest that “the
principle of countervailing passion, rather than that of checks and balances, was the foundation
of the new state” (1977, 30). But this “countervailing passion” found a platform not just in the
dueling egos of politicians, but in the open competition of – and access to – information in a
popular marketplace. In a letter that would be broadly cited by members of Congress in the
Freedom of Information Act debates two centuries later, James Madison wrote, “A popular
Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a

12
as opposed to, say, “public information,” which has become the focus of more contemporary discussions of
freedom in the context of information.
39
Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both” (Madison 1822). Madison believed popular information to
be the fuel which would energize and propel the democratic political culture into the future.
Commenting on the United States several decades later, Max Weber was focused in on its
economic cultures. Weber observed that various sets of religious values – i.e., a “Protestant
ethic” – had underpinned the commercial passions in the early years of the republic, but that
those had given way to a more secular culture, similar to Europe’s, which emptied that
commercialism of its higher purpose. “Where capitalism is at its most unbridled, in the United
States, the pursuit of wealth divested of its metaphysical significance, today tends to be
associated with purely elemental passions, which at times virtually turn into a sporting contest.”
And then, in a warning that has struck many as prescient, Weber predicted that such a culture
could give rise to “specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart” ([1905] 2002, 121). Of
course, this discussion of passions encompasses the political and economic cultures of the early
republic as a whole. The partisanship and commercialism of the American press were extensions
of that culture with their own distinguishing traits.
One of those traits, according to Tocqueville, was the ideological stubbornness to which
the free press gave rise. As ordinary citizens involved themselves in public affairs, the effect
went beyond a dispassionate appraisal of collective or self-interest. Rather, “once the Americans
have taken up an idea, whether it be well or ill-founded, nothing is more difficult than to
eradicate it from their minds.” Tocqueville attributes the durability of ideas in the face of
contradictory information to a kind of pride of prejudice: Americans “cherish [their opinions]
because they hold them to be just, and because they exercised their own free will in choosing
them; and they maintain them, not only because they are true, but because they are their own”
([1835] 2007, 153). Thomas Paine, the early American revolutionary and pamphleteer, noticed
40
at least one negative consequence of public reasoning filtered through the contest of various
passions. “The condition of the world being materially changed by the influence of science and
commerce, it is put into a fitness not only to admit of, but to desire, an extension of civilization,”
Paine writes. “But the principal and almost only remaining enemy it now has to encounter is
prejudice” (cited in Wheeler 1915). Now as then, this pride of ownership over one’s own
opinions, however misinformed or misguided they might be, appears nearly ubiquitous.
The American press is often characterized by legal scholars and political scientists as
having at least two distinguishing inborn traits when compared with its counterparts across the
Atlantic: (1) it was the first to enjoy a broad, statutorily and constitutionally protected freedom
from censorship thereby enabling the press’s adversarial political culture and (2) it was the first
to be independent of direct state sponsorship
13
thereby enabling its commercial economic
culture. These political and economic freedoms are largely products of new ideas and attitudes
about the proper relationship between the state and the press which were emerging
internationally, especially in Europe. Hume and Helvétius have already been mentioned as
thinkers who informed the libertarian values underpinning the American press, attempting to see
man “as he is” – i.e., motivated by, and mired in, “passions” – rather than as ruling elites would
have him be. The utilitarian philosophy of John Stuart Mill was also critical to the culture of the
early American press.
Mill proposed that true and valuable ideas would lose their vitality if they weren’t
continuously subjected to contradictory information and opinions. Even falsehoods must be
given wide berth, because they often contain a kernel of truth or some information of value. Fred

13
although it did profit from several forms of indirect financial and infrastructural support, through partnerships
with the United States Post Office. The postmaster was, in fact, so influential within the early years of the press that
it was a Cabinet level position more highly sought than most any other, mostly because it received more government
patronage than any other Cabinet post.
41
Siebert pointed out how “much of [John Locke’s] phraseology found its way into the American
Declaration of Independence” and how John Milton’s notion that truth would prevail whenever
subjected to a truly “free and open encounter” was the progenitor of the American concept of
“the open marketplace of ideas” (1956, 43-44). Even when, in the 1940s, the Hutchins
Commission convened to examine the successes and excesses of the commercial press in the
United States, communication theorist Harold Lasswell distributed a reading list to the
commissioners which included Milton’s Areopagitica and Mill’s On Liberty (Pickard 2015,
154). European thinkers’ contemplation of the conditions under which both men’s passions and
mankind’s truth would flourish laid the foundation upon which, respectively, the heat and light
of America’s “incandescent press” would be built.
The ideas that gave rise to a republican form of government may have been gaining
traction in Europe but at the time the United States was founded as a republic, no other European
country had such a form of government. European countries began to bestow new rights upon
journalists and loosen regulations upon media organizations in the decades and centuries that
followed. But, until recently, no country’s media system began to approach the libertarian
economic culture which was present at the origin of the American press, and which has
obstinately persisted even as many called for a more socially responsible and public interest-
driven press (Pickard 2015). The creation of the aforementioned Hutchins Commission,
sponsored by the magazine baron Henry Luce, was one effort to organize a wide-ranging public
critique of the commercial press. A decade earlier, President Roosevelt’s administration had
attempted to rein in the press, through the federal government’s prerogative to regulate interstate
commerce. Frustrated with the sensationalism, racial stereotypes and other misrepresentations,
and the low quality information that the commercial press was seen as perpetuating, the
42
administration criticized the all-encompassing definition of the “freedom of the press” as a
“bogie” and a “shibboleth” (Pickard 2015, 136).
The denouement of this economic culture – when it found itself confronted by both
domestic and international criticism – was the New World Information and Communication
Order debates which are discussed in the next chapter. While the U.S. was joined, during those
debates, by several Western allies in promoting press freedoms, the economic liberalism that
underpinned press freedom in the U.S. was indeed unique. After all, “the United States stood
alone among major nations in placing the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting entirely in
private ownership” (Starr 2004, 405). Robert Picard puts it plainly when he observes that “Media
firms in the United States operate primarily as commercial firms and have since the eighteenth
century” (2005, 337). In fact, elected officials in the U.S. would not get around to creating a
public broadcasting system until 1967, when the Public Broadcasting Act was passed. Even then,
Congress saw to it that the “public broadcasting stations that received grants from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting were forbidden from ‘engag[ing] in editorializing’,” and
this prohibition on public broadcasters’ ability to weigh in on issues of public concern wouldn’t
be overturned until 1984
14
(Bollinger 2010, 36).
All this is to note that the commercial culture which was present at the advent of
American journalism has remained dominant even as thoughtful and powerful reformists from
both inside and outside the United States have attempted to moderate or amend it. Some of this
dominance is attributable to the presence or absence of specific institutions, the policy decisions
of elected officials and the changing economic and technological conditions of news production.
But most of it is attributable to cultural variables – to inherited political ideas and deeply

14
by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in FCC v. League of Women Voters
43
ingrained economic traditions. Victor Pickard describes one aspect of the political culture which
gave license to the commercial press. He writes, “Americans have long believed that
impediments to actualizing these democratic ideals [of freedom and equality] lie primarily within
state tyranny rather than the private tyranny of concentrated corporate power” (2015, 154). The
comparativist approach of this thesis precludes me from writing exhaustively about the various
social, political and economic circumstances which contributed to the distinct culture of the U.S.
press. But as the preceding pages attest, this culture was born out of a distrust of the colonial
government and credence in the economic and political “passions” of the colonists. That distrust
and that credence have continued, to varying degrees, beyond the colonial era and up through the
present day.
There are at least three traits of American journalism, however, which were not present at
its inception and which grew out of various aspects of its commercial culture: its abundance, its
professionalism and its inducement of a culture of openness. Each of these will be briefly
discussed in turn in the following pages.
American news outlets weren’t particularly plentiful during the colonial years but, bidden
by the dual promises of financial reward and political influence, and enabled by lower costs of
production and distribution, they would proliferate rapidly. The early American newspapers
simply emulated the form and function of the British newspapers and saw themselves as an
outpost of British news. From the first chapter, we recall how Benjamin Franklin’s older brother
James launched the second newspaper in the colonies in 1720 while his “friends tried to dissuade
him, saying they thought the paper not likely to succeed, ‘one newspaper being in their judgment
enough for America’” (Schudson 2008, 28). But, characteristic of many of the printer-journalists
of his time, Franklin was less interested in the needs of the country than in his own pursuit of
44
political and financial reward. In addition to promoting their ideas and themselves, the
newspaper proprietors in the early years of the republic would also promote their new cities,
attempting to attract new residents, and the commerce which would accompany them. The
“character of American newspapers has had something to do with their being advertising-
supported media, particularly from the 1830s on” but this character also corresponded to the
early American news media’s other commercial dimension: their role as “boosters” or
promotional instruments for attracting individuals and businesses into local communities
(Schudson 2008, 30). Tocqueville would observe, a century after James Franklin launched the
second newspaper within the colonies, and half a century after the country had gained its
independence from Britain, that “in America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own
newspaper” ([1835] 2007, 151).
Paradoxically, the commercial culture of news production in the United States was
supported by a circulatory infrastructure which was, in itself, noncommercial (Cowan &
Westphal 2010). Right around the emergence of the advertising-driven “penny press” in the
1830s, the proliferation of the American postal system began to constitute a veritable media
network. Out of every 100,000 citizens, the United States had 74 post offices while Great Britain
had 17 and France had 4 (John 1996). While the European governments had onerous
requirements that post offices generate significant revenue, America’s new government saw post
offices – and the communication they enabled – as important to the new country’s expansion,
vitality, and unity. The nineteenth century post office would prefigure other communication
technologies and infrastructure (such as the telegraph and the Internet) that, though not
intrinsically commercial, extended and accelerated commercially communicative exchanges.
45
The commercial success of the early newspapers spurred improvements in editorial
quality, and “American journalism became more of an independent and innovative source of
information just as it became more a means of advertising and publicity” (Starr 2004, 148).
Dismissing technological determinism, and observing that the postal system and the proliferation
of newspapers pre-dated railroads and telegraphs, Paul Starr points to cultural variables that led
to what he calls “America’s first information revolution.” Namely, newspapers became central to
the culture in a cyclical fashion: increases in literacy – influenced in the early years by the
rigorous schooling initiated by some Protestant sects, as also observed by Max Weber – led to a
demand for more newspapers and books. Printers and journalists who strove to profit from this
demand flooded the market with new publications and the new prevalence of printed news, in
turn, created a social imperative to become literate. Contemplating what might have initiated this
cycle, Starr concludes “there is considerable force to an explanation that emphasizes the early
influence of both religious belief and the general process of commercialization” (2004, 109). In
more recent years, the relationship between media commercialism and information abundance is
evident in the wide proliferation of satellite and cable television channels and the creation of
print publications that appeal to ever narrower audience niches.
The second trait that has come to be associated with the commercial culture of the U.S.
press, and which wasn’t present in its earliest years, is professionalism. American journalism in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century might have been economically and politically
independent from the state, but several factors prevented it from being a truly autonomous
enterprise, including the the partisan affiliation of the early newspapers, the role they played as a
“booster” for local communities and, of course, the influence of commercial advertising on
46
editorial content. In the late nineteenth century, American journalism’s professional ambitions
began to emerge, and these would take shape over the next century.
American journalism had not been a fully amateur endeavor before this period. Writers
and columnists would be paid for their services and some common standards of practice were
detectable even if they arose organically, and through spontaneous and sporadic processes of
informal socialization within the vocation. But before the 1870s, there was little formal
organization of, or education for, journalists as a distinct profession. During the era of the
partisan press, columnists were frequently writing part-time for a newspaper while they worked
for a member of Congress or a government agency for their primary livelihood. And
“correspondents” were exactly that – friends and acquaintances with whom newspaper editors
would often correspond. These individuals typically lived in other parts of the country and would
send letters filled with updates and information that the editors would then publish. Unlike their
counterparts in England and France, American journalists did not regularly cultivate a high
literary style.
A large part of the popularity of the news in the United States came from its use of
colloquial language and familiar folk and popular references. In writing Common Sense, which
sold approximately 150,000 copies, Thomas Paine dropped classical allusions for biblical ones
that ordinary Americans would understand and explicitly committed himself to the use of a plain
language. This use of plain language and relatability to lay readers persisted even after the news
industry had professionalized, a fact that is best captured in Arthur Miller’s often quoted quip
that a good newspaper is a nation “talking to itself.” Until the end of the nineteenth century,
people who were in the business of producing news neither subscribed to nor benefited from
47
consistent sets of standards of practice, ethical standards or editorial norms that would give their
business the kind of autonomy that characterizes a “profession” (Conboy 2004).
Silvio Waisbord identifies two competing explanations for the rise of the professionalism
within American journalism: (1) a structuralist, political economy account of the “general
process of capitalist development” through which the professionalization of journalists was
“functional to the business goals of press barons,” and (2) a sociocultural appraisal of
professionalism as the “outcome of the aspirations” of journalists “to seek nonmaterial forms of
capital to strengthen social legitimacy” (2013, 26-27). Both of these explanations are plausible.
In fact, they might complement more than they contradict one another if we resist the tendency,
common within media sociology, to devoutly subscribe to either an institutionalist perspective
which sees structural variables as durable or an actor-centered perspective which sees them as
flexible and ephemeral. After all, structures don’t simply appear from the ether, and they need to
be structured by actors before they can structure the beliefs and behaviors of other actors
(Giddens 1986). This perspective has more recently been updated by neoinstitutional
sociologists, who argue that “in the short run, actors create relations; in the long run, relations
create actors” (Padgett & Powell 2012, 2). Applied to the professionalization of journalism, one
might imagine how journalists’ quest for legitimacy and prestige and tycoons’ quest for the
accumulation of capital could feed into one another.
It was not simply prestige that journalists sought, however. In writing about what he
called the “great transformation” that took place in the later parts nineteenth century, Karl
Polanyi observes that various industries tried to protect themselves as rapid industrialization
brought waves of immigrants and a radical increase in racial and ethnic diversity to the United
States ([1944] 2001). This diversity brought with it new types of news and cultural products and
48
variegated the news marketplace at about the same time – the 1870s – that new printing
technologies increased the prevalence of illustrations and photoengraving, and new distribution
techniques and capital led to the first mass-circulation publications.
15
But this increased
diversity, along with new questions surrounding the press’s credibility which came from the
excesses of commercialization (and the rise of the progressive era), made journalists more
conscious of their cultural status and defensive of their industry’s legitimacy.
William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the same magazine publishers who used
muckraking and sensationalist journalism to increase their circulations and their profits, would
try to protect the profession’s reputation by successfully lobbying Congress in 1879 to keep
postal rates low only for publications which included “information of a public character…[with]
a legitimate list of subscribers” and later by funding the nation’s first journalism schools in the
1920s. It is unclear whether the professionalization movement was propelled more by the desires
of journalists or the ambitions of publishers – or by a broader “white collar revolution” which
was taking place across multiple industries during the period (Brint 1994) – but it is clear the
movement was tied, in large part, to a shift in the cultural conditions and attitudes of the time. It
is also clear professionalization was reinforcing the growing abundance of journalism, with
publishers like S.S. McClure beginning to put journalists on long-term contracts and to invest in
research. Finally, it is clear “the occupational norms and practices” of professionalization are
proliferating globally and, though journalistic “ethics remain diverse and contested, evidence
suggests increasing similarity in news values and reporting techniques” (Waisbord 2013, 18).

15
Frank Leslie’s publication Leslie’s Weekly and Harper & Brothers’ Harper’s Weekly are two prominent examples
of the pictorial publications which were broadly popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century. “The
number of periodicals with 100,000 circulation quadrupled from 21 to 85 between 1885 and 1900 and then nearly
doubled again to 159 by 1905; the first magazine to hit a circulation of 1 million was the Ladies’ Home Journal in
1903” (Starr 2004, 262).
49
The third and final characteristic to which, in the United States, the commercial culture of
the press appears to have given rise and which wasn’t present at its inception, is a broader
societal commitment to openness. With few exceptions, American journalists were afforded
unprecedented rights to independently pursue and publish stories and to openly criticize
government officials.
16
But the government itself did not begin to create nor support a culture of
openness – in fact, it jealously defended its secrecy – until much more recently. Some signs of
the press’s ability to impose a culture of openness were visible during the second half of the
nineteenth century, as the role of political patronage began to wane and the commercial
imperatives of attracting a mass audience intensified. The journalistic practice of interviewing
government officials had become “widely accepted in the United States by the 1880s, but… was
judged unseemly in much of Europe until after World War I.” Although it afforded American
audiences a new and more intimate perspective on their elected leaders, one French observer
“criticized ‘the spirit of inquiry and espionage’ of American reporters” (Schudson 2008, 14).
This spirit wasn’t without its domestic detractors. The Comstock Act
17
, passed in 1873,
sought to suppress the Post Office’s distribution of obscene books, but it extended to the
burgeoning circulations of tabloid magazines and publications that focused on sensational crime
reporting. This law and others like it were part of a moral fervor of the Victorian Era which
peaked at the turn of the century. The increasing commercial strength of the mass media enabled
information and ideas to circulate more widely, and the new invention of the photographic

16
Here, the Alien & Sedition Act signed by John Adams at the end of the 18th century is the most notable
exception. Although Adams’s successor Thomas Jefferson overturned the law, it had become a model for some state
laws. Similarly, President Lincoln’s suspended press criticism of the government during the Civil War, which
would undoubtedly violate a modern interpretation of First Amendment.
17
the official name of the law, passed in March 1873, is “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in and Circulation of
Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.”
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flashbulb literally shed light on images – especially those of crime scenes
18
or of the tenement-
dwelling urban poor
19
– which weren’t previously visible to a news audience. In the end, while
the Comstock laws were effective in constraining some of the smaller and more obscure
publications, “the forces in society that Comstock championed would ultimately be unable to
keep in check the forces epitomized by Hearst” and other profit-seeking press barons that would
help to have these laws overturned (Starr 2004, 250).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the American press strengthened its reputation as a watchdog
upon government when the Washington Post published a series of investigative reports that
would come to be known as the Watergate scandal and the New York Times published
confidential documents known as “The Pentagon Papers,” leaked from within the Johnson
administration’s Department of Defense by Daniel Ellsberg. Both of these episodes represented
a push by the news business, in response to a climate of official secrecy, for more tools of
transparency. Following the Watergate scandal, Senator Edward Kennedy promoted a bill that
expanded and reformed the Freedom of Information Act (and successfully overrode President
Ford’s veto) in what Senator Kennedy called “a concrete repudiation by Congress of both the
traditional bureaucratic secrecy of the federal establishment and the special antimedia,
antipublic, anti-Congress secrecy of the Nixon administration” (Bowles, Hamilton & Levy 2014,
9).
Schudson traces the Freedom of Information Acts, the recent spate of whistleblowing
within government, and the more general public demand for openness to several variables. Some
of these are tangential to the culture of news. Television talk shows such as Phil Donahue’s
nationally syndicated program that began in the 1970s “incorporated openness as a practice and

18
Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, would popularize flash photography of crime scenes beginning in the 1930s.
19
among the most famous of these is Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), a book of photographic
portraits of poor residents of the tenements in New York City’s Lower East Side.
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as a value, promoting honesty itself as a form of popular therapy” (2015, 12). Topics which
were once taboo, such as homosexuality, became less so as “‘coming out’ and telling the truth
overrode conventional morality” on these shows and visibility and disclosure were prized
alongside the “conventional morality of tolerance and civility” (2015, 13). Of course, one need to
only consider some of Donahue’s talk show progenies, such as Jerry Springer, to appreciate how
the talk show format would generate not just light, but heat. Finally, Schudson implicitly argues
that transparency begat more transparency as “a brew of social change involving everything from
the civil rights movement to mass public with access to a critical culture in higher education and
an irreverent culture in the press and popular culture” helped bring about a new culture of
openness.
These three characteristics which have emerged within the culture of the American press
– the sheer abundance of news, the rise of professional standards and the imposition of a culture
of openness – each have had their distinct causes and conditions sketched here. Each relates to
the other in some form. The abundance and heterogeneity of news, and the inconsistencies in the
quality of the content which accompanied this abundance, created some of the social pressure
upon the field to professionalize. As journalism became more of a professional endeavor, with
more formal education and improved working conditions, journalists had the social capital and
institutional support to push for government transparency. The newfound culture of transparency
and openness reciprocally intensified pressures to professionalize the journalism field as greater
investigative and observational “power” called for greater ethical “responsibility” and standards
in newsgathering. It also expanded the professional field as more journalists would be required to
cover topics once shrouded in secrecy, and this expansion of professionalization led, in turn, to
more journalistic abundance. These three characteristics of the commercial press can be seen as
52
contributing to the spaces of autonomy and polarization theorized about in the previous chapter.
Other scholars have demonstrated how these traits have become increasingly prevalent
throughout the world and, in chapters four through six, I begin to account for the way in which
they have recently appeared – or are appearing – in the Czech Republic, China and Cuba.

53
Chapter Three: Free Flow Versus Fair Flow – The NWICO Debates Revisited
“Globalization” has been a watchword among political scientists, international relations
experts and communication scholars for well over two decades. For many who try to stay at the
vanguard of their discipline, looking forward more intently than they look back, its meaning has
become internalized, naturalized, taken for granted. That certain economic or informational
networks have, in the contemporary era, gained a global reach is beyond dispute. Technological
progress has unencumbered the transportation of people and ideas, which circulate with
unprecedented rapidity and recurrence. States have negotiated to loosen restrictions on trade and
migration. This has led capital, cultural products and crime to flow among international
syndicates ever more freely. These “free flow” process are often interpreted as the natural
extensions of globalization. In the introduction to his seminal text, Keywords, Raymond
Williams teaches us that language isn’t a simple reflection of the historical processes it describes.
Rather, “some important social and historical processes occur within language” and the resulting
variations among – and conceptual confusion around – certain terms stem not simply from
“deficiencies of education” but instead these “are… historical and contemporary substance…
[and have] been inherited within precise historical and social conditions”
20
(1976, 22-24).
Globalization was not destined to be connotative of the deregulated movement – the “free flow”
– of capital, information and people.

20
I suspect that, if Williams had written this book ten or twenty years later, “globalization” and its interrelated
words and references – what Williams called a “cluster” – might have been candidates for inclusion. I also
acknowledge that my definition of “commercial culture,” detailed in the previous chapter, is an attempt to revert
what has become a “critical” term to “what was at first primarily [a] descriptive” one. Williams writes
“commercial” appeared in the late 17th century to describe “activities connected with trade, as distinct from other
activities but, in the mid-19th century, a definition for ‘commercialism’ arose to indicate “a system which puts
financial profit before any other consideration” (1976, 70). It’s the former definition I attempt to reclaim and use as
dispassionately as possible and the latter, from which I abstain, which describes “commercial” in relation to other
traditions of critical scholarship.
54
Once upon a time, not that long ago, the free flow of communication internationally was
a political doctrine of the United States and a few Western countries, and not a human rights
principle enjoying a nearly global consensus. The globalization of information, which followed a
path of political and economic deregulation, could just as easily have followed the path of
regulation – spreading standards of journalistic professionalism, curbing media companies’
ambitions for economic expansion, and compelling national media systems toward certain
political principles and social responsibilities.
One decisive moment in determining which path the world would follow came amid the
height of the cold war, in 1974, when a Senegalese diplomat and former professor, Amadou-
Mahtar M’Bow, was elected director-general of the United Nations Educational Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). M’Bow was in a fraught position from the start, having been
elected the same year that the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration of the Establishment
of a New International Economic Order. Given the fierce international contest between the
advocates of capitalism and democracy in the U.S. and Europe and the proponents of socialism
and communism in the Soviet Union and China, Western leaders were suspicious of the
declaration, which called for replacing “inequality, domination, dependence, narrow self-interest
and segmentation” with “equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and
cooperation among the States irrespective of their economic and social systems” (United Nations
1974). A corresponding proposal for a New International Information Order, containing
language that similarly reflected a “general anti-imperialist effort to achieve decolonization,” had
been developed a year earlier at a conference in Algiers, and was waiting to be take up by
M’Bow (Nordenstreng 1984, 28). Although initially considered a moderate, M’Bow’s tenure
would spur increased divisiveness within UNESCO. The U.S. government and press were
55
skeptical of the imposition of a “new order” upon their media system which was disorderly by
design. This skepticism of the process and of the political motives of the countries involved
would transmute into distrust for UNESCO’s new leader.
Western apprehension to UNESCO’s new initiative can be understood in the context of
the geopolitical fault lines and affiliations of the day. At the time, the countries of the world were
delineated by political scientists and diplomats into three categories: the First World (Western
Europe, the United States, Canada, etc.), the Second World (the USSR, Central Europe, etc.) and
the Third World (many countries in what political scientists now call the “Global South”). Like
the other “keywords” of which Williams wrote, these categories likely created new political
realities as much as they reflected existing realities. No longer belonging merely to the
“community of nations” that was the UN, each member country was now lumped together with
other countries, with which its national interests were expected to be aligned. In the 1950s, a
group of countries had established themselves as the Non-aligned Movement (NAM). The
movement was mostly comprised of former colonies in Africa and South Asia which became
independent when colonial empires dissolved in the post-war period. The NAM was ostensibly
an attempt by these countries to abstain from the global power blocs of the cold war era. Yet
these non-aligned countries would paradoxically begin to develop their common political
interests, coordinate their geopolitical influence, and even join forces to create a Non-aligned
News Agency Pool (NANAP) in 1975.
The previously mentioned 1973 conference in Algiers, where the early iteration of a
proposal for a new international information order took shape, was in fact a meeting of these
non-aligned countries. As a bloc, they had been expanding their clout within the United Nations
organization, adjusting their voting behavior to attract better concessions from the major power
56
blocs. Many of them had voted with the West during the 1950s but, by the 1970s, as they came
to attack the colonialism and cultural imperialism of the West, they were increasingly voting
with the Soviet bloc. One analysis explains:

“The power of this attack has rested upon a tacit and often uneasy unity between two
opposing Third World groups: on one side, anti-capitalists eager to revolutionize the
entire social structure of their countries and, on the other, native capitalists interested in
opposing domination by Western transnational corporations or getting better terms from
them” (Singh & Gross 1981).

By joining the Non-aligned Movement, countries were essentially trying to transform or preserve
their national economic orders by signing up for an international coalition. This apparent irony
signals how inescapably internationalist the world had become in the second half of the twentieth
century.
By the 1970s, the Non-aligned Movement had swelled to include 90 countries and
represented a majority in many UN agencies including UNESCO, which accordingly began to
give priority to a “development ideology” and the expressed needs of the Third World
(MacBride & Roach 2000, 286). This ideology stood in stark contrast to the international
commitment to a doctrine of free flow, which had made its way into UNESCO’s constitution in
1946. According to its constitution, UNESCO would “collaborate in the work of advancing the
mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication and
to that end recommend the free flow of ideas by word and image.” Three decades later, critics
within the non-aligned countries would come to see this mandate as, at best, a thinly veiled
57
endorsement of the libertarian economic culture of the U.S. media system or, at worst, as “part of
a global strategy for domination of communication markets and for ideological control by the
industrialized nations” (MacBride & Roach 2000, 287).
Herbert Schiller observes that the doctrine of the free flow of information “insists that no
national need or purpose can justify interference with the prevailing flow of messages and
imagery” and so a natural consequence of this position is the “steadfast opposition to, and
rejection of, international codes or agreements that would endorse some degree of social
accountability for the informational system” (1989, 288). Before it was a political doctrine, the
free flow of information was a shared ideal, a philosophical commitment, and a deeply rooted
aspect of the political and economic culture within the United States. The sensationalism and
adversarialism of the country’s commercial press would soon target the very international
debates of which it was the subject.

The MacBride Report & the American Response
In 1976, two years after M’Bow was elected as its director-general, UNESCO held its
general conference in Nairobi. There, representatives of the non-aligned countries urged an
amendment to the free flow doctrine reflecting a commitment to a “free and balanced flow of
information.”
21
This seemingly innocuous addition was, in fact, the product of years of
coordination and advocacy among the non-aligned countries – including at a conference of the
NAM in Tunis that same year – against the “imperial” force of Western media. The primary
concerns of the movement zeroed in on the imbalance of news flows, which “distorted coverage

21
the concept of “balance” gained favor in American journalism within the twentieth century, as journalism gained
standards of professionalism and an overt commitment to objectivity. Yet, even as reporters and editors began to
seek balance, they have rejected attempts by the state to appraise or even encourage that balance, seeing it as the
purview of their professional expertise and autonomy. The resistance to, and ultimately the overturning of, the
Fairness Doctrine is but one example.
58
of the developing world by the dominating Western media,” including reports “of a sensational
character” (Kleinwachter 1993, 14). Many countries within the Global South would receive news
about their neighboring countries through wire services based in Europe and the United States.
Many of these reports angered and humiliated national audiences within the Global South by
focusing on natural disasters, problems of poverty and corruption, and other stories that fed
development-oriented narratives which were attractive and intriguing to audiences within
Western and Northern countries.
At the general conference, the Soviet Union put forward a draft of principles for what the
non-aligned countries were calling a “New World Information and Communications Order”
(NWICO). It read that “states are responsible for the activities in the international sphere of all
mass media under their jurisdiction.” The confusion over the very idea of what “jurisdiction” a
state maintains over the media enterprises within its borders is at the crux of the issue. The
countries which most vigorously advocated for state responsibility for the mass media activities
were those where the governments already controlled or influenced their media systems. Western
representatives were alarmed that, under this proposal, one national government might be held
accountable by another one when the latter country felt adversely affected by the biases or
sensationalism of a news product over which the former country, in fact, had little control.
Leonard Sussman, who was part of the U.S.’s delegation to UNESCO at the time, recalled
UNESCO was considering an international “right of reply” in which, “at the request of a foreign
government, Washington officials would be compelled to instruct a private news service such as
the Associated Press what to carry on its wires” (2003, 2).
Part of the popularity of these proposals derived not only from an attempt to actively
combat the perceived cultural imperialism from the West, but also because the means for
59
governments to do so seemed more within reach. According to a survey by Freedom House, the
number of governments which had direct control over their media systems had been sharply
rising. In the 1930s, 70 percent of the 39 national news agencies were independent of their
government while, by 1980, abetted in part by UNESCO policies, 68 percent of countries had
state-run news agencies (Sussman 2003, 4). U.S. resistance to the work of UNESCO and its
NWICO proposals began to build as NAM’s membership and influence increased, and more
countries followed the trend toward state control of media systems. U.S. officials were
determined not to be governed by binding international agreements which they perceived as
incompatible with the spirit of – and Constitutional protections for – press freedom. And
crucially, U.S. media companies who cheered on those officials were determined not to be cut
off from potentially profitable new markets. Two years after the 1976 conference in Nairobi,
UNESCO delegates met in Paris and unanimously adopted a Declaration on the Mass Media (see
UNESCO Declaration 1978).
Because of the simmering disagreements on the appropriate freedoms and responsibilities
of journalists, the declaration was packed with generalities and noncommittal language. It
affirmed both the importance of a free press while acknowledging that the mass media have a
“contribution to make” in the “countering of racialism, apartheid and incitement to war.” And it
acknowledged that “the strengthening of peace and international understanding... demand[s] a
free flow and a wider and better balanced dissemination of information.” Ultimately, the
declaration was a mashing together of vague descriptors of both ideologies.
Some suspect the watering down of the declaration may have had to do with the attention
it had been receiving in the American press. George Gerbner points to a New York Times
editorial that appeared as the UNESCO delegates were meeting in Paris, which warned, “If it
60
turns out to be impossible to reject this attempt to tamper with our basic principles, there is
always the alternative of rejecting UNESCO itself” (cited in Gerbner 1993, 114). But after the
“most objectionable features had been deleted and Western-oriented provisions inserted into the
final draft,” the Associated Press enthusiastically praised the declaration and its explicit
endorsement of press freedom (Gerbner 1993, 114).
Given the continued insistence by members of the NAM that more forceful policies be
promoted, Director-general M’Bow established a Commission for the Study of Communication
Problems comprised of six representatives of First World Countries (U.S., France, Ireland, Japan,
Netherlands, Canada), two of Second World countries (U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia), and eight of
Third World countries (Zaire, Indonesia, Colombia, Tunisia, Nigeria, Egypt, Chile, and India).
M’Bow chose Ireland’s Sean MacBride to lead the commission. A former Irish Republican
Army member who had won both the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prize for his diplomatic work in
Namibia, MacBride came from a country that, though First World, had struggled under British
colonialism for centuries. This led to the expectation among many that he would be sympathetic
to both the tradition of the free press which was prevalent in the United States and Western
Europe and the Third World’s anti-imperialist advocacy.
The MacBride Report, as the commission’s 1980 report came to be called, was a wide-
ranging, book-length document which tackled some of the most vexing media topics of the time
(see MacBride et. al. 1980). The Report described the many ambiguities surrounding the media
freedom debates and the inherent tension between the promotion of a free flow of information
and a commitment to responsible news production. It urged greater access to the media by
traditionally underrepresented groups and observed that freedom for the “strong” can have
unintended negative consequences for the “weak” (141-142). A look at where specific committee
61
members dissented is telling. The U.S.S.R.’s representative was the lone dissenter to the
agreement that “censorship or arbitrary control of information be abolished” (266) while the
American and Canadian representatives registered their objections to the sections criticizing
commercialization and the influence of advertising (104-111, 152-155).
The Report also broadly addresses the topics of the role of changing information
technologies, professional standards of journalists, and their rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis
their governments. In a passage, particularly prophetic for 1980, the authors predict that
computers and transnational data exchanges “may one day facilitate breaking down barriers
between persons and nations” (31). In addition to foretelling the disruptive and democratic
potential of the Internet, the Report discusses disparities in access to these technologies – what is
now known as the international “digital divide” – as well as their potential for domination by
large multinational corporations, and their distortive effects. Upon publication, criticism came
from all corners. An international group of eleven scholars, led by Cees Hamelink “provided an
almost instantaneous commentary on a remarkably complex document” (Singh & Gross 1981,
111). Kaarle Nordenstreng, who had been one of the leading proponents of the NWICO concept,
criticized it for its lack of historical context and the absence of an explanation of how its
recommendations would promote peace. Others criticized its lack of conceptual clarity, of
specific features of the new order it was proposing, and of guidance for national planning based
on its observations (Ibid.).
At the time many scholars and Third World representatives argued that the report did not
go far enough, many in the U.S. media and political system insisted it went too far. Western
news organizations, as was their custom, interpreted the Report as an existential threat to
themselves. A.H. Raskin, a former editorial page editor at the New York Times conducted a
62
content analysis of major U.S. print media coverage as UNESCO met in Belgrade in 1980 (the
same year the MacBride Report was published). He found “not one story [that]... dealt with any
of the reports, speeches, or resolutions on UNESCO’s basic activities” such as combatting
illiteracy, developing alternate energy sources, or sponsoring research in food production. But he
found 173 stories and 181 editorials that addressed the international debate over communication
policy. Every one of the editorials he analyzed “expressed apprehension” about UNESCO’s
proposals to establish policies relating to a worldwide information order, 151 of them were
“strongly hostile” to the idea, and 27 newspapers explicitly urged the U.S. to withdraw from
UNESCO if it press freedoms continued to face threats (Raskin 1981, 166). A primary object of
scorn within the Western media was the suggestion by some member countries that journalists
should be licensed by their government, an idea that was antithetical to a system of journalism
which is intended to be independent from, if not adversarial toward, its government. However,
the MacBride Report explicitly warns that “to propose a licensing system for journalists was
dangerous since it would require someone to stipulate who would be entitled to claim such a
protection.” As Sean MacBride himself wrote afterward, “Most governments were prepared to
recognize the importance of safeguarding journalists, even though few seemed to cherish the
activities of ‘investigative reporters.’” He noted that such protections would be based on some
professional credential, but by even “raising the issue, Third World leaders were accused of
wishing to license journalists” (MacBride & Roach 2000).
U.S. opposition to UNESCO came also from conservative think tanks and stormy
Congressional hearings. The Heritage Foundation, in particular, lobbied actively against the
NWICO concept, arguing that it “has declared war against the western free press” and “preaches
redistribution of wealth of ultramodern and global mass communication infrastructures created
63
by the western world” (cited in Preston 1989, xvii). Attacks came from a bipartisan group of
U.S. lawmakers too. Republican Senator Dan Quayle, who had once been a newspaper
publisher, introduced a resolution in the Senate in opposition to UNESCO’s attempt to “regulate
news content” and Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, representing New York (the
home of many U.S. media companies) added an amendment directing Congress to withhold “our
share of the money UNESCO chooses to spend implementing its misguided New World
Information Order” (Giffard 1989, 33).
In the same year, 1981, the World Press Freedom Committee hosted what Leonard
Sussman called a “free press counterattack” in Talloires, a small town in the French Alps. Media
leaders from 25 countries contributed to the Declaration of Talloires, which vowed to “resist any
encroachment on… the free flow of information worldwide” and vigorously rebutted the ideas of
international codes of ethics and licensing procedures (which, as mentioned, had been proposed
to, but not included in, the MacBride Report). The declaration announced the shared opposition
“to any proposals that would control journalists in the name of protecting them.” The U.S.S.R.’s
representative on the UNESCO commission had highlighted his proposal to fund national media
systems through taxes on commercial advertising and boasted that “criticism of the commercial
approach to information activities occupies an important place in” the MacBride Report
(Zassoursky & Losev 1981, 120). But the signatories to the Declaration of Talloires affirmed
their commitment to “the importance of advertising as a consumer service and in providing
financial support for a strong and self-sustaining press.” The declaration catalyzed further
opposition to the NWICO movement from the legislative branch of the U.S. government, with a
House of Representatives resolution overtly threatening America’s withdrawal from UNESCO if
the organization continued to focus on objectionable issues that were seen as having negative
64
implications for press freedom. Sussman, who had moved on from his role at UNESCO to
become the executive director of Freedom House, recalls, “UNESCO never did move to license
or otherwise inhibit journalists, but it continued to provide a forum for those who wanted to do
so” (2003, 5).
In December of 1983, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz notified UNESCO of
America’s intention to withdraw from the agency at the end of the following year. The
notification criticized UNESCO’s politicization and the “intrusion of… divisive issues into
arenas that should remain technical, basic, nonpolitical, and functional” as well as its emphasis
on “collectivist statist concepts” (Preston 1989, 10). By the time the U.S. formally made its
decision to withdraw, mutual suspicion and mutual recriminations of each side’s political
motives had energized the debate. Joel Blocker, a former correspondent for Newsweek and CBS
News who had worked as director of UNESCO’s Public Information Office before resigning
under M’Bow, wrote a scathing appraisal of the new director-general in a 1976 Columbia
Journalism Review article. After citing numerous times that M’Bow had criticized the press –
especially its coverage of UNESCO proceedings – for being “tendentious” and “slanted” and
part of a “campaign” directed against UNESCO and the Third World members, Blocker cited an
unnamed UNESCO official who said of M’Bow: “The director-general believes the press ought
to be orderly, controlled, sedate… He has no grasp at all of how a liberal press functions – it
strikes him as ‘irresponsible’” (Blocker 1976, 59). Sussman argued that, while M’Bow publicly
avowed his support for democracy and press freedom in interviews, he privately admitted he was
beholden to the wishes of the member countries’ governments – and often advanced “proposals
for press-control programs that a majority of governments, mainly from the Third World, greeted
with approval” (2003, 5).
65
Several parties to the debates reject the idea that the U.S.’s withdrawal from UNESCO
was a principled protest. Kaarle Nordenstreng, a Finnish scholar and the president of the
International Organization of Journalists, who was a leading advocate for international regulation
of the press, insists:
“The main reason [for the U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO] was not NWICO, the
MacBride Report or UNESCO’s Director-General Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, but a
strategic reorientation of U.S. foreign policy while the balance of global forces changed
with a relative weakening of the U.S.S.R. and the NAM. This was a reorientation away
from multilateralism in international relations towards bilateral relations between the
USA and individual countries – particularly the developing countries with their weaker
economies” (Nordenstreng 2011, 230).

Nordenstreng suggested the American withdrawal from UNESCO was disingenuous, but
then Sussman suggested Nordenstreng’s critique of the withdrawal was disingenuous. Explaining
that his International Organization of Journalists was a pro-Soviet group that had spun off of the
International Press Institute at the start of the cold war and was “funded from Moscow,” Sussman
cited Nordenstreng as having argued international press regulation was a matter of “national
sovereignty” for Third World countries and that it “may be understood best as a step in the still
larger struggle to break the domination of the world business system” (2003, 4). In 2003, with the
political and ideological conflicts of the cold war receding, after twenty years of limiting its
involvement to the financial support of Third World countries’ media systems through the
Intergovernmental Programme for Development of Communication (IPDC), the United States
rejoined UNESCO. The NWICO debates would reconstitute themselves a decade later in the
66
form of the World Summits on the Information Society, where many of the same actors would
begin to deliberate over the international regulations on, and responsibilities of, Internet
providers. But the NWICO debates themselves remain a recent case where the political and
economic cultures characteristic of the U.S. press were laid bare.

A Cultural Analysis of the NWICO Debates
The bulk of both the academic research into, and the popular press accounts of, the
debates over the so-called New World Information and Communications Order portray the
struggle in predominantly political and economic terms. But like the the cold war of which it
was an extension, the NWICO debates were much more than a clash of national interests,
political spheres of influence, and competing economic models. The fight over the appropriate
relationship between the news media and the state was a fight over longer standing and broader
based cultural norms and values. These values implicated everything from the nature of human
freedom to the freedom of human nature and, in the context of the relationship between
journalists and government officials, the balance of power and the power of balance.
This particular front within the cold war was fundamentally a cultural battle in which
mutual misunderstanding, humiliation, pride and other familiar sentiments played a dominant
role. This shouldn’t be surprising given that the primary battlefield on which it was fought – i.e.,
UNESCO – has the word “cultural” in its title. And yet, as discussed, most of the academic and
journalistic expositions of these debates, at the time, focused on their political or economic (or
their political economic) dimensions. Perhaps the scholars and journalists were too close to their
object of inquiry, in both time and space, to detect the overarching but tacit cultural dynamics
67
which propelled these explicitly geopolitical and economic disputes. Or perhaps they, as
representatives of nationally situated cultural institutions, were too invested in the debates
themselves and, thus, were a caught up in the cultural battles they sought to understand.
As an organization, UNESCO sees itself as a proponent (and protector) of culture, but it
is also a product of culture. Some argue it is the product of an internationalist culture that arose
during the Truman administration in the aftermath of World War II. After all, the world had just
observed, with the ravages of Naziism in particular and racism in general, how state-sanctioned
propaganda could promote hatred and fear and publicly legitimate death and destruction on a
breathtaking scale. UNESCO was a response to this observation. The preamble of its
Constitution begins, “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the
defenses of peace must be constructed.” But it was not a neutral response. The culture that this
constitution codified and catalyzed was a culture of internationalism that was more pronounced
within, and being advocated by, the victorious allied countries which co-founded (and funded)
the organization, especially the United States. But “as the non-aligned nations began flexing their
muscles in international bodies, their complaints about international news flows echoed
[critiques of]… Reuters, especially in its denunciations of the Western media’s tendency to focus
on bad news when reporting on the Third World” (Gross & Costanza-Chock 2004, 24).
In the early post-war years, the tendency toward internationalism was understandable.
After a war in which “the Fascists elevated physical coercion and the suppression of human
thought to barbaric levels of state policy,” writes Herbert Schiller, “the proclamation of a free
flow of information principle received widespread popular approval” (1989, 293). At first, the
free flow principle, which is a critical component of the culture of the commercial press, was
seen as an antidote to, not an aggravator of, mutual misunderstanding and cultural discord.
68
As we saw in the previous chapter, the free flow principle was predicated on earlier
Enlightenment ideas which sought to air disagreements in order to resolve them. So it’s
predictable that the cold war conflict would bring this principle into stark contrast with other
principles of press fairness and balance and social responsibility, which it was accused of
deprioritizing. And it’s predictable that, at least within the countries that embraced the free flow
principle, media would become not just the subject of the debate, but active participants within it.
Within the U.S. media, we’ve already discussed the broad resistance to the MacBride Report and
the deliberation surrounding regulation and potential licensing of the press by a supranational
organization like UNESCO. But there was also debate among U.S. newspapers over whether the
United States should, in fact, withdraw its support for, and membership within, the organization.
According to one analysis, approximately three quarters of the editorials in 1983 and 1984
encouraged or supported President Reagan’s withdrawal, and several of these were “canned
editorials” which were written and distributed by the Copley Editorial Service, Scripps-Howard
News Service, and Hearst News and Feature Service (Giffard 1989, 166-173). Although the tone
and intensity of these editorials varied significantly, their broader syndication produced a
drumbeat of discontent that valorized the libertarian model for which U.S. diplomats were
advocating and, ultimately, encouraged the country’s withdrawal from the organization. A New
York Times editorial in December of 1983, which praised the founding mission of UNESCO but
complained that, over time, “every meeting became an anti-Western rally,” is perceived to have
given the Reagan administration license for the withdrawal, “secure in the knowledge that it
would have the backing of the ‘liberal’ press’” (Giffard 1989, 177). It was later that month when
Secretary Schultz notified UNESCO of America’s intent to withdraw.
69
The international mediatization of the NWICO debates – and the news stories and
editorials that swirled around both within the commercial American press and the statist press
within the U.S.S.R. and other socialist countries
22
– had the qualities of what might be called
“performative journalism.” Here I lean on two concepts. The first is Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of
“habitus,” through which professional behaviors and processes can be considered as a type of
“regulated improvisation” and are not just individually productive but socially reproductive
(1972). I resist the term “mimicry,” which has gained popularity within cultural studies lately,
because my interpretation of the work of editorialization and journalism, based on my field
research, is that even amid strong social and normative pressures, there is room for real dissent,
autonomy and agency. Still, much of that agency is carried out as a kind of performance.
That brings me to the second concept: “performative agency” put forward by Judith
Butler (2010). Performativity is, in this sense, is an act that creates or reifies that which it
describes. What Butler writes about the “market economy” could also be said of the “free press”
or “socially responsible press,” the “free flow” or “balanced flow” of information: “We have a
set of processes that work to fortify that very assumption, but also to call into question its pre-
given ontological status as well as the supposition that it operates by causal necessity” (2010,
148). Of course, one can see the way in which different models of journalism are socially and
culturally constituted. But, according to a theory of performative agency, the Western columnists

22
An analysis of the coverage of the NWICO debates within the socialist press emphasizes that much of the
coverage was responding to the perceived attack by “Western press publishers, mainly Americans” that engaged in
an “intensification of the psychological and diplomatic campaign” against the deliberations. It paraphrases the
position, within the socialist press, that “the concept of freedom is not value-free. There always arises the question:
for whom? Who will use it and for what? ‘Freedom of information as such does not strengthen peace,’ [according to
one commentator]” … “One should consider all concepts included in the Declaration, such as: ‘freedom of
information,’ ‘the free exchange of ideas,’ ‘the free flow of information,’ and so on, from the point of view of the
responsibility for peace, security and understanding, notes one of the commentators” (Pisarek 1993, 136-137). Of
course, these perspectives, together, represent a cultural commitment distinct from the libertarian culture of the U.S.
press, which sees press freedom as an ends and not a means. Rather than asserting that freedom is “value-free,” the
commercial press sees freedom as accommodative to all values, no matter how undesirable or misguided.
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and editors who wrote in defense of adversarial journalism and a principle of press freedom did
so in a way that performs their role as adversaries (of a supranational government agency if not
their own national government in this case). Similarly, the Soviet columnists and editors who
wrote in defense of a socially responsible socialist press did so in a way that performs their role
as guardians against international injustice. In both case, the news media acted out the very
processes they were trying to protect and promote. They were trying to carry out their roles of
dispassionate assessors, reporters and commenters of what they identified as an international
political contest. In fact, they were, on some level, subsumed by the cultural battle they were
attempting to critique. As they took sides, the sides also took them.
The cold war helped clarify and confirm the cultural commitments to each media system,
as is evident from the near consensus that emerged both within Western and within Soviet news
organizations. Dominique Moisi, who writes of the “geopolitics of emotion,” recounts that, as
the cold war came to a close, one of President Gorbachev’s advisers warned the West that,
without the threat posed by the U.S.S.R., the coherence of the West’s ideological positions
would become less pronounced and it would therefore suffer from less unity. Moisi observes
that, indeed, “the apparent dilution of common interests brought about by the end of the cold war
is coinciding with the growth of diverging emotions… [Today’s] complexity rarely gives birth to
strategic clarity and certainly not to emotional clarity” (2009, 119). I will argue throughout this
thesis that, while Moisi is correct that the bipolar struggle had the benefit of concentrating the
mind on certain principles, those principles have as much purchase today as they ever have, even
if they have less clarity than they once did. In an era of radical public disclosure, when leakers
and whistleblowers are lionized by sympathetic sources in the media, freedom of information
laws are proliferating around the world, and border-crossing satellite and Internet technologies
71
are being rapidly adopted by new generations of newsmakers, the “free flow” principles have
enveloped much of the globe, even if they might not have the same salience as they did at the
height of the cold war.
During the NWICO debates and the release of the MacBride Report, media organizations
weren’t the only ones that failed to grasp that they were in thrall to this international cultural
struggle rather than independent actors within it. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that
members of the MacBride Commission and American government officials were both so
entrenched in what they saw as primarily a competition of national interests and principles that
they were less aware of their role in a broader cultural discord. They were much more focused on
the media cultures they were protecting than the mediated cultures they were projecting.
Indeed, a review of the literature suggests that American government officials rarely
offered an explanation for how explicit commitments to social responsibility and non-binding
international commitments to ethical codes for journalists would have, in practice, jeopardized
the press freedoms to which they were committed. Of course, in an era of globalization, the
Western media which had once declared there shouldn’t be a common media culture or a set of
shared professional standards are now, paradoxically, propelling international professional and
ethical standards through the internationalization of journalism education, and transnational
ownership of media companies and movement of journalists.
Western officials’ arguments were largely based on the premise that the statist and the
capitalist models of media were wholly incompatible with one another,
23
and that the Soviet
promotion of the former was merely a means for advancing the economic interests – and
expanding the sphere of political influence – of the U.S.S.R. and unfriendly NAM countries. In

23
It is somewhat ironic, then, that the American public broadcasting began in 1967, amid the height of cold war
tensions, “to serve as a civic and cultural counterweight to commercial programming” (Schudson 2005, 39).
72
a memorable rejection of the Soviet assumption that media companies and technologies could be
tools of cultural domination, and the technological and economic determinism such a view
endorsed, Reagan administration FCC chairman Mark Fowler had described a television as
merely a “toaster with pictures.”
The Americans weren’t the only ones who dismissed the sincerity of the shared beliefs
and values that underpinned another’s media culture, and were skeptical of geopolitical motives
behind their opponents. Much of the Soviet press openly charged Western countries with using
the defense of press freedom as a cover for a strong political offense that attempted to expand
American power through a “one-way flow” of news and information. The MacBride Report
tacitly subscribed to this view of cultural values as political instruments even though, according
to one Canadian communication professor, “the affirmation that the one-way flow of news and
other mass culture products is really in the military, diplomatic, and economic interests of the
developed countries has never been empirically demonstrated”
24
(Ravault 1981, 29). In
defending the purity and logic of their own media culture and criticizing the perceived ulterior
motives and negative consequences of the other’s, Western and Soviet diplomats and
government officials both engaged in what amounted to a performance of opposition.
Aside from the media and government actors, scholars were also implicated. Journalism
scholarship which had informed the debate was not fully independent of the debate’s disparate
biases. Content analyses and political economy critiques of Western media coverage of the
debates appear more intent on showing the alignment of corporate interests and editorial
viewpoints, even without exposing a causal – or even a direct – relationship between the two. In

24
Indeed, as it will be argued throughout this thesis, the promotion of the values embraced by the U.S. media does
not always serve, and sometimes spectacularly backfires upon, the interests of the U.S. government. The recruitment
of ISIL fighters on American-created social networking sites or the anti-American rhetoric of China’s more
commercial newspapers are just two conspicuous examples.
73
exposing a lack of balance among these editorials, much of the research reflected the scholars’
own intellectual (and perhaps ideological) allegiance to the principle of balance over the other
values which the Western media proposed itself as defending. Conversely, much of the research
which defended the promotion of the free flow principle oftentimes uncritically accepted the
cultural logic of the principle itself and, thus, these scholars also projected their own subjective
position.
Finally, the communication research that was incorporated into the MacBride Report
was, itself, “based on the traditional paradigm: the sender is in control of the process, the
meaning resides in the message (as intended by the sender), and what the receivers do with the
media is determined by what the media are doing to them” (Ravault 1981, 132). In other words,
some of the Western objections to the report could be seen not simply as a reflexive defense of
the free flow principle, but as the result of more recent theoretical and empirical understandings
of news audiences as active interpreters, rather than as passive consumers. This “active
audience” research – along with an emphasis on humanistic “uses and gratifications” rather than
mechanistic “effects” – served Western critics as a bulwark against the cultural imperialism
argument of the U.S.S.R. and NAM. After all, if audiences were autonomous, the consumption
choices and interpretive work of the audiences would mitigate the hegemonic potential of news
programming exported from the First World to the Third.
25

Although I tend to subscribe more to a view of communication as an active process (as
mentioned in the first chapter), my point here is only to show that the culture of academic
production, like the culture of media reportage and political posturing, was caught up in the

25
It could be argued that the language of “flows” - whether in the “free flow” model advocated by the West or the
“one-way flow” criticized by socialist countries - itself undermined the epistemological underpinnings of the active
audience research to the extent that it characterized information as undergoing a natural and path-dependent process
of information conveyance independent of audiences’ capacity for interpreting or intervening upon that information.
74
international debates over the free flow principle which served as both the foundation of, and a
justification for, the commercial press. With the benefit of hindsight, the commercial culture of
the press was not just the object of the debate, but also the backdrop against which the debate
took place, and which shaped the contributions – and performances – of its disparate actors. At
the dawn of the era of globalization, the contest over nationally-affiliated press cultures set the
stage for a new and broader kind of international culture in which hitherto nationally situated
beliefs and values would be promoted as worthy of universal acceptance.
Suddenly, aided by the enhancement of media technologies and an internationalist
consciousness which emerged after a half century beset by world wars, we entered a global
culture in which national and provincial cultures were frequently and fiercely contested.
Everything from journalism practices to academic discourses to systems of democratic
governance gained international visibility, and became the subject of international scrutiny and
cultural criticism. George Yudice described the process by which nation-states variously
promote and criticize and exploit different cultures in a globalized world as the “expediency of
culture”
26
(2003) In any case, it’s evident that, even if neither the U.S. withdrawal from
UNESCO nor the eventual decline of the Soviet Union resulted in the immediate worldwide
adoption of commercial media systems the U.S. was touting, during the vigorous international
debate at the time, the seeds of a global culture of the commercial press could be glimpsed. The
chief advocates
27
for the free flow principle’s economic model might have exited the forum of
UNESCO, but not before setting off a vigorous and, yes, free flowing contest of ideas and
interests. In a sense, they had brought their nation’s commercial culture of the press to a
supranational organization, and left it there.

26
This concept is explored within, and applied to, the context of the Cuban media in chapter six.
27
the UK abandoned UNESCO one year after the U.S. did.
75
But they also kept an eye on it from afar. Leonard Sussman, a U.S. representative to
UNESCO who doggedly advocated for the international proliferation of the free flow principles
and urged his government against withdrawing from the organization, observes:
“Prior to UNESCO’s having taken up the news-flow question, American media seldom
carried stories about the murder or oppression of developing world journalists. Only after
the international press-control campaign began did American news media publicize the
connection between oppression of journalism in Third World countries and the future of
press freedom worldwide” (2003, 2-3).
In the ensuing years, the U.S. media’s adversarial stance toward its government expanded
to other governments when it came to press freedom, an issue it saw as existentially important to
its international habitus. In an era of increasing cross-border awareness and affinities, American
journalists began to feel a sense of democratic solidarity with, and affinity for, their peers
internationally. Arguably, the imperative to cover cases of international censorship and press
suppression stemmed less from a conscious promotion of national interests and foreign policy
and more from a kind of internationally populist defense of people with whom they shared a
professional identity. Nationally situated values gave way to professionally situated norms, and
international monitory and advocacy organizations such as the World Press Freedom Committee
(est. 1976), the Committee to Protect Journalists (est. 1981), and Reporters Sans Frontieres (est.
1985) became active institutional participants in the international promotion of the kinds of
monitory practices which the commercial culture of the press engendered.
By the turn of the century, a politically unbridled and economically independent press was
widely seen as a necessary condition for a democratic society. Receiving the Nobel Prize for
Economics in 1998, Amartya Sen declared that economic development and political freedom
76
were impossible without press freedom, and he attributed the death of 30 million Chinese during
the country’s Cultural Revolution in the 1950s and 1960s to the “absence of an uncensored
press” which could have exerted public pressure on Mao Tse-Tung’s government. As we’ll see
in chapter five, the Chinese media were rapidly commercializing at the time of Sen’s remarks.
Around the same time, the World Bank, which had previously abstained from investing in
communication infrastructure reversed course and its president insisted that “The free press is not
a luxury...it is at the core of equitable development.” The World Bank
28
published a policy
research paper in 2001, entitled “Who Owns the Media?,” which concluded:
“We found that… government ownership of the media is detrimental to economic,
political, and – most strikingly -- social outcomes. The latter finding is particularly
important in light of a commonly made argument justifying state ownership in a variety of
sectors, including the media, by the appeal to the social needs of the disadvantaged… The
evidence shows, to the contrary, that increasing private ownership of the media – through
privatization or the encouragement of entry – can advance a variety of political and
economic goals, and especially the social needs of the poor.” (Djankov, McLeish, Nenova
& Shleifer 2001, 32).
Academic research was both informing and being informed by a new international
consensus on the importance of the press freedom and by widespread support for the free flow
principle that had proved to be so divisive just two decades earlier. Thus far, my goal has not
been to take a side on the validity of that consensus or support, but to show how it has become
both the basis for, and the product of, a media culture with global reach. The recent expression of
this culture within various national contexts will be the subject of upcoming chapters. Reflecting

28
I understand that the World Bank is a product of the Washington Consensus that emerged in the wake of the cold
war, and its institutional perspectives, which include economic development as an intrinsic good, are not necessarily
neutral in the context of the debate over press freedom.
77
on the UNESCO debates that led to the rise and fall of his committee’s report, and to the
UNESCO Constitution, which called for “the free flow of ideas by word and image,” Sean
MacBride wrote, “The free-flow doctrine was developed by the United States and other Western
nations after World War II” (1993, 4). MacBride acknowledged that this had “ties with other
Western libertarian principles.” But the language of “doctrines” and “ties” reflects an
understanding of the debate’s political and economic motivations and stakes. The cultural and
social roots of the American commitment to the free flow principle, as they were traced in the
previous chapter, in fact go much farther back than the immediate post-war era, and go much
deeper than M’Bow, MacBride, and others might have appreciated.
In 2003, twenty years after it had withdrawn from UNESCO, the United States rejoined
the organization. American officials were satisfied the free flow doctrine was no longer under
threat. There were no alliances of socialist countries seeking to assert a right of reply for
developing countries or recommending the licensure of journalists internationally. Koichiro
Matsuura, a “soft-spoken Japanese diplomat” had taken over as director general of UNESCO and
“slimmed down the bureaucracy, finally convincing Washington that UNESCO was worthy of
rejoining” (Sciolino 2003). The United States had won the cold war and the commercial culture
of the press was already beginning its global spread. It remained alive and well in the United
States too, as First Lady Laura Bush would learn when she traveled to Paris for the ceremony
marking the U.S.’s reentry into UNESCO. As America’s national anthem played and the
American flag was hoisted to join the flags of the other 189 member countries, a New York Times
reporter shrewdly observed, “Mrs. Bush did not face the flag as the anthem was sung; instead,
she stood perpendicular to it, enabling photographers to capture her in profile, with the flag and
the Eiffel Tower behind. The scene was carefully planned for days by a White House advance
78
team, much to the amusement of longtime UNESCO employees.” (Sciolino 2003). As that
reporter and her report exemplified, the commercial culture of the American press – with its
irreverent and adversarial tendencies – had persevered, but that did not mean the geopolitical and
national interests of the United States necessarily would.

79

Chapter Four: Czech Republic -- “Polarized Pluralism” Comes to Eastern Europe

Just a few years after the United States withdrew from UNESCO, ostensibly in protest
over the supranational organization’s support for Soviet-style public media and its criticism of
commercial media, the Soviet Union collapsed. When a character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel
The Sun Also Rises is asked “How did you go bankrupt?” he responds, “Two ways. Gradually,
then suddenly.” In simplistic terms, the same could be said of the decline and fall of European
communism in 1989-1991. The transition from the economic model of (and economic cultures
within) socialism to that of (and those within) capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)
was not so simple. International political forces and internal economic pressures coalesced in
varying ways, and the end of the cold war represents a complex historical moment which is
beyond the scope of this analysis. This transition from a collectivist to a market-based economy
and from a dictatorial and communist political model to an electoral and democratic one is
understood in several theoretical contexts.
29
In fact, within the international studies literature, a
relatively new set of ideas and methods called “transitology” has emerged, seeking to explain
and delineate the thorny processes of political and economic change in a post-Soviet context
(Sparks 2008, 44). But reading across the literature, the scholarly consensus is the geopolitical
and economic transitions were sudden and abrupt from 1989 to 1991 even if the factors that
precipitated them were playing out gradually. The populations of many of these CEE countries
found themselves rapidly reorienting toward economic and political cultures which they had
hitherto observed only second-hand.

29
One of the most commonly cited theories is Samuel Huntington’s “third wave” of democratization.
80

Post-Communist Transitions in CEE
Several media scholars who focus on this part of the world intently analyze the nature of
transitions, wondering what variables ensure the success of these conversions to democracy,
when a transition can be considered complete, and how globalization influences the initiation –
and specific expression of broader patterns – of transition. In focusing so heavily on the
transitions as objects of analysis – rather than, say, a method of analysis – one risks losing sight
of the complex cultural phenomena in an attempt to neatly periodize. The old maxim, about
change being the only thing that is constant, could be applied and rephrased to assert that
transitions are never “over.” Media systems are subject to continuous change, becoming more or
less democratic, more or less pluralistic, more or less market-oriented, more or less
propagandistic, etc. Just as attempts to periodize add levels of abstraction and, thus, imprecision,
so too do attempts to regionalize. Countries within Central and Eastern Europe each have their
own political and social histories, and their own national customs.
30
Academic attempts to
combine them into a broader geographical units of analysis are necessarily afflicted by a level of
conceptual conflation, and it is important for researchers to acknowledged the specificity which
is lost in an analysis of intraregional commonalities.
Still, the importation of a commercial news culture across CEE countries in the early
1990s represented a process of cultural change that was both abrupt and path dependent.
31
As I
observed in a review of their book Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World (2012),

30
The countries of the Middle East and North Africa have, in the wake of the Arab Spring protests of 2010, received
increased attention from media scholars, and such an attempt to regionalize is evident in the increased use of the
“MENA” acronym.
31
I use “importation” is the loosest sense here. The process by which Western European and North American media
organizations and advertising companies set up shop in CEE countries can’t be understood in the simple terms of
economic exchange (nor, for that matter, political colonization).
81
Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz, “acknowledge the disparate sociopolitical, economic, and
cultural conditions under which media liberalization took place” in CEE and they claim that the
“recent history of feudal and autocratic regimes was bound to produce a public culture that
lacked a solid foundation for media freedom and [pluralism]” (Hannah 2013, 646). This is not to
say that countries of this region had no legacy of independent journalism whatsoever. At the
time, communist political beliefs in CEE were common but by no means universal. Some
countries were home to vibrant subcultures which consisted of underground music, literature and
liberal political and economic ideas (just as many socialist ideas circulated within certain
communities and subcultures within the United States during the time). Two world wars had led
to a period of intensified internationalization and so many individuals living within these
countries had at least a rudimentary understanding of the Western ideals of – and rationales for –
a commercial press. The cultural influence of the Soviet Union and its promotion of an ideal
“socialist man”
32
was, in many cases, not more than forty or fifty years old and so the prospect of
a press independent from Party or state control had not fully receded.
And yet, in the post-Communist era, the transition to a market-oriented journalism culture
was not seamless. Rather than the effortless progression which might occur within a given model
of journalism, the upending of one model for another left journalists and editors scrambling for
familiar reference points. On one level, CEE journalism culture became mimetic of the West. A
new generation of journalists began working for media outlets which were newly created by
local entrepreneurs, had recently changed their leadership and organizational structure, or were
set up by foreign companies. These young journalists “were quite eager to practice a new
journalism, many ready to imitate Western styles that they hardly knew or fully understood” and

32
Just as, in the West, government agencies (and cultural and media organizations) promoted an ideal of “the
democratic man” (Turner 2013; Lasswell 1951)
82
some of them “considered journalism simply an avenue for self-expression, or indeed for
political advocacy” (Gross & Jakubowicz 2012, 6-7).
The reappraisal of journalism within CEE should be considered not only from the
standpoint of the foreign (i.e., Western) reference points that were being emulated, but also the
domestic interpretative contexts and capacities wherein that emulation took place. Hallin and
Mancini describe media system development as an essentially path dependent process, in which
media systems are shaped by – and so must be understood in relation to – the local context in
which they’re shaped (2004). And as one scholar observed, in applying this concept to newer
democracies in Eastern Europe, it is critical to examine “how the role of the media during the
autocratic regime determines their structure and performance in the process of democratization”
(Voltmer 2008, 37). Put otherwise, and with an emphasis on actors (individuals) rather than
structures (institutions), the lived experiences of even the most reform-minded journalists and
editors constrain their ability to imagine, design and advocate for alternative methods of
journalistic practice.
As psychologists understand, behavioral change is most achievable when it is
incremental. When journalists had, for the previous several decades, been situated in a
propagandistic role, defending and advocating for the policies of the Communist Party, the idea
of the press as neutral arbiters was a peculiar one or, at least, a difficult one to realize. In these
new, multiparty political environments, journalists would instead be informed by old
professional routines and practices, and find themselves defending and advocating for the
policies of whichever party they or their publication most affiliated (Gross & Jakubowicz 2012).
In this sense, the media during the democratic transitions of CEE countries in the 1990s
resembled the media during the democratic transition in the U.S. during the 1790s, with party-
83
affiliated (and party-sponsored) news outlets constructing a public sphere characterized by a
marketplace of ideas and political loyalties between publications (i.e., external pluralism), if not
within them (i.e, internal pluralism).
At a conference in Prague in 2015, I conducted interviews with several veteran journalists
from CEE countries – including Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic – who lived and
worked through this transitional period and who helped me identify two distinct types of
professional self-identities which emerged in this period. The first, I call “democrats,” using the
broadest definition possible. Many of these journalists came from the networks of dissidents that
were active in publishing samizdat copies of officially censored, politically subversive texts
throughout the Soviet bloc. Unsatisfied with communist rule, these “printer journalists” used the
printing and distribution technologies of their era to advocate for political alternatives and, often,
values of free expression and self-determination. While some of the roots of these democratic
attitudes extend to encounters with Western European and American literature and political
writing (and political art and subversive music such as rock and roll), many of the deepest roots
are grounded in local experiences of autocratic rule. While Thomas Paine’s pamphlets responded
to oppression by the British monarch, the spirit of the samizdat was a subversive response to the
authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its local proxies. There are certainly echoes of the
former in the latter, and the media they produced and the culture they informed helped support
political revolutions in their respective countries at their respective historical moments. But
given the empirically distinct cultural contexts from which each sprung, it would be facile and
more than a little U.S.-centric to claim that the intellectuals and commentators of the samizdat
were the Thomas Paines of their day. Still, the formal (e.g., often self-published and distributed
illicitly through loose networks) and functional (e.g., politically radical fora for self-expression
84
and dissent
33
) similarities suggest that an analogous commercial culture – one which created
spaces of autonomy and polarization – is distinguishable.
The second type of professional self-concept which emerged among journalists in the
transitional period is one which might be called the “mercenaries.” Just as the “democrats” were
informed, in part, by nationally unique ideas of democracy and a necessarily incomplete and
imprecise idea of the political role that Western journalists play within their democracies, the
“mercenaries” were informed by a perspective on the reciprocal influences of journalism and
capitalism which came, in part, from their own nationally formed hopes for a market economy
and, in part, from an incomplete understanding of the reporter’s role in the commercial news
environment of the West. This group of journalists saw the primary trend in this period less in
political than economic terms: the state-owned media was being de-monopolized, Communist
Party newspapers were dissolving, and public broadcast frequencies began to be auctioned off to
private media companies. The transition to a “free media” model yielded, according to some,
new possibilities for corruption and “kompromat” (or blackmail targeting politicians), which
bore similarities to Tammany Hall’s famous patronage, and subsequent weaponization, of New
York newspapers during the nineteenth century (Mungiu-Pippidi 2012). Mercenaries were
aware of this culture of corruption even if they weren’t active participants within it, and they thus
had less romantic ideas about the political purpose of journalism.
This type of self-concept was alternatively driven by a conception of the journalist as a
participant in a new commodity culture in which his or her job description was instrumental: to
satisfy the information demands and the commercial and political tastes of one’s audiences and

33
According to an analysis of an archive of samizdat materials that was commissioned by the U.S. Congress and is
now hosted at the Open Society Archive in Budapest, “by far the largest category in samizdat was political
materials. There were 3,284 items, constituting 62% of Arkhiv Samizdata. The significant majority of them
consisted of personal statements, appeals, protests or some information about arrests, trials and so on” (Hyung-min,
J. 2004).
85
owners. These journalists were not necessarily bereft of expressive autonomy but, as in the
Soviet media that preceded (and so, per Hallin and Mancini’s idea of path dependency,
informed) the new era, they sought this autonomy in the writing itself. As one Romanian
journalist informed me in an impromptu and informal focus group, many journalists in the Soviet
era saw themselves as apolitical, aspiring to be novelists or poets, not columnists or politicians.
During the transition, “they became performing artists, not creative artists,” interested in the
expression of information and ideas, rather than the discovery of information and competition of
ideas.
In both the “democrat” and “mercenary” types, we find points of convergence and
divergence with the commercial culture of the U.S. press. Journalists in the CEE were eager to
learn about and participate in market-oriented journalism, but they were not, for the most part,
fueled by an entrepreneurial ambition or an ideological commitment to free enterprise. As one
informant told me, “journalists during the transition didn’t see their work as a calling, and this
might have something to do with the lack of religious feeling among the population” in the
aftermath of communism (Nessbitt, personal communication, November 14, 2015). Indeed, the
“post-Communist transition/transformation is sometimes regarded as a test of the verity of Max
Weber’s… notion that there is universality in the significance and value of cultural phenomena
developed… by Western civilization” (Gross & Jakubowicz 2012, 3). In other words, the liberal
ideals of free trade, open markets, and individual freedom might be rooted in either an existing or
an inherited “spirit of capitalism” found in the West, but that these ideals, where they exist
within CEE, have different cultural origins or shallower cultural roots since largely secular and
seemingly pragmatic attitudes reign. I asked one Czech communication scholar whether Weber’s
canonic ideas have relevance in his country’s journalism culture. He observed that Prague has
86
some of the most churches per capita within Europe and yet the Czech culture lacks religious
fervor seen elsewhere in Western and Southern Europe (and in the U.S.). And he said that,
without another religious orientation, “in the early 1990s, Czechoslovakia tried to adopt
neoliberalism as a religion” but that the zeal of the converts had subdued in recent years as
people lacked the sense of fulfillment they had – perhaps overly – anticipated (Jirak, personal
communication, November 13, 2015).
This lack of consensus over the appropriate role of journalists in a democracy derived not
simply from the differing conceptions of the political and economic imperatives among
journalists within the CEE countries, but also from global economic factors which put normative
pressure on national journalism cultures. Western financial institutions such as the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund promoted a policy of “shock therapy,” which sought to swiftly
privatize various sectors of the economy and liberalize the national economies. These large
institutions granted loans intended for the development of news organizations, which were
conditioned on structural economic changes such as the allowance of private ownership and
investment and the encouragement of the pursuit of commercial revenue. Many of these
international institutions – part of what was called the “Washington Consensus” – reflected a
Western belief that decentralized market competition would remediate any vestiges of
authoritarianism. Of course, the opening of new markets was also expected to create prosperous
opportunities for both local entrepreneurs and transnational corporations alike. Instead of the
state proposing itself as an all-encompassing political and economic system, in CEE during and
after the transition, “the market as a social institution figures importantly in the practice of
democracy as a social and political system” (Perusko & Popovic 2008, 166). In other words, the
structural changes that influenced and reinforced the transition to the commercial media model –
87
including the investment and regulation by international monetary organizations and the market
entry of transnational media companies (mostly from Western Europe and the U.S.) – radically
reconfigured social arrangements and, in turn, influenced new modes of cultural production.
Media development might have been “path dependent” and national customs, beliefs and
prejudices might not have been fully escapable, but there were also new paths being rapidly
excavated by the new flows of global capital and emergence of new communication networks.
These too were inescapable, especially in CEE countries. The “transnational aspect of media
concentration is more pronounced in the East [of Europe] than the West, where the media
industry developed indigenously over decades” (Perusko & Popovic 2008, 183). Which brings us
back to the “suddenness” of the rise of the commercial press in CEE. While different countries in
the region experienced varying degrees of economic liberalization in the pre-Soviet period, one
thing that unifies these countries is that the abrupt collapse of communism left a precarious
political and economic environment in which control of the media by hastily organized political
parties, opportunistic local businesspeople and foreign owners is accelerated by a “suspicion of
the state in the aftermath of authoritarianism” which Hallin and Mancini (2012, 25) compare to
the democratic transitions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, and which can be seen as resembling
the culture of the press in the eighteenth century United States
34
. As with the United States, the
culture of the market-oriented media led to the commercialization of content, which led in turn to
communicative abundance and pluralism within the media sector. The “post-Communist
countries saw an unprecedented growth in the number and diversity of media outlets. … The
explosion of commercial media outlets led to a diversification of media formats and genres”
(Kaneva & Ibroscheva 2012, 72). This observation provides some preliminary support for the

34
With the exception of the prevalence of foreign ownership, which was, of course, less common before the era of
globalization.
88
possibility that spaces of autonomy and spaces of polarization are emergent within the CCE
countries.
As with the U.S. press, the proliferation and diversification of media was fueled
principally by advertising revenue. But where the U.S. gradually developed a nationwide
consumer culture as the production and distribution methods grew more sophisticated over time,
the global availability of technologies and potential advertisers during the 1990s made the
transition to a commercial culture in the CEE downright abrupt. Just a few years after the fall of
communism, global advertising agencies were establishing branches in CEE capitals and,
between 1997 and 2008 alone, overall spending on advertising in major media outlets within
CEE quintupled from $7 billion to $35 billion (Kaneva & Ibroscheva 2012, 73). In visits to
Romania and the Czech Republic within the past several years, I’ve observed how the
commercial advertising is barely distinguishable from the glitzy and glossy advertising one
comes to expect within the U.S. and Western Europe. While the products and services being
advertised are often local, and the values that are being invoked are culturally specific, the
fundamental form and function of the advertisements – and the promotional and sensational
culture they project and perpetuate – are empirically indistinguishable from those of Western
advertising.
As someone who saw cultural life and social arrangements as unpredictable and un-
determined by economic or political arrangements, Karl Popper would likely have rejected the
tidiness of the “path dependency,” explanation for media development in CEE (1945). For
Popper, the true transformation of a closed society to an open one is gradual, because it relies on
intergenerational beliefs and collective attitudes which are not as malleable as political and
economic institutions. Western diplomats have insisted for some time that democratic feeling
89
and behavior are insufficient for true democracies, and democratic institutions that support these
things are vital. Popper’s analysis inverts this equation, arguing that democratic institutions are
secondary to democratic attitudes which must be cultivated over time. When the political
transitions within CEE took place, the government lost control of the media as an organ for
propaganda and political elites were sent scrambling for finding new tactics for political
communication in a competitive and commercial media environment. The upshot is a tactic
called “political marketing” (and an attendant communication subfield by the same name). One
scholar points out the West was home to three subsequent phases of political communication
development: a pre-modern phase drawing upon low-budget and crude grassroots methods, a
modern phase when public opinion polls were introduced and television emerged, and a
postmodern phase in which diverse messages are disseminated to niche audiences online and on
cable news based upon sophisticated demographic and psychographic data. This scholar
observes:
“No such organic development could take place in the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe, where free and plural political competition and media have no tradition, except
for brief periods. As a result, a few years after the political transformations of 1989 -
1991, the techniques of pre-modern, modern and postmodern campaigns were adopted
roughly simultaneously, and seem to have coexisted to date in the region” (Bajomi-
Lazar 2012, 56).

The commercial culture of journalism in the post-Communist era can be considered from
the standpoint of this truncated timeline of its genesis or, as has been shown previously, the way
in which journalists conceive of themselves as alternately agents of democracy or commerce.
90
The practice of political marketing, attentive as it is to the preferences of voters and “sellable”
qualities of candidates, can be seen as a culture in which the element of choice that underpins
both democratic politics and a capitalist economics is isolated and valorized, but stripped of the
“spirit” of either. As we’ll see in the case of the Czech Republic, this type of political marketing
does, in turn, draw upon a national identity, engender democratic and populist sentiment and
promote a monitory culture, as discussed in chapter one.

A Brief Cultural History of the Czech Media
Vaclav Havel, who served as president of Czechoslovakia during the fall of communism
(1989-1992) and of the Czech Republic during the decade following the Czech-Slovak split in
1993, noticed the commercial culture of capitalism began to emerge in his country before
capitalism itself did. In his well known essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” he observed, “the
hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West has, in essence, appeared in
our society (The long period of coexistence with the West has only hastened this process).” He
went on to describe the way in which “the consumer and industrial society” had begun to
emerge, along with its “concomitant social, intellectual, and psychological consequences,” in
Czechoslovakia at the same time the socialism was on the wane (Havel 1985, 26-27).
The early emergence of these values, which Havel seems to imply resulted at least in part
from increasing internationalization, allowed media pluralism and political marketing to take off
as rapidly as they did in the Czech Republic. It’s also possible that the relatively short reign of
communism, by historical standards, was not sufficient to erase the collective memory of
democratic practices that pre-dated the Soviet Union’s occupation of the Czech territory. As one
Czech media scholar reminded me, “it’s important not to overestimate the influence of the Czech
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Republic’s communist past – it was only forty years of communism after all” (Jirak, personal
communication, November 13, 2015). In this section, I examine the transformation of the Czech
media culture in the wake of communist rule. While much of the extant research focuses tightly
on politically or economically determinist concepts, democratic theory or “varieties of
capitalism” (Hancke 2009), this analysis will focus on the collective beliefs and attitudes among
networks of journalists – and the public more broadly – that alternately sustain and strain the
political and economic systems which have been so thoroughly studied. By the end, this analysis
will show how the pivot to a market-oriented media culture within the Czech Republic led to the
fortification of a shared national identity and an abundance of commercial media which,
respectively represent the first phase in the cycles of autonomy (light) and polarization (heat)
discussed in chapter one. Far from being haphazard, the changes within the Czech media have
taken place, and must be understood, within an historical context of media change.
The Czech people had more experience with democracy than other countries in eastern
Europe, especially in the period between the first and second world wars, and during the Prague
Spring of 1968 when politically liberal social movements led to the election of reformer
Alexander Dubcek as the head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Dubcek advocated
for individual freedoms and more economic decentralization – and these led to an approximation
of a “free press” for a short period – but he was eventually subdued by Soviet political leaders.
Before becoming a part of the Soviet bloc, the country had long maintained an international
orientation – often through political colonization, given the country’s national history as
successively a part of the Bohemian Kingdom, Austro-Hungarian Empire and then being
annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938
35
.

35
The periphery of the Czech country was referred to Sudetenland by Germany and its inhabitants were mostly
ethnic Germans who were pro-Hitler and critical of Czechoslovakia.
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In the early 1900s, as in the U.S., Czechoslovakia was ethnically diverse and home to
many diasporic communities. Czech nationalism began to play out between newspapers that
were catering to specific slices of the population. Prague was (and remains) the country’s media
and political capital and ethnic Germans and Czechs lived side by side in the capital city. Czech
language newspapers developed to compete with German language papers and a fierce
competition ensued. But the competition was at first ethnic, and not primarily economic, in
orientation.
The complicated history of ethnic tension between Germanic and Czech people living in
the region that is now the Czech Republic is beyond the scope of this dissertation. But it is
relevant and important to note the reclamation of the Czech language and culture was part of a
nationalist revival that took place during the 18th and 19th centuries, and accreted to a
reinvigorated sense of Czech national identity by the early 1900s. In the late 1700s, there were
174 noble families in Bohemia but only a few of them “were proud of their Czech extraction and
helped to uphold and later to revive the Czech language” (Kerner 1932, 70). But by the 1830s,
as mass distribution of books became more widespread, Josef Jungmann developed a five-
volume Czech-German dictionary which helped spur a renaissance in the popular use of Czech,
rather than German, in the publication of books and scientific journals. The standardization of
language brought about by commercial printing influenced both elite and popular culture. A
conspicuous example of the latter is Karel Jaromir Erben’s wildly popular Czech nursery rhymes
and folk tales, which contributed to the nationalist project. And while the Czech composer
Antonin Dvorak’s was not politically active, his compositions were appropriated by nationalist
politicians at the end of the nineteenth century to help cement a Czech nationalist culture
(Brodbeck 2007).
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Journalism was, of course, a major part of the deliberative processes that enabled people
to imagine themselves as a national community. While the Czech press doesn’t have the long
history of commercialism and freedom from censorship that the U.S. press does, Czech
journalists did have a long tradition, dating back to the Bohemian kingdom, of using journalism
as a vehicle for sharing political opinions and creative expression. As one informant observed,
“there was always a low level of press professionalism within [the Czech Republic]” with
newspapers sponsored by wealthy individuals and reliably protective of the upper class interests.
But, he also noted, as the upper class gradually embraced the Czech language and national
culture, the competition between Czech language and German language newspapers intensified.
This ethnic competition had a strong economic dimension, as the drive to expand sympathetic
audiences corresponded to a drive to expand a market of consumers. Accompanied by
contestation over cultural institutions such as theaters and museums, which began to gain a more
nationalist feel, the press propelled an “identity project” which helped lead to the creation of
Czechoslovakia as an independent nation-state in 1918 under the leadership of President Tomas
Garrigue Masaryk (Jirak, personal communication, November 13, 2015).
The idea that the Czech Republic owes its sense of national identity and culture to
nationalists who developed dictionaries (and wrote orchestral music and published fairy tales) is
not implausible. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems almost predictable. “One might suppose
that nationalist movements, seeking to form separate states, will seek to convert dialect into
language,” writes Michael Billig. He continues, “The power of writing down a way of speaking
should not be underestimated: it provides material evidence for the claim that a separate
language exists” (1995, 34). This cursory look at recent historical developments within the
Czech press is intended as an antidote to the bulk of scholarly analyses which frame the
94
transformation of the country’s media in purely political terms, while obscuring important social,
psychological and cultural dimensions.
Within some foreign policy and scholarly circles, private media ownership is seen as a
necessary corollary to democratic governance. When the first privately owned national television
channel launched in the Czech Republic in 1993, it gave most Czech citizens their first encounter
with such commercial TV
36
. A distinction between “private” and “public” media was something
with which many Czechs were familiar only in the context of theoretical and hypothetical
political debates. So, to many, “widely accepted commercial programming was seen as evidence
of victory of democratic media, especially as people found it hard to see a clear difference
between (old) state television and (new) public service television” (Jirak & Kopplova 2013,
185). While some media scholars have openly questioned the democratic value of the Czech
media’s “market mentality” – calling the media system “a democratic one, but media contents
are sensational, commercialized, dumb, biased and loyal to big corporations” – they also
acknowledge its predecessor had been “a tool of ideological indoctrination” (Ibid, 187 - 188).
The privatization of media has certainly led to communicative abundance – before the transition,
the broadcast options for Czechs were largely limited to state-owned Czechoslovak Television
and Czechoslovak Radio – but some scholars and critical citizens alike worry that the quantity of
journalism has come at the expense of its quality.
On the whole, however, Czech society embraced the culture of the commercial press.
Yes, critics have decried the way in which the commercial press has become “depoliticized”
(McChesney 1999) and argued that, within the Czech Republic, “a strong industrial sector of
media emerged, which was not restrained by any feeling of responsibility towards society” (Jirak

36
Czechs had been exposed, however, to the Czech language programming of Western radio broadcasters – in 1982,
one fifth of Czech citizens tuned into the U.S.’s Voice of America (and slightly fewer to Radio Free Europe and the
BBC), and this would climb to one third of the population by 1989 (IPORFS 1989, 16).
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& Kopplova 2008, 8). But some prominent observers are more sanguine about
hypercommercialization and ownership by foreign companies. Jiri Pehe, one of former president
Vaclav Havel’s top aides, pointed out that, during the first twenty years after the transition, most
of the media companies were owned by Swiss and German multinationals and the corporate
owners’ primary focus on profits protected the editors and journalists from editorial or political
meddling by their owners. Pehe, the director of NYU Prague who provides political commentary
to both private and public broadcasters (and in a popular political blog) even concedes TV Nova,
the first and highest rated commercial television channel in the Czech Republic, though
sometimes possessing a “flavor of sensationalism,” sometimes has better public affairs
programming than public television (Pehe, personal communication, November 10, 2015).
Aside from the perceived editorial and production quality, and lack of direct political
interference, there is a third factor that leads to the popularity of the commercial press: a kind of
resignation, after the oppressive environment of statist media, that the commercial marketplace
of news is a far superior alternative, if not the best of all possible media worlds. As Jirak and
Kopplova recall, “Czech society resented and rejected any criticism of anything coming from the
‘free world’ … the dangers … were overshadowed by the dazzling glare of the new, democratic
idyll” (2008, 8 - 9). According to this interpretation, the spectacular and symbolic power of the
commercial media drew Czechs toward it, like moths to a flame, and while nobody was looking,
the media system shed its commitment to social responsibility. Even if this conclusion is
overstated, or treats media audiences as more passive than I would, the fact that the Czech public
was, on some level, enthralled by the novelty of the new commercial journalism was borne out
by my interviews with veteran Czech journalists. One journalist, who had reported for both
public and private broadcasters, commented, “You [in the U.S.] were used to tabloids and horse
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race coverage. We [in the Czech Republic] went from media that has [sic] no pluralism, no
tabloids, no pornography, no sensationalism to watching late night meteorologists get naked on
cable news for ratings!”
37
(Anonymous, personal communication, November 12, 2015).
Two more recent phenomena concern Pehe: (1) the sale of many of the Czech
newspapers and magazines to wealthy Czech moguls and (2) the fragmentation of political
discussion as the result of the Internet (Pehe, personal communication, November 10, 2015).
Pehe points to politically ambitious billionaires like Andrej Babis (who purchased MAFRA, the
company which operates two of the country’s major daily newspapers, before being appointed
finance minister) and Zdenek Bekala (the owner of Respekt, a liberal magazine begun by
samizdat journalists during the transition and which previously had Karel Schwarzenberg, the
former minister of foreign affairs and the runner up in the 2013 presidential election, as a
majority shareholder). Pehe warns these media moguls too closely resemble an oligarchic model
although, given the unabashed political interests of these owners, their public disavowal of direct
interference in the editorial process
38
, and the fact that, as Pehe acknowledges, “the anti-
monopoly office does sometimes get involved when necessary,” it’s possible the new Czech
owners have come to instead resemble politically ambitious U.S. media moguls, such as Michael
Bloomberg or William Randolph Hearst (who ran for mayor of New York City as a third party
candidate in 1907). In fact, two Czech journalists made the comparison between Babis and
Bloomberg during my interviews.

37
TV Nova, the private cable news channel started by Vladimir Zelezny (with Ronald Lauder of the Estee Lauder
family as an initial financial backer), ran a 3 minute program called "Počasíčko" – an erotic weather report – each
night, featuring a nude meteorologist. At first, the meteorologists were exclusively women, but then the reports
began featuring men. It’s unclear whether the addition of men represented a true commercial demand or a
commitment toward gender equality and, thus, social responsibility.
38
Rather than using press outlets as political instruments, at least one of these moguls (Babis) has proposed,
conversely, to run the country like a company (Pehe, personal communication, November 10, 2015).
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The fact that the Czech elites are purchasing media companies from foreign companies
might also be interpreted as a foreseeable consequence of the rise of a new class of wealthy
individuals amid the new conditions of capitalism. And it’s uncertain that the new crop of Czech
media owners will exercise undue influence within the culture of journalism production.
According to one recent survey of Czech journalists amid the “media ownership turmoil,” while
some reported a sense of “instability and uncertainty of Czech journalism” and “insecur[ity]
about their employment as the number of permanent positions has decreased,” there was no
evidence to suggest that “the autonomy of journalists or their perception of external influences”
had changed in any meaningful way. Instead, the study revealed how the public controversy had
reinvigorated a sense of professionalism and ethics among journalists (which were lacking
because the new crop of journalists that entered the field in the transition of the early 1990s were
people with “no education in journalism or communication”) and, facing public skepticism of
their field, journalists were prompted “to show a refreshed sense of the importance of journalistic
ethics … [and] renewed interest of Czech journalists in the values and sense of their profession
as well as their normative role in society” (Hajek, R., Stefanikova, S., Lab, F. & Tejkalova, A.N.
2015).
There was another recent survey of Czech journalists, which appears to undermine
theories which propose there is a “capture” of the Czech media by “dominant” political interests,
and the intensification of profit-seeking by mogul-owning outlets will inescapably lead to a
“depoliticized” neoliberal dystopia. Also published in 2015, this study found the younger
generation of journalists (what the authors refer to as the “post-transitive generation”) is more
adversarial toward the politically and economically powerful and actually had a weaker
identification with the media’s market logic. The authors speculate that the older generation of
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journalists might have less critical distance from the politically powerful since it “participated in
developing the current shape of the liberal-democratic regime, and it might … [have a] sense of
responsibility and unacknowledged worries about the existing regime they have been helping to
build” (Moravec, V., Urbanikova, M. & Volek, J. 2015, 43). Moreover, they attribute the
younger generation’s weaker connection to the market logic to its “weak or non-existent
identification with the market ethos of the transformational 1990s which saw the building of a
market society as one of the forms of ideological cutting off from the old regime.” The younger
journalists see “commercial logic as their ‘father’s ideology’ against which, with the absence of
[a] real enemy, it is possible to make a stand in a permissive society” (Ibid, 44). This presents
two paradoxes: first, the younger journalists who are more distant from the democratic struggle
of twenty-five years ago appear more willing to engage in the kind of independent and
adversarial journalism which democracy requires. Second, the younger generation of journalists
is more awash in a more commercial culture, but appears more capable than the preceding
generation of recognizing the drawbacks – and not just the affordances – of that commercialism.
Pehe’s concern that the Czech media barons too closely resemble Russian oligarchs is
mitigated by examining the relatively resilient, autonomous, and democratic cultures which exist
among Czech journalists but not, at least to the same extent, among their Russian counterparts. In
a comparative analysis of the Czech and Russian media, Florian Toepfl reveals the “degree of
legitimacy that communist rule enjoyed amongst journalists” was low in the Czech Republic
relative to Russia,
39
and journalism education “adapted to Western standards” in the Czech
Republic but not in Russia (2013, 244). Toepfl also shows how the media-related attitudes and
beliefs of citizens were quite different in each country during the post-Communist era. In the

39
as mentioned, Czech intellectuals had fought for press freedom for over a century.
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Czech Republic in the late 1990s, 89 percent of citizens believed that press freedom was
important to democracy and, when polled a few years later, fully 46 percent of Russians were in
favor of tighter controls upon the media (2013, 248). Finally, the advertising-driven consumer
culture which grew rapidly within the Czech Republic during the 1990s was conspicuously
absent in Russia where “lack of advertising revenue… severely hamper[ed] media change
throughout the 1990s” and, unlike in the Czech market, “foreign capital was largely absent”
(2013, 247). Like the handful of new media barons in the Czech Republic, the oligarchs of
Russia purchased media outlets to advance their political ambitions. But the political ambitions
of Czech media barons, unlike the Russian oligarchs, are more constrained by economic
pressures exerted by the quest for advertisers. These pressures have a moderating effect,
privileging the commercial media’s economic logic, which I’ve previously characterized as a
logic of attraction rather than of promotion.
40
In any case, these data empirically seem to suggest,
contra any superficial similarities which exist between the billionaire patrons in each country, the
Czech news media’s economic cultures of production and political culture of consumption are
more typical of the culture of the U.S.-style commercial press than of the dominant media culture
in modern Russia.
Looking at all the research in this section in aggregate, it becomes clear how, in the
aftermath of communist rule, the rapid commercialization of the Czech press led to three
attributes found in the first phases in the development of spaces of polarization: a media culture
marked by abundant (and sometimes sensationalist) media outlets, new pressures for – and
powers of – professional autonomy, and a pluralistic market for political news. It is also now
apparent that the rapid commercialization contributed to the first phases in the development of

40
We’ll take a look in the next section at how Czech politicians have adapted to this new phenomenon.
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spaces of autonomy: the former samizdat journalists who began to see themselves in the
“democrat” role and as advocates for their preferred parties perpetuated a sense of democratic
diversity and national unity. At the same time, other journalists who saw themselves in a more
“mercenary” role, seeking to “give the people what they want” helped perpetuate a common
culture which is alternately consumerist and populist. With a few minor exceptions
41
, my
analysis has emphasized the values and beliefs of journalists and the public, abstaining from a
structuralist or historical materialist approach. Consistent with my overarching research question
– which examines economic cultures of news production alongside political cultures of
consumption and the ways in which these resemble their U.S. counterparts – I hope to have
contributed, to some extent, to an understanding of how the commercial culture of the press has
emerged and expressed itself in the Czech context. The next section grapples with how the
commercial press has imposed a new culture of transparency and compelled political leaders to
conform to the formats, timetables, and content demands of commercial news organizations.

Political Marketing as an Autonomous & Polarizing Practice
The Czech media have become more independent of the government and dependent on
the commercial marketplace in recent years. As a result, political parties and candidates for
elective office who seek to attract media attention have had to become responsive to the
pressures of commercial media. This basic observation is the foundation of the “political
marketing” theory, which has gained traction among Eastern European media scholars and
campaign consultants alike. Political marketing, “the utilization of commercial marketing
techniques and concepts in politics” (Lees-Marshment 2009, 1) has arisen as a communication

41
Such as the reference to the lending policies of the World Bank, the obvious geopolitical contests that were at the
heart of the waning days of the cold war, and the Czech language broadcasts by the American and British
governments.
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subfield which theorizes and interprets the way in which candidates are “sold” – as if they were
consumer products – within a competitive marketplace of votes and political support.
The theory’s premise is not particularly new, especially among scholars who study the
U.S. media. Joe McGinniss documented how Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign came to be
dominated by advertising and public relations executives who urged the candidate to focus more
on his political image and popular appeal than on policy issues (1998). Reaching farther back
into U.S. political culture, historian John Morello’s book Selling the President, 1920 tells the tale
of Albert Lasker, the president of a Chicago advertising agency who used celebrity endorsements
and the latest advertising tactics to sell not only Lucky Strike cigarettes and Sunkist oranges, but
also the presidential candidacy of Warren G. Harding (2001). While marketing appeals have
always been a part of democratic politics (Perloff 1999), the emergence of a field of political
marketing, and its swift adoption by Czech campaign strategists in the wake of media
commercialization, suggest the commercial press culture is instigating – and not simply
reflecting – certain hypercompetitive aspects of the political culture.
Political marketing theorists suggest political parties can fit into one of three types: the
product-oriented party (which sees its ideas and policies as essentially right and capable of
selling themselves), the sales-oriented party (which believes strongly in its policies but actively
seeks to attract the public to them), and the market-oriented party (which uses market
intelligence to identify voter preferences and adapt the candidate’s policy positions accordingly)
(Lees-Marshment 2009; Stromback 2009).
A crude interpretation of these categories might argue that the product-oriented party is
likely to be comprised of ideologues unresponsive to their constituents while the market-oriented
party simply engages in political opportunism, pandering and shape-shifting with no abiding
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vision. Value judgments like these aside, the proponents of this theory provide considerable
evidence that, in an era when traditional institutional affinities – such as political party loyalty –
are eroding, “the incentive to become market-oriented is much stronger, both because parties in
such a situation cannot take their own voters for granted and because they might be able to win
new voters” (Stromback 2009, 23). Another factor that leads political systems to become more
market-oriented is the level of media commercialization and journalistic professionalism. In a
more commercial media environment, it is “more important… for the parties to manage and spin
the news in a favourable way,” and in the face of “interpretive and assertive journalism” it might
be “more important for the parties to be market-oriented, as it might make it more difficult for
the media to frame them as unresponsive and elitist” (Stromback 2009, 26-27). Whereas, in
Hungary, which has entrenched political parties and a media environment more partisan than
commercial, “parties have grown more and more independent of the needs and wants of the
people” (Kiss & Mihalyffy, cited in Hannah 2013, 649), the Czech Republic is often cited as an
example where market-oriented politics has flourished.
The notion that, amid a globally commercialized (and depoliticized) press, political
parties and other social organizations have begun to dissolve is consistent with a particular view
of cultural globalization. This view sees globalization “as the experience of a deterritorialized
culture” and one which is “substitutive” rather than “additive” (Beck & Willms 2004, 38).
Global culture is thus characterized by “reflexive modernity,” in which institutional forms are
deteriorating (rather than simply transforming), the nation-state is losing geopolitical power in
the face of private transnational enterprises (rather than simply assuming new institutional
logics) and individualization is usurping traditional modes social solidarity. Although the capital
and corporate entities that are extensions of a commercial press culture might be transnational in
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scope (indeed, many advertisements on Czech TV are for American, French and Japanese
products) and that commercial culture can be inspired or informed by foreign influences
(especially in an era where information and individuals circulate globally), the particular culture
is itself nationally situated, expressed, negotiated, and adjudicated.
And political parties and other institutions are not dissolving in the Czech Republic. They
are now required to adapt to and participate in a newly commercial press culture, in which
journalists see themselves as “guardians of democracy” (Matuskova, Eible & Braun 2010) and
media companies have economic pressure to attract and maintain market share. Parties’ public
legitimacy and popularity are increasingly shaped by the media. So they are required to reform or
transform themselves in a way that suits the commercial news media’s preferences (e.g.,
narrative consistency, visual appeal, accessibility/intelligibility for a broad audience). And this
mediatization of politics is occurring globally (Mazzoleni & Schulz 1999).
Beyond the mediatization of politics, the Czech press’s correspondence to a market-
oriented political campaign culture has also spurred a culture of monitory journalism. This is best
demonstrated with a brief description of a high profile political news story. In 2005, the Czech
prime minister Stanislov Gross became embroiled in a scandal when financial irregularities in
the purchase of his apartment were reported. Gross, the highest ranking member of the left-wing
Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD), was elected during a moment of public skepticism
toward the political system, with hopes that he would reinvigorate the party and modernize the
government. Mlada Fronta Dnes, an opposition newspaper which leans in support of the right-
wing Civic Democratic Party (ODS), disputed Prime Minister Gross’s claim that his uncle lent
him the money for the down payment when it investigated his uncle’s financial status. This led
the uncle to “change his story, saying he himself had borrowed the money from relatives living
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abroad” (Cameron 2005). For three months, Gross attempted to maintain his office and reassure
a skeptical public that he was guilty of no wrongdoing. But the consistent scandal-seeking media
attention – along with criticism by watchdog organizations such as the Czech branch of
Transparency International – eventually led Gross to resign.
Of course, it is difficult to determine whether the adversarial reporting of Mlada Fronta
Dnes was propelled by a civic mission, a political agenda, or a desire to sell newspapers to its
right-leaning and largely anti-Gross readership. Each of these motivations was cited by Czech
journalists who were asked to recall this incident in my interviews. It is likely each of these
factors played some role and, for that matter, they are not always mutually exclusive. For
example, the partisan legacy of a newspaper might influence its positioning in the commercial
marketplace or the commercial strength of a newspaper might make it more politically
independent and, thus, better able to carry out an idealized civic mission. One thing that is clear,
however, is that the effect of these various motivations is the same: The pluralistic and
commercial media which have arisen within the Czech Republic in the past twenty-five years
have propelled a vigilant and monitorial press culture which, among elected officials, prizes
transparency and punishes secrecy.
Openness and transparency are not the only political values being promoted within the
Czech press, however. As previously mentioned, the Czech political system has become
“market-oriented,” meaning that political candidates and parties have adjusted their policy
emphasis and refashioned their public identities based upon data about prospective voters’
attitudes and opinions. Anna Matuskova is a campaign consultant who has used these political
marketing techniques as well as a scholar who analyzes their use.
42
After Prime Minister Gross

42
As an example of the influence of the globalization of professional education, Matuskova studied for a year at
Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs as a Fulbright Scholar. Given her broad range of
105
resigned, his Social Democratic Party was in a state of disarray. Although “Czech voters behave
in a stable and consistent way and mostly stay loyal to ‘their’ parties, parties overall have to deal
with low party membership and low party identification” (Matuskova, Eible & Braun 2010, 159).
As a result of this low identification, the two leading political parties
43
“cannot rely on members’
votes, and are forced to run more general voter-centered campaigns” (Ibid, 164). With the
scandal surrounding Gross, the reputation of his Social Democratic (CSSD) party had been badly
bruised. In June of 2005, hoping to win over new voters while reassuring party loyalists, that
party elevated an energetic politician named Jiri Paroubeck as its new leader and the country’s
prime minister. It also retained the American political consulting firm Penn, Schoen and Berland
Associates (PSB), which had deep experience coaching clients throughout the world on how to
market themselves in democratic campaigns.
Even before PSB was retained, academic researchers had sent an e-mail survey to
members of the Czech Parliament trying to measure their beliefs about common political
marketing tactics. Three-quarters of respondents
44
said the campaign tactics which helped them
identify target groups were important, even if only one-third acknowledged the importance of
public opinion polls (which are the most commonly used tactic to identify these groups).
Certainly these poll results should not be taken at face value, given the likelihood a social
desirability bias would be present when politicians make assessments of campaign tactics of
which many of their constituents might be skeptical. Among the respondents, members of the

Czech connections within the academic world (she is on faculty at Charles University), the political world (she is an
independent consultant working primarily for Andrej Babis), and the media world (her political communication
work has strengthened her relationships within the Czech press), she was one of my primary informants over the
course of several days of fieldwork in Prague.
43
The Czech Republic is home to a multiparty system although, of the five parties that typically win some
representation in Parliament, the left-leaning Social Democrats (CSSD) and right-leaning Civic Democrats (ODS)
have the most representation and influence.
44
with an approximately 15 percent response rate after surveys were sent to all 200 members of the House of
Deputies and 81 members of the Senate.
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Social Democrats (CSSD) provided the most positive views of political marketing techniques as
“CSSD members are more open to the possibility of adjusting the party platform according to the
voters’ desires” (Ibid, 164-165).
Even before the fallout from its high profile scandal, the Social Democrats were primed
to cater to the desires of Czech voters. An internal poll commissioned on behalf of CSSD found
that, “despite heading the government for seven years, CSSD was perceived as an ideologically
undefined party” and with the right policy priorities, would have more potential than its
competitors to expand its base (Ibid, 169). So this ambiguity over the CSSD’s core mission was
both the party’s opportunity and its challenge. Ultimately, the party’s slogan in the 2006
parliamentary elections – “Security and Prosperity” – was taken directly from public opinion
polling which found that the two policy issues of greatest importance to voters were (1) social
safety net issues like healthcare, pensions and unemployment benefits, and (2) economic issues.
The party continued to conduct large-scale polls on a monthly basis and continuously refined
both its policy platform and communication strategy based on them (Ibid, 169). Although it did
not eventually form the governing majority, its market-oriented political marketing strategy was
broadly seen as a modern, data-driven approach that was sensitive to public opinion and the way
in which the media influence that opinion and set the political agenda (McCombs & Shaw 1972).
In short, it was the transformation of the political practices to suit the tastes of the commercial
media which, itself, had transformed to suit the tastes of its audience. It was mediatization.
This trend is not without its critics. One pair of leading scholars of the Czech media refer
to this it as the “reality show called democratization.” They demonstrate how, in the
hypercompetitive media environment, even the public television channel has begun to be
“governed by the principles of marketing tactics” and offer slick programming that resembles the
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more profit-driven channels
45
(Jirak & Kopplova 2008, 21). They argue that the dependence on
advertising revenue and an “MBA mentality” have led media organizations to hire more
inexpensive young people who, without adequate “experience” and “life wisdom,” bring with
them an “inclination towards emotive expression of exalted, one-sided attitudes, tawdry language
bordering on vulgarity, general crudeness of communication and declining identification with the
journalistic profession as a life mission” (Ibid, 18). This vulgar media culture shapes the political
culture, or so this line of analysis posits. Whether the Czech media’s commercial culture is
democratizing or debasing the political process – and I suggest throughout this dissertation such
a culture of the press often does both – echoes of Tocqueville’s exegesis of the vulgarity of the
press in the United States (following its bout with foreign-based authoritarian rule) ring out.
After decades of a parliamentary system of democracy in which the members of
parliament elected the prime minister, the Czech Republic became a presidential democracy and,
in 2013, for the first time, Czech citizens were able to directly elect their country’s leader. My
interviews with Czech journalists led me to conclude that at least part of the impetus for this
change came from the deterioration of public confidence in political leaders, and that this was in
turn driven by the scandal-seeking and a “vulgar” and polarizing press. Though none of my
informants explicitly invoked mediatization, the explanations they provided for why the Czech
public sought to directly elect its head of state aligned with mediatization’s general proposition:
candidates are only knowable and accountable to the majority of their constituents through the
media, and when the press becomes independent of political elites and responsive to – and
representative of – the public who consume it, a more direct model of democracy becomes
possible and even desirable.

45
This is a criticism that often gets lodged against American public television as corporate sponsorship, the
donations of wealthy individuals, and the competition for audience share have hampered its public mission
(Ledbetter 1998).
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Mediatization goes beyond commercial media proposing themselves as “guardians of
democracy” thereby strengthening their role as “gatekeepers” and “agenda setters.” In their
ability to uncover otherwise secret information on behalf of the public (i.e., their audience), the
media have taken a role of almost mythic proportions. This is particularly true of online media,
which are seen as a new site of monitory and investigative journalism (and where, incidentally,
enthusiasm for direct democracy appears most pronounced). In Prague, I met Tony Curzan
Price, a Swiss economist who was the editor-in-chief of openDemocracy.net from 2007 to 2012.
Speaking of the rise of the commercial press in central and eastern Europe, Curzan Price
suggested, “in the Middle Ages, all the heroes slayed dragons. In the post-Enlightenment era, the
‘truth seeker’ is the primary heroic figure. This is the age of the detective novel and the Bourne
Conspiracy” and, propelled by a newly independent and commercial journalism (and popular)
culture, this truth seeker is now being lauded in CEE.
Of course, truth seeking is not a new phenomenon in the Czech Republic. The culture of
samizdat press, with its clandestine circulation of dissident ideas and censored information, was
active long before the collapse of communism. And even before the advent of modern
democracy in the region, truth was not portrayed as anything other than positive (even if political
elites did not accept or support its idealized adjudication through an Enlightenment-style
“marketplace of ideas”). What does appear to be relatively new in the Czech Republic is how, in
a political and economic environment which, by design, lacks an ultimate authority, truth-
seeking has become a spectacle-driven and highly polarized contest.
As ownership of Czech media outlets continues to shift from multinational conglomerates
to wealthy – and sometimes politically ambitious – Czechs, the media marketplace itself became
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increasingly suspect. In an interview, Jeremy Druker, the editor-in-chief of Transitions Online,
46

remarked, “Before [wealthy Czechs began to buy ownership stakes in Czech media outlets],
people were spoiled. The foreign owners were only concerned with making a profit … and
weren’t interfering politically.” (J. Druker, personal communication, November 10, 2015).
Druker added, in an observation which conjured up the work of Lance Bennett (1990), the press
had become a kind of domestic political institution. The theory of the press as a political
institution can be seen as the inverse of the mediatization theory, which proposes politics as a
kind of mediated institution. In the contemporary Czech Republic both theories have some
empirical validity: some commercial media outlets have developed a partisan orientation as an
attempt to shore up audience loyalty and, as discussed, some political parties have deployed
“political marketing” (i.e., commercial) tactics to expand and attract membership. Taken
together, these theories explain the blurring of the distinction between political and economic
imperatives.
If contemporary Czech democracy has truly acquired a “reality show” atmosphere, the
results are not all bad. In this analogy, the voyeurism of reality television can be construed as an
extension of the watchdog function of the press, wherein political actors are monitored, their
commitments and promises recorded, their assertions fact-checked, and some of their otherwise
secretive behavior made visible. This monitory process enables, and is enabled by, spaces of
journalistic autonomy. At the same time, the mediatization of politics along the lines of reality
television can contribute to spaces of polarization: candidates have to use clear (if sometimes
provocative) verbal and visual language to attract voters, draw stark contrasts between

46
Transitions Online is an Internet magazine that covers the formerly communist countries of Europe and Central
Asia. It is a nonprofit organization which receives some funding from international NGOs and Western
governments. It runs professional training workshops for journalists in these countries and advocates for
independent and professional journalism. More information:
http://www.tol.org/client/transitions/11869-about-us.html
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themselves and their opponents, and garner endorsements of Czech celebrities. There has been
no shortage of popular and academic criticism of the carnival-esque environment of modern
politics (e.g., Dayan & Katz 1994, Edelman 1988), negative advertising and campaigning, and
the outsized role celebrities play in the political process. However, political science research
teaches us that spectacular campaign events effectively motivate people to vote (one important
measurement of political engagement) (Green & Gerbner 2004), and that negative (or “contrast”)
advertising increases political knowledge more than positive political advertising does, even as it
increases political polarization (Ansolabehere & Iyengar 1996).
By the time of the Czech presidential campaign of 2013, candidates’ use of political
marketing tactics and their responsiveness to the demands of the commercial media culture were
in full swing. Anna Matuskova, the campaign consultant and media scholar who wrote about the
practice of political marketing in the Czech Republic in the previously cited article was working
as chief strategist for conservative presidential candidate Karel Schwarzenberg. Although
Schwarzenberg began the campaign with only six percent support, he proceeded to come in
second place in a multi-candidate race. Given the public’s relative unfamiliarity with her
candidate, Matuskova embarked upon a strategy involved in portraying Schwarzenberg as a
“logical successor” of the “exceedingly popular” Vaclav Havel, who was a “close friend” of
Schwarzenberg but who had passed away months before the campaign began (Gregor &
Matuskova 2014, 26). The campaign also enlisted the support of other, non-political celebrities,
organizing “‘Clubbing with Karel,’ where popular music clubs were open and bands supported
our candidate” and enlisting the famous and “controversial” artist David Cerny to design a
campaign logo featuring the candidate with a pink mohawk – “So the oldest candidate had a
visual inspired by [the] punk group [the] Sex Pistols” (Ibid, 28).
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In an increasingly mediatized political culture, the heightened importance of celebrities –
and the celebritization of politicians themselves – was foreseeable. “Celebrity has become a
defining characteristic of our mediatized societies” and a celebrity culture has become an issue of
critical “importance for social cohesion and identity formation” (Driessens 2013, 642). Within
the Czech Republic, the public response to the increasing celebritization of politics has been
ambivalent. Citing the “unprecedentedly high involvement of celebrities” in the 2013 Czech
presidential campaign, a team of researchers conducted focus groups to better understand
attitudes toward “the blending of the field of politics with the field of popular culture” (Stechova
& Hajek 2015). Although some in the older generation remember the way that “the popularity of
then ‘celebrities’ was misused by the ruling Communist party for political purposes,” many of
the respondents had a more conciliatory attitude. They saw the involvement of celebrities as
“simply a part of the modern campaign” and, within a post-communist context, saw it as
“specifically related to tendencies of personalization, professionalization and Americanization in
campaigning” (Stechova & Hajek 2015, 343-349).
The modern campaign tactics (including the enlisting of celebrity support) in the Czech
Republic do indeed resemble those of U.S. campaigns, and the culture of the country’s
commercial media is beginning to resemble that of the U.S. – with its proliferation of outlets,
professionalization and mediatization, the creation of a common national identity, the cultivation
of democratic attitudes, and a penchant for monitory journalism. But lacking the same extensive
legacy of democratic participation and stable institutions (resulting from the rise of democratic
governance amid “reflexive modernity” in which, as mentioned, institutionalism gives way to
individualism), the question is begged: how will such a media culture deal with the current wave
of populism which is globally resurgent? Laclau defines populism as a specific articulation of
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popular demands that gives shape and identity to a discursive formation (2005) and it arises
when one crucial part of democracy – namely, majority rule – turns against another – namely,
tolerance and an emphasis on human rights. Michael Mann, who wrote about the prevalence of
ethnic cleansing within democracies, observes, “democracy has always carried with it the
possibility that the majority might tyrannize minorities, and this possibility carries more ominous
consequences in certain types of multiethnic environments” (2004, 2).
Anna Matuskova, the political consultant who applied the concepts of political marketing
to the Czech presidential campaign in 2013 and currently works for Andrej Babis, the billionaire
finance minister who owns two of the leading daily newspapers in the Czech Republic and who
is reported to have presidential aspirations, grappled with this aloud in our interview. “How do
you deal with populism and the media? When eighty percent of Czechs are terrified of the
immigration crisis [coming from Syria as a result of ISIS occupation], what is a politician
supposed to do? Is it a democratic thing to represent the majority or is there a responsibility to
educate the population? Bad politicians are created by the voters.” (A. Matuskova, personal
communication, November 12, 2015).

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Chapter Five: The Commercial Press with Chinese Characteristics
In the popular imagination of international relations, Chinese culture has come to
represent an antithesis of American culture. An overly simplified characterization portrays the
collectivist, unified and ancient values of China as standing in stark contrast to the
individualistic, diversified and modern values of the United States. It might seem like a stretch,
therefore, to argue that the economic and political cultures characteristic of the U.S. media have
reached, and are to some extent transforming, China. After all, the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) maintains a majority ownership stake in all news organizations, recent “crackdowns and
harsh punishments for editors who defied party edicts have been reported” (Whitten-Woodring &
Van Belle 2014, 123), and the government continues to restrict access to Western news and
social networking websites behind its famed Great Firewall. Is it possible then, that even with the
economic reforms taking place, spaces of autonomy and polarization – replete with ideological
pluralism, commercially driven sensationalism and politically adversarial reporting – are
emerging in China?
I propose that it is not only possible but, in the following sections, illustrate this is indeed
occurring through: (1) a recent case study of a public dispute over censorship between a Chinese
newspaper and the CCP, (2) a brief descriptive account of the recent history of media
commercialization in China, (3) an analysis of how that commercialization has informed a more
monitorial and politically autonomous – if nationalistic – journalism culture (and spurred a cycle
of continuous change between the Chinese media’s economic and political cultures). My
methodological approach is based upon a review and synthesis of recent research on the Chinese
media, as well as my own field work in Shanghai during September of 2014.
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Before embarking upon this analysis, a necessary note about the longevity and seeming
impermeability of the Chinese culture is warranted.

Waiting Out the Barbarians: Chinese Resistance to Foreign Forces
Theories which are part of a body of academic literature on globalization must distill
exceptionally complex national cultures and histories into comprehensible categories and linear
narratives. There has been, in recent years, some resistance to ad hoc typologies among some
social scientists and to periodizing among some academic historians. But the analytical utility of
these methods can outweigh their explanatory shortcomings as long as researchers are cognizant
that precision is being sacrificed for concision.
This disclaimer is all the more indispensable when dealing with the subject of China. For
most of their history, the Chinese saw themselves not as one powerful empire or nation-state
amid a wider world, but as a world within themselves. Its own culture is informed by an
interminable sense of its own identity, and part of the “singularity” of Chinese civilization,
according to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, is that “it seems to have no beginning”
(2011, 5). With a written language that dates back four millennia and a set of foundational
philosophical texts – such as Confucius’s Analectics and Sun Tzu’s Art of War – that predate the
Christian Bible, there is a persistence of, and a proportion to, certain cultural values within
Chinese society which require a kind of deferential calibration of the Western social scientist’s
instruments. Invoking the observations of Kissinger, however bona fide his credentials as a
diplomat might be, could itself elicit criticism of “orientalism,” i.e., the tradition within Western
scholarship of analyzing “the orient” as “other than” and in binary contrast with the occident
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(Said 1978).
47
Although my research is accompanied by a sincere attempt to eschew the kinds of
petrified political beliefs and nationalist perspectives that tend to exoticize newly experienced
cultures precisely as they explore or explain those cultures, it is inescapable that parts of an
Eastern culture rooted in antiquity will be outside the grasp of the the empirical and
epistemological toolkit, and available frames of reference, of any scholar living and working in a
contemporary, Western context.
48

The sensitivity to “orientalizing” among Western researchers, however, might be
matched by the potential for Chinese elites to engage in “occidentalizing.” The Chinese empire,
after all, long perceived civilization as coextensive with its own territory. Taking a less
missionary approach to pre-modern foreign affairs, the Chinese orientation toward the world
outside its borders can be described as that of insularity and almost indifference. Until recently, it
had neither a significant expansionist impulse nor an exploratory ambition. It referred to the
people living on the periphery of its territory as “barbarians” and it sought to “rule [them] with a
loose rein… using barbarians to check barbarians” and, if it became necessary, “using barbarians
to attack barbarians” (cited in Kissinger 2011, 20). And China’s early advances in nautical
technology in the 15th century were not exploited for conquest and exploration in the way the
European fleets were when they were developed a couple centuries later. This led one British
translator to observe, in 1850, that China’s “exclusion of foreigners and confinement to their own
country has, by depriving them of all opportunities of making comparisons, sadly circumscribed
their ideas” (cited in Kissinger 2011, 10). The scope of China’s strength, territory, population

47
In fact, Said incisively targets some of the research methods deployed by Kissinger, referencing Kissinger
specifically in pp. 46-47 of the work cited.
48
Even the reference to “Eastern” is relative, and based on a line of longitude that was established by a Western-led
International Meridian Conference in Washington DC, in October 1884. The Chinese have long seen themselves as
the “Middle Kingdom” and Japan, from where the sun rose in the east (a.k.a. The “Land of the Rising Sun”), was
Eastern. The same could be said of the relativity of “antiquity.”
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and culture arguably obviated the requirement for China to engage meaningfully with the world
outside its borders. When modern international relations developed during the 17th century, as
countries of comparable size and strength within Europe gave rise to a Westphalian notion of the
nation-state and ideas about state sovereignty, these ideas were less urgent and salient in China,
which was largely seen as unconquerable by its relatively smaller and weaker neighbors.
(China’s famous Great Wall is one early example of the overpowering defensive capability of the
Chinese empire.)
Still, in the era of global flows of people, information and capital, China’s interest in
trade, diplomacy, and modern foreign affairs has increased as a practical matter. It has begun to
understand its place not just in the context of its own rich history and cultural heritage, but in
relation to other national powers. In 2010, Liu Mingfu, a retired colonel of the People’s
Liberation Army and professor at China’s National Defense University, published a book in
China entitled The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-
American Era.
49
The book portrays and prophesies the decline of America’s status as a global
superpower in much the same way several American authors portray and prophesy the rising (or
falling) influence of China. And it analyzes and reports upon American culture in the way that
many American authors analyze and report on Chinese culture – which is to say it examines
these foreign phenomena as esoteric and exotic. Rather than seeking to identify commonalities
between the native and foreign cultures and customs, this text deploys a heuristics of contrast
(much as Kissinger’s book on China does). Predictably, these authors appear more likely to
attribute their country’s relative strengths to intrinsic cultural traits and their shortcomings to

49
The book was published in an English language translation in 2015, and here I cite that 2015 edition.
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global or situational variables.
50
America’s chroniclers see their country’s strength in the fact it
was born of a longing for individual freedoms, remains a “nation of immigrants” with a vibrant
multiculturalism and an inbuilt “spirit of capitalism.” They attribute its relative weakness to the
precarity of “failed” or “failing” states, the economic maturation of the “developing world,” and
the drawbacks to U.S. workers in the face of globalization (which is sometimes seen in this
context as an unstoppable trend rather than one America strategically helped begin). A similar
romanticism of a nation’s strengths is seen in Liu’s writing:
“Chinese culture is already the most vital culture in the world. Not only is it the world’s
only extant classical culture, but it has the power to conquer its conquerors…. Chinese
culture’s incredible cohesiveness makes it the world’s most difficult culture to assimilate.
America is an immigrant nation, and it’s been called a ‘melting pot’ of different cultures.
But the biggest headache for this cultural melting pot is Chinese culture, because
American culture finds it very difficult to assimilate” (2015, 76).

Liu’s discussion of the “melting pot,” like his discussion of other American tropes (he
mentions Fukuyama’s “end of history,” “manifest destiny,” and the Puritans’ self-conception as a
“city upon a hill”) is presented through the lens of a Chinese scholar much in the same way, I
suspect, much of my analysis of Chinese history and culture will be inexorably tinged by my
own vantage point as an American. That is, though I write with great curiosity about, and
enthusiasm for, my subject, my appreciation and understanding of this subject are limited to
those of any outsider looking in. In Liu’s case, the traditional American metaphor of a “melting
pot” is interpreted at face value and the nuances around America’s identity as a nation largely

50
This is a kind of “fundamental attribution error,” a phenomenon well known to psychologists, applied in an
international or intercultural context.
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comprised of immigrants – where full assimilation is not, at least today, the prevailing ideal – are
difficult for an outsider to conceptually grasp no matter how many interviews or content analyses
are conducted. The same charges can be registered against my research on, and observations
about, the Chinese media.
Another criticism of this work, and any analysis which concentrates attention on cultural
exchange between individual nation-states and their citizens, comes from some strands of critical
communication scholarship. This critique argues culture circulates less from relations between
nationally situated actors and institutions than from hierarchically organized transnational classes
(D. Schiller 1996) or along a racial logic inherent in global capitalism (Chakravartty & da Silva
2012). Yuezhi Zhao applies – but complicates – these analytic traditions to information flows
between China and the United States:
“Under the conditions of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency and the U.S.
military’s imperial presence, and with the historical establishment of the U.S.-China
diplomatic relationship in the context of the China-USSR split, the reform-era multiethnic
Chinese state has engineered multifaceted internal processes of class dispossession and
cultural dislocation… We can now see how the racial logic of global capitalism has
intersected with the nation-state and class dimensions of power…” (2014, 283).

Studies of culture can not be blind to the geopolitical conditions and economic power
differentials between nation states through which information flows take place. But, reciprocally,
these information flows are increasingly helping to establish those geopolitical conditions and
contribute to the economic differentials (e.g., China might be less likely to take on U.S. debt if
adversarial and autonomous news reports used nationalist arguments to loudly criticized the
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policy). This is what I understand some scholars to mean when they posit culture as a
constitutive influence upon political attitudes and economic activity.
Liu’s intelligent and insightful book, which predicts mounting tensions and a “marathon
contest” between a rising China and the United States provides a researcher with a helpful glance
into the way in which China sees itself in the present moment. Steeped in references to Marx and
blending the language of globalization with the language of “democracy” and “hegemony,” Liu
does take stock of the international importance of culture. He writes, “A nation that leads the
world is a nation that produces spirit and exports culture. China is a major producer of material
goods, but it still isn’t a major producer of spirit and culture. China needs to become a world
factory of culture and bring Chinese culture out to the world” (Liu 2015, 82). The call to become
a “factory” of culture seems to underscore an industrial conception of culture that might be
characteristic of China. Liu proceeds to describe the high number of books that China imports
relative to those it exports as a material indicator of the imbalance in China’s cultural influence.
As I intend to demonstrate throughout this chapter, the economic reforms which have
liberalized and internationalized the Chinese media will give China more of an ability to export
those ideas and values which together constitute its culture. But the economic and political
cultures which enable those mechanisms of reform – and ultimately the circulation of Chinese
cultural products beyond its borders – tend to resemble the economic and political cultures of the
U.S. press. They form a commercial culture within and around China. Liu’s book, a vigorous
defense of Chinese exceptionalism and strength, might even provide an example of that culture.
When it was first published in the original Chinese in 2010, it was “denounced by the Chinese
government” but after becoming a bestseller within China, the book was “embraced [under Xi
Jinping’s administration] and is the present direction of government policy … [and it is now] in
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the recommended reading section of all-state controlled bookstores in China” (Fensten 2015). In
other words, the book’s success in an increasingly commercial publishing culture prefigured, and
possibly influenced, its acceptance among political elites.
Liu’s book was the basis for the title of a book about U.S.-China relations by the
American scholar Michael Pillsbury (i.e., Pillsbury 2015). Of Liu’s book, Pillsbury writes,
“while China’s goals are peaceful ones, and can be obtained peacefully, when read in the
Mandarin the tone is clearly not peaceful” (cited in Fensten 2015). A nationalist book about
China, which won success in China’s increasingly commercial marketplace, is helping China
increase its book exports and promote its culture abroad. Given his aforementioned lament of
China’s lack of book exports, this should gratify Liu. Even if the book’s success within China
has been promoted by commercial media culture which has arisen within China, and which
resembles, to some degree, that of the U.S. press.

The Case of Southern Weekly
On January 3, 2013, the editors of the provincial newspaper Southern Weekly published a
New Year’s editorial invoking President Xi Jinping’s common trope of “China’s Dream,” which
they entitled, “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutional Government.” At least they thought
they had. The editors were dismayed to discover that the editorial had been heavily censored and
revised, apparently by the Guangdong province’s propaganda chief Tuo Zhen, without their
knowledge, under the innocuous headline “Chasing Our Dreams” (Ding 2013).
The original draft of the letter, written by Dai Zhiyong, swiftly circulated among Chinese
citizens on the social media site Sina Weibo. Several of these users began sharing images that
juxtaposed the original draft with the subsequent revisions and within hours, government censors
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began deleting posts related to the editorial (Bandurski 2013a). Searches on Sina Weibo for
information on the incident were met with a message that read, “According to the relevant laws,
regulations and policies, the search results for ‘Southern Weekly’ cannot be shown” (Bandurski
2013b).
Within days, an open letter to the Guangdong Provincial Party surfaced, signed by
prominent editors, journalists, and scholars. It read, “In public opinion, the disgust and
opposition toward Tuo Zhen is readily visible, and it is clear that society generally has taken a
civilized and necessary position of resistance” to him and the propaganda office, which he leads
(Bandurski 2013c). The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) secretary in charge of Nanfang
Media, the publisher of Southern Weekly, directed the newspaper’s acting editor-in-chief to take
control of the paper’s official Weibo account and issue a statement affirming the newspaper’s
independent authorship of the editorial. Frustrated by their editor-in-chief’s decision to publish,
under pressure, a statement they regarded as “completely at odds with the truth,” the paper’s
editors and staff staged a strike (Bandurski 2013c).
The striking workers were joined by reform-minded protesters, who waved pro-
democracy signs (Kaiman 2013) as a dispute over a single case of censorship, a regular and
largely accepted practice within China, metastasized into a national political controversy. Within
two weeks, however, the conflict had officially concluded. Though the terms of the negotiated
agreement were kept confidential, journalists reportedly agreed to relinquish a plan to publish
details of more than 1,034 of their stories that were allegedly “censored or deleted in 2012” by
Tuo Zhen’s propaganda office and, in fact, “staff members were instructed not to speak to
reporters for foreign media about the protest” (Demick 2013).
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The prohibition on communicating with the foreign press may, on one hand, have been
propelled by the Chinese party officials’ sensitivity to their international reputation and foreign
public opinion. On the other hand, these officials appear to see foreign media as an influence
upon, not just an external audience for, this dispute. The Central Propaganda Department
attributed the strike at Southern Weekly to unspecified “hostile foreign forces” while the striking
journalists were confronted by some opposition protesters who held signs with nationalist
messages, such as “We support the Communist Party. Shut down the traitor newspaper.” and
“Southern Weekly has an American dream. We don’t want the American dream. We want the
Chinese dream.” (Wong & Buckley 2013)
There is good reason to think the Chinese protesters who condemned as “American” the
Southern Weekly’s public opposition to party censorship are doing more than simply
scapegoating the United States for China’s domestic political problems. It may not have been the
Southern Weekly’s call for a “dream of Constitutional government” which was distinctly
American, but rather the newspaper’s quest for salience with its audience within the context of
an increasingly competitive and commercial news marketplace. Under Mao Zedong, the Chinese
media were seen exclusively as a tool for political indoctrination and Communist party cohesion,
often described as a “commandist system” or the “throat and tongue” of the Party (Yongnian
2009). After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping became the paramount leader within the
Chinese Communist Party and launched economic reforms that reduced state subsidies for media
organizations and permitted advertising. The commercialization of Chinese media further
accelerated at the turn of the century, when political leaders sought to increase the international
competitiveness of Chinese media organizations, ending mandatory subscriptions to – and many
government subsidies for – official newspapers (Shirk 2010). This general shift within the
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Chinese media to a more competitive and commercial economic culture is examined in greater
detail later in this chapter. For now, it bears noting there is nowhere in China where this trend
toward commercialization is more pronounced than in Guangdong province, the home of
Southern Weekly.
This region is “the headquarters of the cutting-edge commercial media, with three
newspaper groups fiercely competing for audiences” (Shirk 2010). Southern Weekly is among
the most commercially and politically successful of these new commercial newspapers, having
spun off of the official Nanfang Daily in the early years of commercialization and earned “strong
support from a small cohort of reform-minded politicians… becom[ing] a role model for smaller
publications that have less latitude to speak truth to power” (Kaiman 2013, 1). As a result of this
new competition, official party newspapers are “increasingly irrelevant to the average Chinese
reader” (Gang & Bandurski 2010, 55). In the decade between 1993 and 2003, circulation of the
CCP’s official national newspaper People’s Daily declined from about 2.8 million to 1.8 million
and Guangdong province’s official Nanfang Daily declined by 14 percent while these papers’
regional commercial subsidiaries, including Southern Weekly, increased their circulation
exponentially (Ibid).
The commercialization of Chinese media was neither inevitable nor globally
predetermined. In writing about Chinese film and television, Michael Curtin (2007) lists several
historical variables that laid the groundwork for these industries’ economic development,
including: the end of the cold war, the rise of the World Trade Organization, China’s repatriation
of Hong Kong, the “rise of consumer and youth cultures,” and the “growing wealth and influence
of overseas Chinese.”
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Commercialization was part of an economic strategy designed to withstand the
encroaching influence of foreign media, but it was also an accidental (and arguably
counterproductive) byproduct of a domestic political strategy. Part of the central government’s
motivation to withdraw state subsidies to regional newspapers in the 1990’s was to starve some
of the outlets that were competing with the official party publications like People’s Daily and
Xinhua News Agency (Gang & Bandurski 2010). Yet, the lack of government support propelled
these publications into more advertising and subscription based revenue models, increasing their
financial and editorial strength. In order to stay competitive, even the official publications had to
adjust their content to appeal to public demand. One journalism professor at Fudan University
explains how this is true of television news in Guangdong province:
“Even ten years ago, the [commercial] Hong Kong TV enjoyed about 70 percent of the
market share. Since then the percentage has reversed and now most people get local TV
from the local [official] Guangdong channel. This is mostly because the quality of local
[official] TV has improved under the conditions of commercialization” (Baohua, personal
communication, September 3, 2014).

By the time Hu Jintao acceded to the presidency in 2002, Chinese media had begun to
constituted a commercial industry. While Hu’s administration affirmed party control of the press,
it was received wisdom that “the media now had two masters, the party and the public” (Ibid).
Though, as mentioned, Chinese media commercialization was not globally
predetermined, it can be observed within a context of globalized economic and political forces.
As economic exchange became globalized, capital and information flowed across borders,
constituting informational networks that have shifted the dynamics of geopolitical power and
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accelerated the pace of social transformation (Castells 1996). It may be these global trends, more
than the deliberate tactics of any specific group of actors or nations, which more closely
resemble the “hostile foreign forces” which the Chinese government expressly condemned
during the Southern Weekly protests.
Globalization theory would challenge us to describe some of the economic and social
changes within the Chinese media as national expressions of planetary patterns, interrogate
“essentialized notions of space, place, nation-state and community… [and] be suspicious of the
term ‘Chinese media’” itself as a problematically and imprecisely monolithic (Curtin 2012, 3).
Chinese distrust of commercial media may be seen not just as a resistance to
globalization, but also as a vestige from the “New World Information Order” (NWICO) debates
discussed in chapter three. At the same time the United States perceived the NWICO debates as a
threat to their conception of press freedom and autonomy, China likely saw the encroaching
influence of supranational organizations as threatening its conception of press freedom. Some
scholars caution that, in various national contexts, “media define their freedom… as the
relatively unrestricted ability to serve their clients - private or public” (Gerbner, Mowlana &
Nordenstreng 1993, x). Indeed, in my interviews with journalists and communication scholars in
Shanghai, the term “freedom” was used several times to express freedom from foreign influence.
During the NWICO controversy, UNESCO sought to advance “mutual knowledge and
understanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication” and recommended “such
international agreements as may be necessary to promote the free flow of ideas by word and
image” (cited in Gross & Costanza-Chock 2004). To some Chinese observers, this language was
nothing but anti-communist cold war propaganda designed to valorize Western models of
commercial media and downplay disparities in information access.
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Mustapha Masmoudi, Tunisia’s representative to UNESCO, issued a statement
enumerating these disparities and concluding that “information must be understood as a social
good and a cultural product, and not as a material commodity or merchandise” (Ibid). The
implication is that information, as a social good, should not simply be left to the “free flow” of
market forces, but should instead be, at turns, publicly protected and promoted, sanctioned and
subsidized. Yet one can imagine how the Southern Weekly journalists might claim that language
like this, which claims information as a public good, might be used by Chinese propaganda
officials, conversely, to valorize the party control of the media. In short, the recent disputes over
censorship and control in the Chinese media are reviving the economic and cultural debates of
the cold war-era, and signaling the free flow model’s stubborn pursuit of universal purchase in
this post-cold war moment.
Given China’s rapid economic expansion and heightened international influence,
communication scholars (and foreign policy analysts) have become increasingly curious about
whether a glimmer of a real adversarial press is detectable. The Southern Weekly case
demonstrates a new kind of public sphere seems to be emerging in China and, while the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) continues to maintain a controlling stake in all media enterprises, a
receptivity for -- and even a tendency toward -- a politically independent “free press” is ever
more evident.
The idea of a commercial and politically adversarial press is not completely inconsistent
with China’s cultural heritage. After all, earlier Chinese leaders’ concept of a Mandate of Heaven
“gave some color of legitimacy to resistance to unjust oppression” (Moore 1966, 416). And
early Chinese newspapers had a penchant for satisfying public curiosities and holding political
power accountable as when, in the 1600s, the Beijing Gazette frustrated the emperor by
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publishing “information about the internal debates stolen from the desktops of senior officials or
leaked by them” (Shirk 2010, 29).
Outside of my focus on the influence of cultural variables, it is important to take stock of
some economic and technological factors which are also compelling a politically freer media
system in China. Some scholars argue economic performance is the strongest single predictor of
the proliferation of information and communication technologies within a given country (Nour
2002) and so broad adoption of digital media can be seen as a correlate with the recent economic
rise of China. As Philip Howard has systematically shown within the Middle East, the
liberalization and expansion of markets for communication technologies (and the breakup of
statist monopolies of information production and consumption) create the economic and political
conditions for democratic social movements (2010).
So it didn’t surprise many that the Chinese public was instigated in online discussion
groups when their state media distributed a translation of a speech by Vice President Dick
Cheney at Fudan University in 2004, and omitted the phrases “the desire for freedom is
universal” and “freedom is indivisible” (Parker 2014, 51). Chinese citizens were newly able to
engage in a spirited denunciation of the state media’s revisions in an online discussion board by
using a homonym of the Chinese word for Cheney’s name and mixing in Roman letters to evade
censorship. The following comments surfaced: “China’s news media is just a propaganda tool of
the Communist Party!,” “I have just two words, shameless and deceitful,” and even “This is an
infringement of Cheney’s intellectual property rights” (Parker 2014, 52). The Internet has
intrinsic properties (e.g., its decentralized structure, its self-organizing tendency) that extend and
accelerate the commercial culture of the press. Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin’s
characterization, in 2001, of the Internet as a “political, ideological, and cultural battlefield”
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(cited in Osnos 2014, 30) can be seen as simultaneously an affirmation and a derogation of the
Internet’s provision of channels for contestation – and of spaces of polarization.
A freer press is emerging with the proliferation of the Internet, and the increasing
diversification and commercialization of television and newspapers. Just as economic
development is spurring Internet penetration, so too did it spur, in the 1980s, the proliferation of
television. In fact, given the significant poverty that afflicted much of China’s mostly rural
population, and the “chaos inflicted on cultural production during the Cultural Revolution,”
television didn’t succeed radio as the most influential medium in China until the 1990s (Zhu
2012, 13). While the official national policy continues to mandate that cultural production and
consumption are subservient to political oversight, this chapter intends to demonstrate that this
power relationship is beginning to be tested. In China, economic and technological change
within the press are perhaps not influencing political change as much as the changing economic
culture of the Chinese media is, at least in part, transforming China’s political culture. This is the
subject to which I turn in the next section.

Guanxi: Networked Connections in a Professionalizing and Democratizing Press
The emergence of a vibrant and ideologically diverse public sphere in China can be
traced to the economic reforms enacted under Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s and 1980s. As
previously mentioned, Deng began to liberalize many sectors of the Chinese economy, including
the media sector, as part of a broader nationwide effort to promote international competitiveness.
State subsidies for media organizations diminished, (limited) private advertising and private
investment were allowed and encouraged and, eventually, the government stopped mandating
that private citizens subscribe to official newspapers (Shirk 2010). Throughout the 1990s, the
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political imperative to faithfully represent the CCP’s perspective came under increasing
competition with the economic imperative for news outlets to be financially self-sufficient. This
led to official party newspapers creating more (though not fully) editorially independent
commercial newspapers, which, given their acute responsiveness to consumer tastes and public
opinion, quickly overtook the popularity of official newspapers. One study of newspaper
readership in 2004 found that nearly half of respondents report reading only one newspaper and
nearly all of those respondents reported a preference for commercial newspapers (Gang &
Bandurski 2010, 44).
To be sure, there was not a seamless path toward this culture of commercialization.
During his time as president, from 1993 to 2003, Jiang Zemin encouraged his administration
(and, by extension, the Chinese media) to be especially receptive to the public opinion being
reflected by the Chinese public’s news consumption. In his “Three Represents” policy, he
explained that “Our cadres must maintain the work style and the way of thinking of ‘from the
masses, to the masses.’ They must be concerned about the people’s hardships, listen to their
opinions and protect their interests” (cited in Zhu 2013, 15, emphasis added). Under Jiang, the
media’s obligation to serve the “dual masters” of the CCP and the market was only sometimes
contradictory. Yet, when his successor, Hu Jintao, introduced his philosophy of the Harmonious
Society during the 2005 National People’s Congress, a staunch emphasis on social stability led to
heightened regulation of – and government investment in – the media. These cycles of
regulatory tightening and loosening, privatization and nationalization, are not uncommon in
China and elsewhere and, indeed, have spurred their own macroeconomic theories (Hirschmann
1982). However, the culture of commercialization, and the attendant responsiveness to public
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opinion, which had been establishing itself in the decades before Hu’s assumption of the
presidency appears, to some extent, indelible.
Restrictions on the press were becoming more frequently contested by a public which had
grown accustomed to the commercial media’s proliferation of watchdog journalism, and the
sense of personal empowerment which arose from increased exposure to “choice shows,” and the
culture of commodification ushered in by advertisements, such as China Mobile’s slogan, “My
Turf, My Decision” (Osnos 2014, 41).
The new economic culture of the Chinese media which emerged in the 1990s, and that
has persisted since, can be illustrated in two Chinese terms. The first is “chanyehua” or
“industrialization.” This moniker points to a broader philosophy of media development in China,
but also accounts for the pivot from a purely propagandistic model to an economic model which
values profitability (Zhu 2013, 26). Put otherwise, the economic culture of media has
transitioned from a revenue-neutral to a revenue-dependent model, from a sole focus on political
profits for the state to an additional focus on financial profits for its investors and advertisers.
This is a critical transition because the entire notion of “who benefits” (and how they benefit) has
been upended.
The second term is “guanxi,” which means “connections” or “relationships.” Guanxi is
not a new concept in China. In fact, it can be traced to the writings of Confucius, who “tried to
distill all the human relationships in the world into five basic types, each with its own set of
norms, behaviors, forms of etiquette, and taboos” (Young 2013, 45). Most observers of Chinese
culture possess anecdotes about how certain segments of social life – from college admissions to
employment recruitment – are influenced by these social connections. Updating this concept for
a more commercial and internationally networked media culture, however, we see how
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journalists’ connections have made newsgathering a more decentralized process. Whereas, once,
officials expected the right to proofread an interview they gave to a journalist before it was
published, journalists have cultivated broad connections with reform-minded officials who don’t
insist on the same preconditions. Over time, this has led to changes in journalistic norms in
which journalists exercise greater selectivity over sources and, in turn, those sources compete for
access to journalists (Young 2013). In a conversation with an editor
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of Liberation Daily, the
official Communist Party newspaper in Shanghai, I was told that “the whole atmosphere of
journalism is being professionalized. It’s not just the commercial papers [whose reporters are
exercising new autonomy] but there is a spillover effect occurring” in which official papers have
undergone professionalization too. But this editor also shared an example of the way in which
these guanxi can run counter to the interests of professionalism, and preserve power among
Chinese elites (much as it does among well connected and politically and economically powerful
Americans). The chief editor of Sina Weibo, which, as a commercial social networking site is
seen as less regulated, was a Fudan University classmate of the chief editor of her CCP-run
newspaper Liberation Daily and, this editor attested, through this connection, he knows what the
limits of his website’s free expression are (Anonymous, personal communication, September 3,
2014).
The political resonance of a “free press” in China is thus an outgrowth of the changing
economic culture of media. This changing culture is marked, as I have attempted to demonstrate
in the preceding paragraphs, by two interdependent phenomena: (1) an increased emphasis on

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The editor has asked to not be attributed, a request which perhaps undermines the force of the quotes contained
here, given that she is employed by an official newspaper. The interview was conducted in her Shanghai office on
September 3, 2014. Liberation Daily was the first newspaper in China to run advertisements although its
commercial subsidiary, The Morning Post, maintains a higher circulation (approximately 500k compared to
approximately 300k, according to my source). In a testament to the limits of open competition of the Chinese media,
my source informed me “People’s Daily says it has one million readers but there is no way of knowing.”
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public opinion which begins as a commercial imperative and evolves into a democratic principle
and (2) a gradual professionalization of media workers which begins with the media
organizations’ obligation to be economically self-reliant and evolves into a political
empowerment of journalists and editors.
This professionalization is consistent with Waisbord’s (2013) two modes through which
journalistic professionalism takes place. These are discussed in chapter two but, to briefly
recapitulate, the first mode is economic and sees professionalization as means to financial profits
of media owners while the second mode is more cultural, seeing professionalization as a
rationalization and legitimation of the aspirations of “occupational groups” to accumulate
symbolic capital. It is possible that the path to professionalization was compelled more by the
first mode in the West and the second mode in China (since commercialism in China has not
unfolded in an environment of intense market-based, mogul-led, and investor-driven capitalism).
In both cases, however, many of the consequences of this professionalization – for example,
greater journalistic autonomy – are the same.
The positive consequences of this new autonomy are evident within China in the tenacity
of investigative reporters who hold political officials accountable, the diversity of entertainment
and public affairs programming, and the cultivation of more critical audiences
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(Zhu 2013).
Still, these freedoms are not always wielded responsibly. As with media commercialization
elsewhere, China’s media system has been afflicted by bouts of sensationalism and “bottom-line
thinking.” As just one example, in 2005, a commercial newspaper in Sichuan Province persuaded
“a young woman to donate her liver so they could publish a heart-wrenching front-page news

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The Shanghai-based American journalist Doug Young, who reports for Reuters and is on the faculty of Fudan
University, shared an example of this increasingly critical audience: “Most newspaper readers skip the first few
pages because it’s all party crap. Then they get to the inside stuff, which is more interesting to them” (Young,
personal communication, September 3, 2015).
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story” about the incident (Gang & Bandurski 2010, 44). It is the new tensions between
sensationalism and stability, and between diversity and unity, that the new economic culture of
the Chinese media is attempting to manage. Incidentally, these tensions are emblematic of the
spaces of polarization and the spaces of autonomy within the commercial culture of the press.

“Public Opinion Channeling” - Openly Monitoring in a Closed Society
The so-called “spirit of inquiry and espionage” that was once primarily the domain of
American journalism has more recently developed throughout the world as media systems
increasingly shift their editorial imperatives from their governments’ conception of a public
interest to a commercial assessment of their publics’ interests. As demonstrated above, within
the Chinese media, this spirit is just beginning to animate journalism which targets the particular
tastes of news consumers. However, it has been animating secretive journalistic activities
designed for – and commissioned by – government officials for many years.
Journalists working for large national outlets including People’s Daily and the Xinhua
news agency continue to develop “secret reports” for government leaders that are comprised of
the kind of content that other journalism cultures might treat as quotidian journalistic fare.
Public grievances and political sentiment are reported alongside “bad economic news” and
“foreign criticism,” and confidential compilations of user-generated content online (e.g., in
Xinhua’s Digest of Online Public Sentiment) present a paradox whereby “public internet chat is
rehashed in top-secret reports, divulging the contents of which could result in a lengthy prison
term” (The Economist, 2010). As commercial media outlets begin to appropriate their
investigative power and begin to deploy it more autonomously, a fundamental shift is taking
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place wherein the media which have been used on behalf of the government to surveil the public
is increasingly being used on behalf of the public to surveil the government.
It is this trend that has led the political leadership of China to relinquish its emphasis on
“guidance of public opinion” in the 1990s in favor of the “new media buzzword, ‘public opinion
channeling’” (Gang & Bandurski 2010). This somewhat awkward reversal in the discourse of the
relationship between the state media and the public likely reveals three characteristics of the new
propaganda policies. First, it may signal an increased sensitivity to international norms. Second,
it may demonstrate an awareness of the new economic and political imperatives, in a more
commercial media environment, of being responsive to (and not simply attempting to influence)
the public agenda. Finally, it turns this awareness into a political strategy that seeks to exploit
the ostensible responsiveness of the media by deploying CCP messages through both the
commercial and official media alike. This strategy has been characterized as “grabbing the
megaphone” by Chinese journalists and it “can be seen as a direct response on the part of the
leadership to changes in the nature of agenda setting… as a result of media commercialization
and the rapid development of new communications technologies” (Ibid.).
As commercial media outlets gain new measures of independence and influence, this
independence and influence are being exploited, somewhat ironically, by the CCP in two key
ways. First, the government is tapping into the credibility of the commercial media in so-called
“public opinion crises,” by intervening in journalistic content amid politically or socially
sensitive developments. While Chinese communication scholars have largely abstained from
reporting on the waning credibility of official outlets, Stockmann (2010) has systematically
interviewed Chinese media experts to demonstrate how credibility shifts have left the unofficial
(i.e., commercial) media organizations in a more efficacious position vis-à-vis the CCP’s
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previous strategy of “guidance of public opinion.” As she describes the paradox, “media
challenges to state control can boost the ability of the state to manipulate public opinion –
provided that the state retains some control over news content and can deter media outlets from
deviating too strongly from the official line” (Stockmann 2010, 182).
The second way in which China’s central government has exploited the
commercialization of the news media is in confronting the problem of corruption among local
officials. One byproduct of the economic reforms within China is the increased tendency for
local and provincial leaders to collude with businesses in their region to spur economic growth,
often at the expense of the kinds of public services that are mandated (but not always funded) by
the CCP. Corruption among local officials is widespread and threatens the reputation of the Party
nationally. Yet, with the central government’s bureaucracy progressively unable to manage local
corruption and without an autonomous court system whereby private citizens can sue corrupt
officials, the CCP has relied upon the commercial “mass media to serve as a fire alarm” for
detecting local corruption (Shirk 2010, 19). This tactic also has the secondary benefit of
redirecting public frustration away from national political leaders and onto local officials. The
strategy seems to be working as “surveys indicate that Chinese people are more critical of the
performance of local elected officials than of central ones, in contrast to the pattern in American
politics” (Ibid.).
The institutional power, within China, to gauge and influence public opinion and to set a
public agenda was once monopolized by the central government, but has recently become
contested by the rising independence and influence of the commercial media. The spirit of
inquiry and espionage may well have spread from the offices within the Politburo to newsrooms
populated with muckraking and scandal-seeking journalists. Yet, while the functional day-to-day
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relationship between the state and the media has loosened, the formal primacy of the state
remains intact in a way that subordinates the media to the state’s political prerogatives and
ultimately constrains meaningful press freedom.
It is unclear whether form will follow function in the case of the Chinese media. The
state still retains a majority stake in even those media properties which are publicly traded or
receive private investment, though some experts conclude that “the trend toward private
ownership is clear” (Stockmann 2010, 177). One informant observes, “people are jaded and
don’t feel like they have a voice in government… prosperity is relatively new… but maybe when
the novelty of prosperity wears off, people will lose patience with their alienation from the
political process” (Young, personal communication, September 3, 2014). Another way of
investigating the changing formal and the functional relationships between the state and the
media is by analyzing the relationship between Chinese news organizations’ changing economic
cultures and the changing political cultures of their publics.

The Cycle of Economic and Cultural Liberalization Within the Chinese Media
Looking back on the Southern Weekly protests, and the changing formal and functional
nature of the relationship between the Chinese central government and news media, a question of
causality emerges: In what ways has the Chinese media system’s changing economic cultures
influenced its changing political cultures and vice versa? Is it merely a coincidence that headlines
calling for a “dream for Constitutional government” are printed during the height of media
commercialization? Did economic reform precede changing social and political attitudes or does
the temporal precedence go the other way?
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Before addressing these questions, it’s important to note communication scholars have
advanced a theory of cultural and media imperialism which characterized cultures of
deregulation and free market economics not as discrete phenomena, but as part of a broader
imposition of Western cultural dominance. The cultural imperialism thesis, which has been
discussed in previous chapters, was defined by Herb Schiller, one of its most authoritative
proponents, as “the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and
how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping
social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating
centre of the system” (1976, 9). Schiller proceeds to describe the media, specifically calling out
the commercialization of broadcasting as the means by which these processes are carried out,
and identifies the corporate owners of the media, rather than governments, as the dominating
forces.
Schiller’s argument has been critiqued for its foundational assumption that cultural
domination is a necessary upshot of certain types of media ownership models and for taking a
totalizing view that “neither sees the point nor possibility in attempting to isolate and investigate,
for example, the consumerist attitudes or the political values that exposure to particular media
texts are said to promote” (Tomlinson 2001, 39). In other words, there’s little empirical
verification within the media effects literature which would elevate media imperialism from the
realm of the speculative.
The argument, then, that the current economic liberalization of the Chinese media
system, and its cultural influence, is an example of – or should be studied within the context of –
media imperialism becomes problematic. As the Taiwanese scholar Chin-Chuan Lee observed,
it’s particularly difficult to make the cultural imperialism case in China, where foreign
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investment in media organizations is tightly controlled and no media organization is wholly
privately owned, let alone privately owned by foreign or multinational corporations (1980).
While these economic arrangements may certainly change in the future, and even though it may
fit within the rhetoric of the CCP’s condemnation of “hostile foreign forces,”
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the media
imperialism thesis has not been shown to have significant explanatory power for understanding
the culture of the Chinese media.
Reviewing the Southern Weekly protests as an illustrative case study, along with the
recent history of the development of a media industry within China, it becomes apparent the
relationship between economic culture and political culture within the Chinese media is not just
reciprocal but also cyclical. Economic reforms which removed economic subsidies from media
organizations in the 1970s and 1980s didn’t immediately loosen editorial control and modify
public expectations about appropriate levels of government intervention. Instead, three
successive phenomena emerged, which contributed to a more democratic political culture
(which, for the purpose of this analysis, can be defined as the ability for a population to
collectively and independently determine its own shared values and beliefs, without coercion by
politically powerful actors).
First, the economic imperative to generate revenue from non-state sources, such as
subscription and newsstand purchases and advertisements, engendered a commercial culture at
the organizational level. Second, these new organizational objectives created competition for
customers and advertisers at a meso level. These competitive pressures did not exist under a

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In 2010, exasperated by the Chinese central government’s tight censorship of its search offerings, Google
threatened to withdraw from China. Officials in China’s Propaganda Department were caught off-guard by the
high-profile threat, surprised that Google didn’t first try to negotiate within the context of their working relationship.
“A Beijing academic heard a senior official say that the government was treating the Google crisis as ‘the digital
version of June 4,’ referring to the Tiananmen crisis” and although Google only had a 30 percent market share (most
Chinese preferred Chinese-owned Baidu), the Chinese government successfully turned the tide of online public
opinion against Google for trying “to subvert Chinese sovereignty through its ‘information imperialism’” (Shirk
2010, 4).
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central planning model and they affected not just the commercial media that were cut off from
state subsidies, but also the official media, which needed to maintain their appeal in an
increasingly crowded marketplace.
Finally, given the new competitive atmosphere, some media outlets began to focus on
specific market positions and audience demographics, ultimately offering more editorial
diversity and niche news products (Donald 2002). As Stockmann points out, it’s not just
competition from new commercial media, but also from the increasing availability of online and
international media, which influence content. The international outlets, she insists, “place
competitive pressure on television, radio broadcasting, and print media to be bold in their
reporting.” (2010, 178) And one Chinese journalist told me “social media is filling the vacuum
of news – things you couldn’t publish in the print media are more permissively published
online,” and this creates a competitive pressure upon print publications (Fan, personal
communication, September 4, 2014). The new diversity of content contributes to a more diverse
political culture whereby the Chinese population’s shared beliefs and values become more
expressed by their consumption of particular cultural commodities than impressed by
propaganda officials. To be sure, culture is comprised of, and reflected by, much more than
consumer choice within the context of a media industry. But the ability to independently identify
and engage with specialized content within a newly diverse media sector surely represents a level
at which culture is being liberalized.
Aside from this more democratic political culture among the Chinese public, there are
two other characteristics, in tension with one another, which have presented themselves amid the
changing institutional structure of the press: a culture of corruption and a culture of
professionalization. The culture of corruption within the Chinese media industry is too vast and
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complex a topic to fully explore here. However, it relates, mostly as a hindrance, to the evolving
culture of professionalization within the Chinese press. In brief, “pay-to-play news” has a long
history in China, and all types of organizations, from government agencies to factories to
educational institutions, have a tradition of preparing cash gifts for journalists, concealed within
a red envelope. “This practice is so prevalent in China today that the first question even for a
young university student who interns at a news organization… is always how to handle the red
envelope the interviewee gave him/her” (Li 2010, 300). While western standards of professional
journalism would compel the intern to abstain from the gift, many veteran Chinese journalists
still suggest that doing so would be an insult to the interviewee and may risk access in the future
(Ibid.).
In spite of the persistence of the culture of corruption, a culture of professionalism “or
zhuanye zhuyi has taken on greater importance… [and] a sense of social mission among Chinese
journalists has emerged as party news ideology has faded” (Gang & Bandurski 2010, 57). One
informant reflects on this new atmosphere of professionalism: “Today, business reporters focus
on business filings – who owns what – and this didn’t exist in the 1980s. People have started to
get very good at it” and reporters have developed skills for some “very basic things, such as fact
checking, how you treat your sources. There’s more opportunity for reporters to develop a
reputation independent of their media outlet” and, like in the West, “some young journalists are
hired from obscure online publications” and quickly become leaders in their field (Fan, personal
communication, September 4, 2013). While the culture of journalistic professionalism in China
may have many differences with that of the West, both cultures of professionalism appear to
arise as media systems shifted their primary orientation from political institutions toward
individual consumers. As previously discussed, the editors and journalists who went on strike at
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Southern Weekly were motivated more by a desire for social legitimacy than material gain and
this is a sign that political culture is changing within – and not as a mere consequence of – the
media sector’s evolving economic culture.
This changing political culture, in turn, has created further impetus for a changing
economic culture through a two-phased process, which becomes clear with the Southern Weekly
example. In the first phase, the individuals respond to the new content diversity in one of at least
two ways. Some consumers are likely to embrace the content diversity as an end in itself, seeing
it and its plurality of ideas and information as socially beneficial. These may be somewhat
omnivorous media consumers, reading official newspapers to get a sense of government
priorities alongside commercial newspapers to get a broader or more populist perspective on
particular news stories (not to mention international outlets online). Or they may simply consume
individual outlets that offer a broader range of content. Southern Weekly would be an example of
such an outlet since it, along with other commercial newspapers in the 1990s, “spiced up official
news with consumer-relevant lifestyle, entertainment and sports coverage” (Gang & Bandurski
2010, 41). This response to increased content diversity and a changing political culture could be
characterized as the “cosmopolitan” response. The alternative response is the possibility that
some Chinese news consumers, presented with content that targeted a narrow segment of – or
certain demographics within – the media market, began to self segregate by specific economic
interests or political opinions. I’ll characterize this possible response as the “class cohesion”
response, in which new possibilities for collective identities and social solidarities are rendered
visible.
When a changing political culture leads to these “cosmopolitanization” and “class
identification and cohesion” responses, the next phase which presents itself, in either scenario, is
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consumerism. Consumerism is described by Gary Cross as “the belief that goods give meaning
to individuals and their roles in society” (2000, 1). While Cross characterizes consumerism as a
way of furnishing an individual (more than a collective) identity and tracks its rise against the
decline of the “identification with class, nation, and even high-minded social reform,” he does so
based upon a distinctly American type of consumerism (one which “concretely expressed the
cardinal political ideals of…liberty and democracy”). It is possible that, in some cultural
contexts within China, where political ideals are more aligned with group solidarity than
individual liberty, consumerism may be animated as much by an attempt to forge collective
identity than achieve personal gratification. It is also possible that consumer culture is always
and everywhere, on some level, driven by both.
The cosmopolitan actor, though she may disavow crass materialism, will require, in order
to sustain a cosmopolitan identity, a new level of commercial consumption, be it in the form of
international travel, higher education, or an ever expanding repertoire of cultural products. The
more provincial actor, whose media consumption fuels a more specific class or cultural identity,
will likely adapt his purchasing behavior and material acquisition in a way that is not just within
his means, but also appropriate to his perceived social status, class identity or community
membership. In these ways, consumerism is driven not just directly by the introduction of
commercial advertising, but also by the particular types of economic and social group identities
that emerge in the wake of changing political culture. And one can imagine how, as
consumerism becomes more prevalent and entrenched, carving out and reinforcing group
identities, new pressure is placed upon political actors and lawmakers to continue and expand
economic reforms. This description of the cyclical relationship between changing economic
culture and changing political culture is visualized in the following graphic:
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Figure 2: A Cyclical Model of the Relationship Between the Economic and Political Cultures of the Chinese Media

To cultural studies scholars, the assertion that economic and political cultures are
cyclically linked is neither controversial nor necessarily unique. Larry Grossberg has even
challenged (2010) the modernist assumption that economics, culture and politics are separable or
discrete domains for investigation. And Anne Balsamo has described (2011) how technological
innovation and imagination in an entrepreneurial context are, by their very nature, sites for
cultural production.
The part of this model’s proposition that may be new, however, is its synthesis of
classical sociological theory with more contemporary economic sociology. The right side of the
model, which enumerates the ways in which a liberalized economic culture leads to a liberalized
political culture, is informed by historical materialism as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of
interests. The suggestion that economic conditions of an individual or population influence or
even determine that individual’s or population’s cultural practices (in this instance, within the
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context of the Chinese media system) is familiar within this sociological tradition. On the left
side of the model, however, the specific way in which social relations influence economic
systems is described in a way that would be familiar to readers of Max Weber or more
contemporary economic sociologists.
As the Southern Weekly case study would suggest, and as this related model proposes,
commercialization and democratization may continue to reinforce each other in mutually
constitutive ways within the Chinese media system. If so, it may be reasonable to expect that,
unless this cycle is obstructed, the Chinese media’s culture of journalistic professionalism will
continue to strengthen, and despite acts of government censorship in the short term, its spirit of
inquiry and espionage – or, its spaces of autonomy and spaces of polarization – will remain
intact.

The Dawn of Chinese Media Politics
As I have sought to demonstrate, political power relations have shifted within China
throughout the past several decades. While the CCP continues to maintain absolute authority
over state institutions and a monopoly over legislative actions of the national government,
Chinese media organizations have garnered greater political influence and populated themselves
with increasingly autonomous actors (including journalists, editors, investors, etc.). Some of this
power has been relegated voluntarily by political leaders, and some of it has been appropriated in
opposition to their wishes. In this concluding section, I apply Castells’ idea of “media politics” –
defined as “the conduct of politics in and by the media” (2009, 194) – to the Chinese political
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system to demonstrate how, through the domestic changes and international pressures, the
Chinese media are creating the conditions and constraints for political action.
54

Media politics can be seen as a close conceptual cousin of the broader “mediatization”
thesis. It is also similar to what Hallin and Mancini describe as an increasingly global
phenomenon of “political parallelism” in which “the structure of the media and practice of
journalism reflect and participate in the ideological and factional divisions of the political
system” (2012, 292). Hallin and Mancini conclude that even the Chinese media system, “even if
it exists in the absence of multiparty politics and a liberal ‘civil society,’” is home to this type of
political parallelism.
It is not particularly original or controversial to argue that local and national politics in
China are mediated. Mounting research has demonstrated how “different sectors of the print and
broadcast media took different positions and articulated different social interests in a
multifaceted Chinese ‘public sphere’” (Zhao 2012, 161). What might be considered original, or
at least relevant to addressing the question of whether and how a commercial press is gaining
purchase in a Chinese context, is the observation that the emerging logic of media politics has
been perpetuated not just by a changing economic culture (as I described in the previous section),
but by international pressures imposed by globalization. Castells observed the global
consolidation of media companies “and the growing interdependence of societies around the
world lead to the rise of a global media culture and global professional practices that are
mirrored in similar forms of media politics” (2009, 199). This interdependence is particularly
pronounced within, and consequential for, the Chinese media.

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as much as, if not more than, political leaders create the conditions and constraints of media practice.

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Sun Shaojing, a professor in Fudan University’s journalism school, informed me there is
a popular expression that has begun to circulate within China over the past decade. It translates
roughly to “exported products are being sold in China” (Sun, personal communication,
September 3, 2014). What people mean when they say this is that journalism (and other cultural
products) created by Chinese reporters for Western publications is being re-imported, sometimes
illicitly. Sun observed that this activity “puts pressure on the government because if there is an
important topic that the mainstream media doesn’t mention, people will learn about it anyway
and this further jeopardizes the media’s credibility.” The activity of foreign media within China
cuts both ways, however. While foreign media are “usually far more trusted” than the domestic
media, when they project detectable biases or make reporting errors, they give the Chinese
government (and official newspapers) an opportunity to openly question their credibility (Young
2013, 61-62).
Still, there is an apparent consensus that the influence of the pluralistic and competitive
culture of Western media upon the Chinese media is stronger than the reciprocal influence. As
Stockmann explains, “both online and international media represent sources of information that
are more autonomous from the state than the traditional domestic media… and place competitive
pressure on television, radio broadcasting and print media to be bold in their reporting” (2010,
178). In a move which both acknowledges that political discussion and activity are increasingly
mediated and attempts to reclaim political power from the more commercial media, the CCP
made a multi-billion dollar investment in the summer of 2014 in an online media network called
“The Paper.” The new venture conspicuously resembles Rupert Murdoch’s (recently failed)
venture, “The Daily,” and may be seen (somewhat paradoxically) as an example of the
“Murdochization” of the news by the CCP (Thussu 2007). As the Shanghai-based journalist Fan
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Wenxin told me The Paper is “catering to the new reading habits of the Chinese people… It
wants to be the new Southern Weekend or Global Times but it’s an official outlet… they’ll allow
it to do some muckraking at the local level” [but will unlikely permit more high-profile
investigations or dissent]. Unless it showed some real editorial independence, Fan continued, it
would not win the trust of the Chinese people and would therefore be a squandered investment
(Fan, personal communication, September 4, 2014).
Sun Shaojing echoed this analysis and noted that, just a week before we were meeting,
The Paper was penalized by the government. Sun mentioned that fines like these are going to
become more common in an era of “post-print censorship” when censors can’t keep up with the
instantaneous nature of digital publishing, and they might have a chilling effect on The Paper’s
editorial team. Sun pointed out that this, along with the fact that future funding is uncertain, is
why “most academics and professionals aren’t very optimistic” about The Paper’s future
development (Sun, personal communication, September 3, 2014).
I previously demonstrated how the trend toward professionalization and
commercialization was not just creating new spaces of autonomy and content diversity, but was
also responsible for new sensationalist practices. In this section, I conclude with the observation
that, through the introduction of media politics to China, not only does the practice of politics
become more inherently democratic (as more actors with competing constituencies have begun
to constitute a public sphere) and transparent (given the international pressures discussed), but
that commercialization often leads to nationalistic (and sometimes anti-Western) fervor. In
moments of international tension, expressions of nationalism within the more commercial press
are motivated less by a desire to serve the CCP leadership than by an opportunity to establish
salience and solidarity with audiences (i.e., customers).
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In the case of the anti-Japanese protests of 2005, citizens that lacked trust in the state
media sought information about the sensitive international dispute from the commercial press.
As Stockmann points out, “an outraged nationalist is more likely to believe the Southern Weekly
or news reports on [social media] than those published in the People’s Daily” and so these
commercial outlets “have a greater potential to influence political behavior during a public
opinion crisis” (2010, 196). Put simply, the ability for commercial (including online) media to
help spur democratic social movements in protest of CCP policies is the same ability to spur
nationalistic or xenophobic movements. Another indicative example comes from the 2008
Beijing Olympics, when much Chinese public sentiment was frustrated with the global media’s
sympathy for Tibetan protesters. The Chinese public interpreted this coverage as interference in
China’s domestic affairs. In response, a graduate student from Fudan University produced a six-
minute online video entitled “2008 China Stand Up!,” which garnered millions of views and
stoked patriotic pride. In April of that year, when the Dalai Llama was made an honorary citizen
by the Paris City Council, the CEO of the online portal Sohu (similar to Yahoo!) organized
online a boycott of French products “to make the thoroughly biased French media and public feel
losses and pain” (Zhu 2013, 245). The ideological contestation between the Chinese and French
media represents a kind of internationalization media politics -- what might be called “media
geopolitics” and is increasingly referred to “media diplomacy.”
As with the many countries, including the United States (think Fox News), the most
commercial media in China are often the most nationalistic. And while the culture of
cosmopolitanism discussed in chapter one is increasingly prevalent in many parts of China, Fan
Wenxin insisted “commercialism is intensifying nationalism, not undercutting it” (Fan, personal
communication, September 4, 2014). Through the emergence of media politics in China, the
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media have become politically freer than any point in the past half century even if they are newly
constrained by hitherto unknown economic obligations. It is unclear whether the increasingly
diverse networks of cultural production and consumption will produce the kind of harmony that
Hu Jintao sought and John Locke prophesied or the kind of discord, sensationalism and
polarization that Western critics of media commercialization have decried. Or both. It is more
and more evident that the spaces of autonomy and polarization are intensifying within China. As
we drank cappuccinos in the “Fuel Coffee” on the fourth floor of a sprawling and sparkling
shopping mall in Shanghai, Fan Wenxin left me with a concluding thought which poignantly
signaled both the peril and a promise of the increasingly commercial culture of the Chinese
press. He told me, with a tone of reflective resignation, “People want more than just harmony.
People want some truths.”

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Chapter Six: Hybridizing the “Holy Space” In Cuba

In March of 2016, President Obama became the first sitting U.S. president since Calvin
Coolidge to visit the island nation of Cuba. Predictably, given its increased polarization and
partisanship (Stroud 2011), the U.S. media amplified many vigorous complaints about the
strategic wisdom, and even the patriotism, of the president’s visit. But President Obama appeared
less concerned with shielding himself from the adversarial culture of the U.S. press than with
helping to provoke such a culture within the Cuban press. In a joint press conference with
Cuba’s president Raul Castro, which was being broadcast live at President Obama’s insistence,
Obama called on a reporter from CNN who asked President Castro whether he would release
political prisoners. Castro was visibly annoyed as he answered the question, while Obama
proceeded to wink at the press during his response. A day after the press conference, President
Obama met with about a dozen Cuban dissidents at the new American embassy in Havana.
Several of them were independent journalists. According to Joel Simon, the executive director of
the Committee to Protect Journalists, “one of the key goals of Obama’s Havana trip was to create
more space for critical expression in a country that until recently was one of world’s most
censored” (2016).
Of all the countries in the Western hemisphere, Cuba is home to the most politically
restrictive and economically illiberal media system. In their Historical Guide to World Media
Freedom, Whitten-Woodring and Van Belle note, “critical journalists risk harassment and arrest,
and those convicted of subversion or acting against the state face long prison terms or even
death” (2014, 143). As part of the normalization of bilateral relations between the U.S. and
Cuba, American telecommunications and technology companies will begin to be able to offer
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services within Cuba.
55
Internet access is currently limited by Cuban law and by the limited
economic means of Cuban customers. The publicly accessible Internet is more like a national
Intranet, and in 2015, the government created thirty-five new Wi-Fi hotspots in public spaces
throughout the country. Yet this Internet access costs 2 CUC per hour in a country where the
average monthly salary is about 28 CUC (Fernandes 2016a).
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These developments certainly
signal a significant structural change within the Cuban media system. And they’re being well
chronicled and advertised within the U.S. press as part of a narrative of increased liberalization
of the Cuban economy and political system. But consistent with the critique of the press as a
political institution (Bennett 1990), many of the journalistic accounts of Cuban media change
distinguishably reflect an American perspective and promote a set of American values (if only
implicitly). The ostensibly independent press’s complicity with this part of the U.S. president’s
foreign policy agenda is perhaps best epitomized by the wink Obama shot to the traveling press
corps during the above-mentioned joint press conference.
To be fair, it is possible that it is not just news organizations that are acting as political
institutions but U.S. colleges and universities as well. A certain strand of cultural studies
scholarship, steeped in the traditions of Marxist thought, has focused less on the scarcity of
informational and material goods available to the Cuban people (and of the opportunities for
political dissent), and more on the “culture of solidarity” and informal/creative economies that
have arisen among the Cuban people. This academic culture provides a productive counterweight
to the often one-sided reporting of Western media organizations.

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The Obama administration has previously attempted to expand Internet access to Cuba in 2009, when TeleCuba
obtained a license from the U.S. Treasury Department to extend a 100 mile fiber optic cable between Key West and
Havana, but the project ultimately failed after, given the American embargo, Cuba was unable to obtain the
equipment necessary to extend the cable within Cuba (Fernandes 2016a).
56
In March 2016, one CUC was equivalent to one U.S. dollar.
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With some awareness of my own subjective position, as someone who has been shaped
both by the culture of the American press and that of the culture of American academic
traditions, I traveled to Havana in December of 2013 to meet with Cuban journalists, government
officials and journalism scholars to better understand the economic and political cultures of the
Cuban media in the current moment. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet, before
and after my trip, with USC professor Roberto Suro, and Guillermo Suarez-Borges, the media
attaché within the Cuban government’s mission to the United Nations. Both individuals were
helpful in making introductions to journalists, officials, and scholars within Cuba. In an attempt
to ensure a more diverse set of informants, one of my first meetings in Havana was with Lynn
Roche, a public affairs officer in the American Interests Section who referred me to other
interviewees within the independent journalism community. This chapter will blend these
interviews with the theoretical work of leading cultural studies scholars to analyze how the
revolutionary national identity of the Cuban people is being contested in a country which is
gradually opening itself up to the international influences of globalization.
Before wading into this more contemporary analysis, however, it will help to provide
some historical context. The country of Cuba, after all, has a varied history of international
influences. And, as I demonstrate in the next section, the revolution which led to the long reign
of Fidel Castro was itself supported, roughly sixty years ago, by the provocations and culture of
the U.S. commercial news media.

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A History or Transculturality Within Cuban Media
The media industry in Cuba represent a critical part of the country's cultural legacy. In
1922, Cuba became the first country in Latin America to broadcast a public radio station and, in
1950, became the third country in the region to launch a television station (Lugo 2008, 117).
The economic and political cultures of the Cuban media are complex and are tightly tied up in
the country's shifting colonial influences and international alliances. In order to elucidate and
periodize these influences, and to provide an historical context which is analytically useful, we
can look at the recent history of the Cuban media in three phrases: the era of American influence
during middle of the twentieth century, the cold war era that dawned after Fidel Castro led the
revolution that ousted the Batista administration in 1959, and the so-called "Special Period,"
during the 1990s when the end of the cold war left Cuba economically and culturally isolated.
Like any attempt at historical periodization, this one necessarily omits certain transitional and
intermediate points and sacrifices historical nuance for the purpose of setting up an intelligible
and coherent contextual backdrop for our analysis. Fortunately, the economic and geopolitical
conditions and characteristics of each of these phases are so distinguishable that they provide
clear examples of – and precedents for – cultural convergence and divergence.
The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro in 1959, received much of its popular support
among Cuban citizens, and gained significant legitimacy internationally, as a result of the
masterful exploitation of the affordances of the modern mass media of its time. The broadcasts of
Radio Rebelde, led by Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra mountains, were instrumental in
degrading public support for the Batista administration and building popular support for Castro,
especially among Cuban college students. Perhaps more consequential was a series of articles,
appearing in the New York Times in 1957, which portrayed Castro's imminent revolution as a fait
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accompli. The Times, which had previously reported that Castro had died in a failed invasion
attempt, helped resuscitate international public awareness of, if not popular support for, the
young and charismatic revolutionary.
Herbert Matthews, the veteran New York Times foreign correspondent, had developed a
close personal relationship with Castro and the guerillas after interviewing them in the Sierra
Maestra Mountains just months before the revolution. Matthews hailed Castro as a “flaming
symbol of the opposition to the regime,” and his sympathetic portrayals in the Times helped
strengthen Cuba's revolutionary fervor (cited in DePalma 2006, 106). Matthews’s promotion of
Castro took place amid an era – and within a news organization – which many associate with the
height of journalistic objectivity in the United States. So the mixture of editorial writing and
foreign reporting with which Matthews was tasked at the venerable Times speaks to the
persistence of the U.S. media’s commercial culture. The spaces of autonomy supported by this
culture is reflected in a 1944 memo Matthews sent to his publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger,
arguing that the job of a correspondent should “more and more be to interpret, illuminate,
analyze…” (cited in DePalma 2006, 62). The spaces of polarization were reflected, a decade
later, in the article that Matthews filed – and an accompanying editorial he wrote – blasting the
incarceration of students in Argentina, which led to protests of the Perón government. Perón was
thrown out of office a few months later, and an American television series called The Big Story
“dramatized Matthews’s adventure and made him, briefly, a hero” (DePalma 2006, 64).
Although the Batista government censored Matthews’s reports, actually scissoring them
out of the imported newspapers as they did with offending articles of all types, American
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travelers brought the uncensored newspapers with them to Havana and the news of Castro’s
survival and reports of the strength of his army
57
quickly circulated by word-of-mouth around
Havana (DePalma 2006, 102). This political practice of censoring international news, and the
subversive social practice of word-of-mouth information-sharing which it triggers is, as we’ll
see, are experiencing a renaissance in the present day.
Che Guevara would write later in his journal that a "foreign reporter – preferably
American – was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much
more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export
our propaganda" (Fontova 2009). Interestingly, several of the Cuban journalists (and all the
Cuban government officials) with whom I spoke were familiar with the role Matthews played in
the revolution, and cited him as one of the forefathers of Cuban independence. The leaders of the
Cuban Revolution of 1959, which brought Castro to power, understood the way in which a
commercial journalism culture – one that was attracted to dramatic narratives, “exotic” locations
and quotable and photogenic underdogs – could be put to use in support of their nationalist
project. They might also have known that the nationalism and populism which the culture of the
market-oriented press engendered would ultimately precipitate an assertive monitory culture. If
so, it shouldn’t be a surprise that these media-savvy revolutionaries would, for practical as well
as ideological purposes, seek to restrict such a press as soon as they took control of it.

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Many of Matthews’s reports, it turned out, included imprecise and exaggerated troop numbers. After honoring
Matthews for his role in the revolution, Castro publicly embarrassed him at an Overseas Press Club event, claiming
he had tricked Matthews during those interviews in the mountains into believing he had a large army of guerrillas
when, in fact, he had just eighteen armed men.
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The primary point is the revolutionaries deftly exploited the expediency of the
commercial media culture that circulated within Cuba at the time. Here, George Yudice’s
concept of “cultural expediency” (2003), is helpful. This concept draws upon notions of
performativity, where individual and collective identities are apprehended in relation to
normative ideals, and the construction of cultural categories becomes “merely politic” (2003,
38). While Yudice's conceptualization of culture as "expedient" represents a relatively recent
turn in cultural studies, it provides a useful theoretical framework for understanding earlier eras
of contestation over the ownership and international influences of the Cuban media.
A secondary point is the revolutionaries’ exploitation of the commercial culture of the
press took place amid a technologically and professionally advanced media system. Aside from
its leading position within Latin America for the introduction of media technologies such as
radio and television, Cuba's journalism culture was highly professionalized with “six
professional schools of journalism across the country, graduating 200 students every year” (Lugo
2008, 117). Castro was acutely aware of the institutional influence of the media industry, and its
ability to inform public opinion and set the political agenda not just in the context of the
revolution, but in its aftermath as well.
When the Castro administration's criminal prosecution of the military officials from the
previous regime was criticized by the national and international media, Fidel Castro launched
“Operation Truth,” which began to lay the groundwork for state control of the press. In June
1959, at a lunch organized by the National College of Journalists (which most media owners
boycotted), Castro said that “if anyone must appreciate the freedom of the press, it is not the one
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who makes a business of the freedom of the press, but the one who, thanks to the freedom of the
press, writes, orientates and works with thoughts, using a right the Revolution conquered for the
country” (Lugo 2008, 118). In a sense, Castro was echoing the critique of the press freedom ideal
which points out “freedom of the press is only enjoyed by those who own one” and, by
overturning the private ownership of the press, he rhetorically positioned himself as quashing
this inequality of access.
As the revolutionary forces of resistance assumed a new position of dominance, the
Cuban mediascape was reconstituted with new economic and political logics that perpetuated
new "scripts." Scripts are, according to Appadurai (1996, 35-36), “complex sets of metaphors by
which people live...and protonarratives of possible lives [and] fantasies that could become
prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement.” Like Appadurai, Nestor Garcia
Canclini invokes metaphors (and narratives) as an empirical locus for observing the local
expression of international phenomena. He notes that these metaphors “serve to imagine
difference and the ritualized narrations give order to it” (2014, xli). The critical metaphors and
narratives which propelled the new statist media system involved a reinterpretation of the
“freedom of the press” from a freedom that is exercised by independent proprietors of media
organizations (who were dispossessed of their licenses by the new government) to one that is
exercised by individual journalists who work for the state, from which this freedom is granted
(and, of course, upon which it is contingent).
In the wake of the revolution, as the media were nationalized, the international
proliferation of communism added new international dimensions to the Cuban mediascape.
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After the United States and Soviet Union clashed in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion in
1961, the influence of the Soviet Union within Cuba strengthened and, by the time that Cuba
entered the COMECON economic alliance of 1972, millions of copies of Soviet newspapers
circulated within the country (Lugo 2008, 122). To be sure, the commingling of Latin American
and Soviet cultures extended beyond the economic and political cultures of these countries’
media systems. But news and cultural products and policies are loci for productive comparison.
One Cuban government official related a memory from the cold war era which
serves as a representative example of the divergence of Cuban and Soviet cultures at the time. In
1983, as a ten-year-old boy traveling in what is now Slovakia with his father, a member of the
Cuban foreign service, he came across a newsstand that was selling lottery tickets and
pornography. He remembers, "when I got home I asked my father, 'if they're socialist too, how
come they get to have these things and we don't?' to which my father responded, 'socialism in
Cuba is everyday created by Cubans.'" (Capo, personal communication, January 2014). The
moral of the story seemed to be that certain cultural conventions are capable of resisting foreign
economic and political influences. Though that moral was complicated by the fact that my
informant, like so many Cubans born in the 1960s and 1970s, was given a distinctly Russian
name (Boris), which reflected the strong influence of Soviet culture during that era.
This apparent contradiction between the identification with, and disavowal of, a
dominant cultural or colonial influence is best expressed by Homi Bhabha's concept of
"mimicry" (1994). Bhaba explains that instances of colonial imitation represent “a discursive
process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the
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same, but not quite) does not merely 'rupture' the discourse, but becomes transformed into an
uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a 'partial' presence.” The same government
official who shared this memory of cultural difference between Cuba and Slovakia also shared a
lesson the Cuban government has learned from the failure of the Soviet Union's media system. I
asked my informant whether the Cuban public could and, in his estimation, did trust public
opinion polls conducted by the state when the state had a political interest in projecting unity and
consensus. He responded, "We understand that the USSR's failure was that opinion polling was
top-down. Raul and Fidel need to know [what people think of their leadership]… The key to the
continuity of the revolution is how connected the government is to the people" (B. Capo,
personal communication, January 2014). While this answer elided the crux of my question
(which was about public trust in public opinion polls), it also spoke to the departure from, but
association with, the Soviet practices in a way that seemed to echo Bhabha's theory of mimicry.
Perhaps more relevant for the consideration of the theory being developed here, we can
see from this exchange that the Cuban government appears to have a sincere interest in
monitoring the attitudes of its citizens. It realizes the Soviet press, centralized and hierarchical as
it was, failed to understand the actual (rather than self-reported) attitudes of its public and this
was one if its fatal flaws. The commercial press, by contrast is more diffuse and thus more
capable, on some level, to ensure the government remains “connected… to the people” (to use
Capo’s terms). As mentioned in chapters one and four, the cultural and economic logic of the
commercial press is characterized by attraction (rather than promotion). In an environment where
Cuban citizens are gradually losing interest and trust in the state media’s constant promotion of
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the ruling party’s policies and revolutionary ideals, the appeal of more attractive media, which
connect their audiences (i.e., citizens) to the media producers (i.e., government) is gaining favor
with Cuban leaders. This is explored in more depth in the next section. For now, it suffices to
quote one of the independent Cuban journalists who met with President Obama at the American
embassy in Havana during his visit: “The Cuban government is losing credibility day after day.
… President Castro made many promises and has not been able to fulfill those promises” (quoted
in Simon 2016).
The Cuban media system did, in the 1970s and 1980s, adopt many of the traits of the
Soviet publications, which were so prevalent during the cold war period. The fusion of Soviet
and Latin American cultures in Cuba during this time can be analyzed through the theories of
hybridity which are frequently used to analyze diasporic identity in the context of postcolonial
scholarship. Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic, is among the more influential thinkers to
discuss the way in which information, ideologies and individuals migrate transatlantically and
hybridize culture (1995). Gilroy resisted notions of ethnic essentialism and fixed identities
common to analyses of globalization, instead insisting that intercultural encounters produced a
more dynamic and complicated process of identification.
This concept is salient in Latin America, where, according to Marwan Kraidy, "hybridity
is shaped at once by ancient intercultural encounters and contemporary social dynamics" (2005,
64). Indeed, even before the American influences of the first half of the twentieth century or the
Soviet influences of the second half, Cuba was a site of rich intercultural contact and a product of
pan-Latin American and African migrations. It also received a significant number of immigrants
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from Europe. In the period between 1846 and 1930, nearly a quarter of the 52 million people
who emigrated from Europe landed in Latin America. Within Latin America, Cuba was the third
most popular destination after Argentina and Brazil (Garcia-Canclini 2014, 46). In fact, the
notion of transculturation was originated by the Cuban cultural critic Fernando Ortiz who
“developed the notion… to understand Cuba's experience with racial and cultural encounters. …
Ortiz posited the African element at the heart of scholarly inquiry and public debate about Cuban
national identity… and asserted that it was inevitable that Cuban culture would be mixed”
(Kraidy 2005, 53).
Turning to the cultural heritage of the Cuban media, the period of Soviet influence is both
a product of, and contributor to, a hybrid culture and this observation can help redress some of
the scholarly criticism of hybridity as a discourse. Specifically, critics depict hybridity “as
poststructuralist license” and argue “hybridity rhetoric embraces the logic of transnational
capitalism and is therefore ‘neocolonial’” (Kraidy 2005, 66). The transcultural influences of the
USSR upon Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s provide a useful case in which hybridity is not seen as
a necessary corollary to global capitalism.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered an economically and culturally isolated
“Special Period,” in which its state media reemerged as the dominant news source for the Cuban
public. Leaders lionized nationalist icons such as Jose Marti and resurrected revolutionary
rhetoric. The state media during this time actively promoted a protectionist and highly
nationalistic agenda given the belief, common throughout Cuban government bureaucracies and
the Cuban public, that an American invasion was a distinct possibility (Anonymous, personal
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communication, December 27, 2103). At the same time the media were pursuing this strategy,
the highest levels of government leadership were reportedly frustrated by the gulf between the
rhetoric of the Soviet and Cuban newspapers during the perestroika years and the reality of the
Soviet Union's imminent collapse. As one government official informed me, "In the 1980s, the
media was very triumphal in its tone. Yet Fidel started wondering why the media were saying
everything was fine if everything was not fine" (Capo, personal communication, January 2014).
The protectionist strategy deployed by Cuban state media during the 1990s was not
unwarranted. The decade was marked by regional free trade agreements and the rising influence
of supranational institutions such as the World Trade Organization and International Monetary
Fund. As one Cuban journalism professor explained, "When NAFTA was signed, we realized we
kept studying the United States without the rest of North America. We needed to be studying the
inter-American system" (López Oceguera, personal communication, January, 2014). This
informant noted Cubans were wary of the "complex interdependence" and "securitization" that
followed from these agreements, and mentioned how Cuba witnessed Guatemala's indigenous
people resisting mining companies from Canada, a country Cuba has long called a friend.
Incidentally, this scholar is affiliated with a research center at the University of Havana which,
until 1987, had been called "The Research Department of the United States" but which now calls
itself the "Center for Hemispheric & United States Studies.”
In addition to specter of foreign influence which globalization brought about more
generally, the United States began to ramp up its public diplomacy efforts toward Cuba during
this period. In 1985, the United States government had launched Radio Marti and, five years
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later, TV Marti, which were modeled on the Voice of America program and were explicitly
designed to influence public opinion by "support[ing] the right of the Cuban people to seek,
receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" (Kerry
2010, 3). Radio Marti and TV Marti had a combined budget of $37 million in 2006 and together
they were "accused by the Cuban government of inciting subversion and civil disobedience, and
encouraging terrorism and illegal emigration" (Lugo 2008, 125). Indeed, my Cuban government
informants were quick to cite specific allocations the United States Congress makes for
supporting dissident activities around the globe, and argued such allocations and activities put
smaller countries in a perpetually defensive position.
A cultural analysis of the Cuban media system (and, for that matter, foreign media
broadcasting inside Cuba) is not particularly elucidating if it remains merely structural.
International political disputes, trade agreements and transnational media policy likely influence
individual identity and social behavior. And yet, we likely conceal more than we reveal when we
analyze global patterns alongside, and in opposition to, national resistance efforts in a binary
way. Nestor Garcia Canclini encourages us to move the debate on globalization "from questions
of identity to the discrepancies between supranational integration policies and citizen behavior,"
rejecting the simple opposition between global and national, and noting that the key issue is "to
explore whether subjects can have agency in larger social structures" (2014, 14). As we turn
now to an examination of the way in which a commercial culture is catching on within the Cuban
media in the current moment, we shift our focus from theoretical discussions of broader patterns
of international influence upon Cuban media to more concrete observations about the work of
journalists within Cuba.

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The “Revolutionary Identity” of the Cuban Media Amid Late Communism
When I traveled to Havana in December of 2013 and January of 2014, Cuba was the only
country within the western hemisphere which allowed no private ownership of the news media.
When I mentioned this fact in passing, one Cuban government official was quick to point out the
state had recently granted a few licenses to private individuals to publish reference pamphlets
and magazines for tourists, and that the Roman Catholic church’s Archdiocese publishes news
and opinion in its newspaper Espacio Laical or “The Holy Space” – and this publication is
exempt from government censorship (as its title might imply). (Anonymous, personal
communication, January 2014). When I asked this official – and every official with whom I
spoke – whether economic and cultural change within the Cuban media were imminent, I
received similar responses, which focused on the looming threat of foreign influence that would
threaten Cuba’s cultural autonomy. One official told me, “It’s not easy to create a space like that
in Cuba… [once you do] foreign advocacy groups will start giving money to news organizations
[which criticize the Cuban government] and once you provide a first step, people will keep
taking the steps” (Anonymous, personal communication, January 2014). These concerns are
understandable in light of Cuba’s colonial history. And yet, they conveniently serve to insulate
political elites within Cuba from domestic public criticism.
Much has been reported about the economic reforms currently underway in Cuba under
the leadership of Raul Castro, who was designated as the President of the Council of State in
2006 and officially elected to the position in 2008. These reforms increasingly allow for small
businesses and cooperatives within certain sectors of the Cuban economy (e.g., private
transportation, small restaurants and bed and breakfasts known as “casas particulares”) to
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generate and accumulate profit. Although the state continues to assert significant regulatory
authority through licensure and taxation, certain swaths of the Cuban economy that were
previously administered solely by the state are now operating in response to market variables.
“On a structural level... the reforms sound the death knell of the Soviet-style system of
centralized planning and control that Cuba has had since the 1970s” (Wilkinson, 2010).
One sector of the economy that had been largely absent from these processes of economic
liberalization is Cuba’s state-run media. Understanding media production and consumption as
sites of cultural and political contestation, and considering Cuba’s somewhat exceptional
circumstances vis-à-vis broader patterns of transnational flows of information and people, this
section investigates the economic and political cultures of the contemporary Cuban media, and
whether they have begun to bear any resemblance to the culture of the commercial press. Arjun
Appadurai informs us that local knowledge is “not only local in itself but, even more important,
for itself” (1996). To the extent that the Cuban media system is a leading purveyor of local
knowledge throughout the island nation, and to the extent that the media’s government sponsors
maintain an active interest in the deterrence of foreign (i.e., nonlocal) knowledge, the
instrumentalization of local knowledge for the ongoing nationalist and revolutionary project can
be considered a key aim of Cuba’s national media.
Even without a profit-driven, privately owned, commercially oriented model of
journalism, there are at least three ways in which ideas and information are circulating in a way
that challenges state control of public information. First, the Castro administration has ended its
ban on international travel for Cuban citizens. While the vast majority of ordinary Cubans lack
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the financial resources to travel outside of the island nation, those that begin to travel for work or
vacation will begin to better understand their country’s deprivation of informational resources.
As one American State Department official working in Havana told me, “Young people who
begin to travel, even just to countries like Nicaragua and Ecuador will start to see how easily
their Latin American neighbors can access the Internet, and so Cubans will begin to realize that
they’re being held back” (Roche, personal communication, December 2013).
If the migration of Cuban people outside the country is an “inside out” flow of
information, an “outside in” flow is occurring as Cuba becomes more internationally integrated.
This is the second way in which an unregulatable circulation of information is being imposed
upon Cuba. It is exemplified in an anecdote which was shared with me by one of my Cuban
government informants. He recounted how, as Cuba prepared to host the visit by Pope John Paul
II in 1998, many of his peers in the Communist Party meetings were opposed to the idea of the
visit. They pointed out the Pope led the charge against communism in Poland. “But Fidel spoke
up and told those officials that if we really believe in the country we’ve built, we shouldn’t be
afraid of the Pope” (Anonymous, personal communication, January 2014). This underscores a
paradox of the Cuban media: while an ideal socialist media model would be inclusive and
egalitarian, the Cuban political elites who oversee the state-run media have, for the past half
century, defended the country’s political leadership and discouraged the expression of dissent.
This paradox, in which the political imperative for unity confronts a call for editorial diversity,
represents an inherent tension within the Cuban media. At the meeting discussing the Pope’s
visit, some foreshadowing of a more commercial press – and the call for a clash of competing
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ideas – is apparent. Though needless to say, in a show of the limitations of this clash within Cuba
at that time, none of my informant’s peers present at that meeting questioned Castro’s final word
on the subject.
Throughout my interviews, and from even a casual and informal analysis of Cuban media
content, it becomes clear a strong emphasis upon "unity," as an imperative of the revolutionary
project, is the political premise upon which pluralism has typically been constrained. Recently,
however, Raul Castro has increased his calls for Cuban citizens to share their "grievances" with
the editors and producers of Cuba's official newspapers and television stations, and publicly
insisted that journalists begin to more aggressively investigate instances of government waste
and corruption.
The Castro administration created media platforms where diverse opinions are
publicized, and a degree of criticism of the government has been tolerated and even encouraged.
The country’s main daily newspaper Granma started hosting a column every Friday in which
people write in with various grievances, and Channel 6 hosts a program called “Cuba Dica”
(“Cuba Says”), which is intended to serve as a kind of vox populi. When I asked one informant
about the government's circulation numbers of Granma (which are kept secret, characteristically)
– specifically whether the Friday edition was more popular than other daily editions, he
confirmed it was (Anonymous, personal communication, January 2014). Perhaps more
important than the comparative popularity of the edition of the newspaper in which grievances
were aired was the fact that the official had memorized the circulation rates of the daily
newspapers, indicating a market sensitivity for the state-run newspaper.
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While there is some tolerance for dissenting opinions in these outlets, one journalism
professor at the University of Havana thinks the Cuban media remain ill equipped to carry out an
investigative role, and this has less to do with political constraints than with cultural norms. She
insists "the most difficult thing to change is human consciousness and journalists are unable to
ask the right questions... and follow up when the official is lying through his teeth. Journalists
are still very cautious even when the highest authorities are saying ‘be brave.’” (López Oceguera,
personal communication, January 2014). This echoed an observation made by the American
foreign service officer I met with in Havana. She noted “younger people don’t have experience
with what we see as ‘objective’ journalism,” and so a culture of an independent or even an
adversarial press would require new avenues for professional education.
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These new avenues have emerged in a somewhat an ad hoc way as the Internet has begun
to support some entrepreneurial young journalists as they pursue their chosen profession. This
gets us to the third way in which information and ideas are beginning to elide the oversight by
the Cuban government: through informal networks of information sharing which are gradually
formalizing and, in doing so, testing the limits of the Cuban government’s restrictions. There is
no law within Cuba that either explicitly mandates or prohibits censorship but, as a practical
matter, Cuba has developed an international reputation for suppressing information. (In several
high-profile cases, journalists have been imprisoned for “insulting” the head of state or the
revolution, and the Committee to Protect Journalists regularly lists Cuba among its “Ten Most

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I told a Cuban government official that I heard from some local vendors that, when a murder occurred, it was
never reported in the newspaper and he heard it through a word of mouth within his neighborhood. The official, who
was familiar with the sensational coverage of the Western press from his time working for Cuba’s Mission to the
United Nations in New York, argued that the mandate for journalism in Cuba is different. “If we’re creating a space
[within the media] for instruction and education… murders and crime are irrelevant” (Capo, personal
communication, January 2014).
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Censored Countries.”) The lack of independently produced reporting has resulted in public
distrust of the state media.
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One street vendor told me the main reason Cuba has a reputation for
low crime is that the newspapers simply don’t report it. But there are people in his neighborhood
who are tasked with a kind of neighborhood watch and, when a theft or a mugging occurs, a
semi-structured word-of-mouth network is in place to help alert the neighbors (Anonymous,
personal communication, January 2015).
In recent years, this culture of networked information sharing can be found in the form of
USB drives that get circulated widely, with Cuban citizens uploading and downloading packages
of news and movies. While much of the content that gets circulated is imported (and illegal),
there is also a vibrant culture of homegrown amateur movie-making and independent journalism
included in these transmissions. Cuban culture is known, in part, for its widespread musical
training and performance, and I experienced the richness of this creative culture, and its
precarious position amid new international flows of culture, on two occasions: (1) when a local
group of teenagers was trying to play their music in an alley in the old section of Havana
(Havana Vieja) but was drowned out by an album of Italian opera star Andrea Bocelli being
amplified on loudspeakers in preparation for some public event and (2) when a group of local
musicians took us back to one of their homes for a night of dancing, showed us the music videos

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One taxi driver who had recently graduated from the University of Havana told me that, among his peers at the
university, “one hundred percent of them didn’t believe what they read in the newspaper.” Lest this be interpreted as
the skepticism common among youth, this sentiment was echoed by Cubans of all ages with whom I informally
interviewed in public parks within Havana and Trinidad. I asked one government official whether he thought the
Cuban people trusted the media. He smiled knowingly, said “Trust isn’t the right word,” and then told me that the
public generally “trusts” certain officials, such as Josefina Vidal, the director of the North American Department at
Cuba’s Foreign Ministry, who negotiated the normalization of diplomatic relations with the U.S. (Anonymous,
personal communication, April 2015).
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one of their adult children had made. Without Internet access, they expressed frustration they
couldn’t share the videos of which they were understandably proud.
Without broad access to the Internet, young Cubans have organized to produce more
highly edited and curated versions of the thumb drives. Just a few years ago, circulated thumb
drives often contained little more than the day’s or week’s news from an uncensored copy of a
foreign newspaper such as the Miami Herald. More recently, young Cubans have begun to
bundle hard drives full of foreign and domestic cultural products and distribute them throughout
the country in what are called El Paquete Semanal (“the weekly package”). The American media
studies scholar Rick Maxwell traveled to Havana in the spring of 2016 and told me “I kept
hearing things like ‘flash-drives are gold’” and as for the trove of information on El Paquete, he
said, “I don't know how they get the original stuff, but one theory is that it's a kid in the military
with access” (Maxwell, personal communication, April 2016). One news report describes the
phenomenon in a way that suggests the emergence of a true black market economy:
“El Paquete began some half-dozen years ago, compiled by a small, shadowy group of
friends in Havana every week. It’s a massive digital trove of recent movies, TV shows,
magazines, apps, software updates and other digital goodies made available to Cubans,
often mere hours after they become available elsewhere in the world. It’s copied and
distributed on portable drives to 100 people, who distribute it to 1,000, and so on, and
then it’s delivered through an informal network of human mules who travel in public
buses to every corner of the island. Most customers get the drive at home, where they
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exchange it for last week’s drive and the equivalent of $1.10 to $2.20. (Distributors
selling to other distributors charge ten times as much.)” (Helft 2015).

This distribution network has opened up opportunities for some young Cubans to begin
creating and publicizing original content. In March 2014, a few months after I left Cuba, a 27
year-old Cuban named Robin Pedraja got together with six of his friends and created the first
issue of Vistar, a popular culture magazine targeted at a young Cuban audience. The magazine
boasts a slick design and high-quality professional photography, and features Cuban movie stars
and rockstars in a country that discourages the promotion of celebrity. Yet, because the vast
majority of Cubans still don’t have access to the Internet and because it is illegal to publish
outside of state oversight, Vistar reaches most of its Cuban audience in a PDF version which is
distributed as part of El Paquete. Pedraja articulates the rationale for his magazine in a way that
would resonate with the family who invited me into their home and showed me their son’s home-
made music video, “In Cuba, there are a lot of new artists with a lot of talent, and they never had
something like this to show what they do” (Kessler 2015).
When I asked Elaine Diaz, a journalism professor at the University of Havana, whether
she foresees private media ownership in Cuba, she pointed to Vistar. Indeed, she’s quoted in a
Fast Company article discussing Vistar, “All media was property of the state before. … Now we
have underground ways to publish and you don’t need permission” (Ibid.). Diaz is herself perhaps
the most instructive example of Cuba’s transitional moment. As a faculty member at the
University of Havana, she’s connected with the ruling Communist Party. And yet she was the first
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Cuban journalist to receive a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. So it was not too
surprising that, when a Cuban and an American government official each gave me a list of Cuban
journalists to contact as informants, Diaz’s was the first name on both lists. But it is novel that a
journalism professor and blogger such as Diaz, who maintains a positive relationship with the
Cuban government, has begun to spotlight, to this American researcher, an example of a new
publication which operates outside the control of the state. Diaz has also launched a nonprofit
online publication called Periodismo Del Barrio (or “Neighborhood Journalism”) which explains
“Our model for future funding requests includes funds to public and private entities in different
countries, including the United States… we will not accept donations of any institution that seeks
– or has sought – subversion of the Cuban political system, or anyone seeking to influence our
agenda. And we will publish the name of the donor and the amount of donations we receive”
(Editorial 2015). Diaz is proud of of her country and identifies with its economic culture, even if
she is seeking incremental change. She tells me, “I want some form of privately owned news
media. I’m trying to do so. Although I would love to go in some sort of cooperative, instead of a
private enterprise, there are a lot of people pushing on that issue” (Diaz, personal communication,
March 2016).
While Diaz is not pursuing a profit-oriented press with its commercial culture, given her
increasing visibility within the international media, such a culture seems to be pursuing her. As an
example, when President Obama met in Havana with President Castro, the Mexican-American
television news anchor Jorge Ramos, of Fusion TV, interviewed Diaz by satellite. Diaz began the
interview with an upbeat assessment of the sentiment among the Cuban public in response to the
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state visit, and provided commentary about the meeting’s historic significance. But then Ramos’s
colleague asked Diaz about the reports in U.S. newspapers of Cuban authorities arresting anti-
government protesters and the seeming absence of this story from the Cuban press. Diaz gave a
smile as she responded, “That’s correct, we’re here in Havana where there are no non-official
media outlets – no TV, no radio and no print press have shown anything about the [protest group]
The Ladies in White… or anything about that issue here, so there’s zero, zero information about
that…”. The headline on the Fusion website emphasized the most provocative aspect of Diaz’s
reporting, “Cuban blogger says news of dissident arrests prior to Obama’s visit was kept quite”
(Ramos 2016). A couple weeks later, Diaz informed me she faced no criticism or punishment by
government authorities for that report.
Like Diaz, Vistar’s Pedraja is attempting to develop a journalism outlet that is
economically independent of the state and attract an audience by reporting on topics that are
popular, and not simply within the public interest. And like Diaz, he is struggling to maintain
certain aspects of the socialist culture of Cuba while liberalizing the economic model of his outlet.
On a typical day, when the state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde (the “newspaper of the Cuban
youth”) published a story on “measures to gradually increase the purchasing power of the Cuban
peso,” another about UNICEF’s recognition of Cuba for its low infant mortality rate, and an
opinion piece entitled “Our right to be Marxist-Leninist” penned by Fidel Castro and appearing in
the recurring “Reflections of Fidel” column, Vistar published articles with the titles, “Brenda
Estrada, The Cuban Miss Fitness,” “Mirabal Studios and Usher Announce Collaboration,” and “Is
it True that Marc Anthony is Coming to Sing in Cuba?”.
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Traveling in Europe in 2015 to try to raise investment capital, Pedraja was interviewed
by Billboard magazine (whose competitive rankings of music albums Vistar appears to emulate in
its “Cuba National Top 40” list
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). Pedraja’s responses to some of the interview questions –
specifically about whether the revolutionary attitudes discourage the kind of “cult of personality”
and celebrity that he’s promoting or how he tries to introduce a culture of advertising in a country
“where it has not been seen for more than a half century” – are illustrative of the Cuban media’s
changing economic culture. Pedraja observed:
“We’re not creating a cult of personality; we’re just giving everyone the space that they
deserve. We feature the most popular Cuban artists and the best Cuban artists; those two
things aren’t always the same. We try and strike a balance between those two things.
Here they put a lot of things on the television that isn’t like in the United States. The
message is not buy, buy, buy! It’s another a kind of ideology that’s being transmitted.
But even that is changing in Cuba…. advertising is not prohibited but it’s not permitted
either. Cuba is not a consumer society. You don’t see advertising on the street or in
publications. Now that the big companies are going to be entering Cuba, there’s going to
be more of a need for advertising. Now if you talk to someone like a restaurant owner
about advertising, a lot of times they say, ‘I have my clientele already - I don’t need it.’ I
say, ‘Don’t you think that Coca-Cola already has customers?’ They don’t get the
concept. … People like to see these images in the magazine, it shows there is
consumerism, there is movement. With Vistar we’re showing that there’s a new Cuba
that is on par with international standards. … And when people here in Cuba read
Vistar, they feel motivated, and that’s what makes me happy. Everyone [in Cuba] wants

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Visible online here: http://vistarmagazine.com/lists/top-40
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to be in Billboard. Everyone wants to walk on the red carpet. And now, the doors are
open.” (quoted in Candor-Navas 2015)

And yet Vistar still operates in a legal grey area within Cuba. Although it’s an impressive
example of the creativity and industriousness of young Cuban designers, photographers and
journalists, it is possible it could be blocked by the government if, for example, it began
publishing ideas which were politically discordant with the Revolutionary identity of the existing
administration or, perhaps more likely for this popular culture magazine, its celebration of
foreign and domestic cultural icons began to overshadow nationalist and revolutionary heroes
such as Jose Marti, Che Guevara or Fidel Castro himself. Both Vistar and Periodismo Del Barrio
are trying to balance what they identify as loyalty to a national culture with what they might see
as a more universal human desire for credible, “unofficial” – and, yes, sometimes sensational –
sources of information and ideas. The awkward pace of these developments, in which the so-
called “experiment with capitalism” continues to progress without a clear legal set of guidelines
or a recent cultural precedent, is best summed up in the current administration’s slogan, “Sin
prisa, pero sin pausa” (or “No hurry, but no stopping”).
Benedict Anderson observed that the "twin conceptions" of revolution and nationalism
are “inventions on which patents are impossible to preserve” (1983, 156). The preservation of a
revolutionary national identity in Cuba, therefore, becomes an active and ongoing project that is
alternately maintained, updated and challenged by media narratives. And in an era when, as
discussed, (1) ordinary Cubans are able to travel more freely outside the country, (2) the country
is gradually opening itself up to foreign sources of information and capital and (3) Cubans are
beginning to develop formal and informal networks of information production and distribution,
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these media narratives are being developed and challenged in new ways from both within and
outside the country.
Perhaps a fitting summary of the existential crisis currently confronting Cuba's state-
owned media, as well as a clear-eyed warning to the triumphal Western reporting that sometimes
seems to suggest Cuba is marching steadily toward a model of democratic capitalism, can be
taken from Arjun Appadurai, who has observed that knowledge and imagination are essentially
social and cultural practices and that:
“States find themselves pressed to stay open by the forces of media, technology, and
travel that have fueled consumerism throughout the world and have increased the
craving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities and spectacles. On the
other hand, these very cravings can become caught up in new ethnoscapes, mediascapes
and, eventually, ideoscapes… that the state cannot tolerate as threats to its own control
over ideas of nationhood and peoplehood.” (Appadurai 1996, 40).

It is fair to criticize the Castro regime for, to some extent, becoming what it despised.
The revolutionaries fought against the Batista regime not just because it thought Batista was
turning Cuba into a puppet of the West, but also because they thought he was an authoritarian
who suppressed dissent. When he was sitting in the Sierra Maestra mountains, Castro knew he
needed to not only beat the Batista army in a military coup but to inspire popular support for his
revolution. He knew then that deftly exploiting commercial and/or “unofficial” media was the
means to do so. He demonstrated this when working with his confidante Celia Sanchez to
broadcast to university students through pirate radio or enlisting the New York Times’ Herbert
Matthews to help make him a hero in the American press. Given its first-hand knowledge of the
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influence of the media, we can better understand why the Castro administration has jealously
guarded its monopoly on media ownership and resisted legal and economic reforms which would
explicitly allow private media ownership and enable commercial advertising. But when it comes
to new means and methods of journalism and new forms of independence for journalists, the
spirit of the law is beginning to take on a new permissiveness even if the letter of the law has not
changed substantively. This is noteworthy because, as nationalist icon Jose Marti once observed,
“The problem of independence is not a change in form but a change in spirit” (cited in Brooks
2016). This is something that Castro and his comrades knew as they met with Herbert Matthews
in the mountains sixty years ago, and it’s something that Cubans like Robin Pedraja and Elaine
Diaz appear to know today.

The Coming Battle of Ideas
Is a commercial press culture currently detectable on the island of Cuba? The foregoing
analysis, which chronicles new developments within the Cuban media amid a period of
loosening regulation and increased exposure to information and communication technologies,
leads me to a somewhat provisional – though perhaps provocative – conclusion. It appears the
first step in the creation of spaces of autonomy (a.k.a. “cycle of light”) and of spaces of
polarization (a.k.a., “cycle of heat”) has been taken.
To reiterate from chapter one, a cycle of light begins and ends with the strengthening of
the culture of the market-oriented media and the three phases in between are: (1) a national
identity and cosmopolitan consciousness, (2) democratization and populism and (3) a culture of
transparency and monitory journalism. My research has produced scant evidence of a true
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populist fervor independent of government directives (or state-run media narratives) or a
journalistic yearning for an adversarial “watchdog” press. Indeed, one Cuban government
official who spent time working for the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York
during the Bush administration told me, “Believe me, we didn’t like Bush, but when we watched
American television, we were shocked at how disrespectful your news anchors were toward him”
and suggested such an oppositional attitude would be unattractive to, and unacceptable among,
Cuban journalists (Anonymous, personal communication, January 2014). Given its source, this
appraisal could certainly have been tinged with some wishful thinking, but the general
observation – that commercial news coverage would be seen as an oddity for many Cuban
journalists in the current cultural context – was well made nevertheless.
What is apparent within the Cuban media, however, is a budding cosmopolitan
consciousness as well an increased agency among ordinary Cubans in helping “imagine” their
national “community” and thereby helping to co-create their national identity. As Cuban media
producers – as well as members of the Cuban public – begin to travel internationally, they are
increasingly aware of the various ways in which the world sees Cuba (and not simply aware of
how the Cuban state media see the world). Whether it’s Elaine Diaz’s knowing smile to Jorge
Ramos after receiving a question about the state media’s suppression of news related to anti-
government protesters or Robin Pedraja’s attempts to attract European investors by explaining
the cultural relevance – and thus the commercial promise – of Vistar magazine, Cuban media
producers are increasingly sensitive to narratives about Cuba that deviate from the seemingly
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self-conscious and single-minded attempt by the state media to preserve and protect the
country’s revolutionary national identity.
My informants in the Cuban government seem to appreciate the considerable challenge
which confronts their government. They want to reintegrate Cuba internationally, but repel new
sources of foreign influence as they attract new sources of foreign investment. They seem to
have a sense of inevitability about the heightened cosmopolitan possibilities available to their
citizens but, given their history of colonial influence and the precarious position of their political
leadership, seem to conflate any foreign criticism of the Castro administration with threats to
their national sovereignty. And as they make Wi-Fi hotspots available to their citizens and
abstain from aggressively policing the networked distribution of El Paquete, they appear to
understand that what it means to be Cuban is becoming more diffusely and democratically
determined (even if the Wi-Fi hotspots censor websites like Wikipedia and even if it would not
countenance politically threatening opinions being published in Vistar). So the first step in the
“cycle of light” is increasingly apparent: traces of a culture of a market-oriented media are
beginning to establish a true cosmopolitan consciousness and a democratically imagined national
identity. As yet, has this step led into the “democratization” and “populism” of the second step?
To answer this question, I draw on a research technique developed by Nestor Garcia-
Canclini in his book, Imagined Globalization. Garcia-Canclini argues that one may analyze a
particular culture on the basis of “what sentence is most distinctive of a society” (2014, 192). In
my interviews with the University of Havana journalism professor and with one of the Cuban
government officials, I brought up the topic of dissent, and whether Cuban citizens felt enabled
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to democratically express ideas critical of Cuba's political leadership. As mentioned, the Cuban
government has publicly called for more vibrant airing of grievances and even disagreement. The
two critical metaphors repeatedly used by my informants were “the coming storm of ideas” (by
one journalism professor) and the “battle of ideas” (by a couple of government officials and
journalists with whom I spoke). Fidel Castro has frequently referred to the “batalla de ideas.”
Leaving aside the conspicuous – and telling – omission of any reference to a “marketplace” of
ideas, the distinctive and repeated usage of the metaphor of “a battle of ideas” warrants analysis.
When Castro would appeal to the “battle of ideas,” he was referring to the political and
ideological struggle against capitalism. Within the context of the revolution, the battle of ideas
was being waged against external foes. In all of my interviews, the “storm of ideas” and “battle
of ideas” were used to describe the internal debates necessary to maintain the revolutionary spirit
while updating the political and economic arrangements within the country. The battle of ideas
was no longer so much a contest between domestic communism and foreign capitalism, but a
contest within Cuba – and among Cubans – over what values were important and which reforms
were beneficial. This scope of this battle is broader than the media itself, and extends to the
whole of (what exists of) Cuba’s public sphere. Yoani Sanchez, a dissident blogger who has been
widely praised within the West for her independence
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is, in fact, a polarizing figure among the
Cuban public. Several Cubans with whom I spoke scoffed or rolled their eyes at the mention of
Sanchez. One informant, who did not adore the Castro administration, said, “Yoani thinks she’s

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Sanchez started her blog “Generation Y” in 2007, and in May 2014, launched 14medio, which bills itself as
Cuba’s first independent media outlet (though it is registered in Spain). She doesn’t accept funding from foreign
governments though, in February 2016, the Knight Foundation announced funding for a project by the International
Center for Journalists, which will bring 14medio journalists to the United States for professional training:
http://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/201551612/
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such a big shot, posing in photographs with her Macbook, flying around the world accepting
journalism prizes, making a living by embarrassing Cuba and Cubans” (Anonymous, personal
communication, December 2013).
Within Cuba, a political culture which resists celebrity and puts patriotic unity ahead of
democratic diversity runs deep. Forecasts of a coming “storm” or “battle” of ideas would seem to
anticipate the possibility of a democratic culture within Cuba and, indeed, if the theoretical ideas
contained within this dissertation have any predictive value, the creation of new spaces for
democratic and populist expression – new spaces of autonomy – could be envisioned. The
particular political culture which those democratic or populist expressions inform might not be
attractive to some Western foreign policy makers. After all, part of the battle of ideas currently
underway within Cuba is the battle over the acceptance of economic values and institutions
which don’t enjoy widespread support in Cuba. As one observer points out, “some Cubans feel
that the specter of what is to come – an onslaught of American tourists, trade deals with
American corporations, free-trade zones, and foreign control of Cuban enterprises – will
exacerbate inequality in a way that may become irreversible” (Fernandes 2016b). The
commercialization of media in Cuba might – as it has in China per the analysis in the last chapter
– give some Cubans a bullhorn with which they can amplify not just dissident ideas but also
patriotic, nationalistic, anti-Western and anti-American sentiment.
Which brings us to the spaces of polarization. As mentioned, the culture of the market-
oriented press perpetuates, and is perpetuated by, in turn: (1) the professionalization of
journalism and commercialization of news content, (2) communicative abundance and
182
mediatization and (3) pluralism and polarization. The Cuban media system has not engendered
the kind of polarized pluralism that the previous paragraph imagines it yet might. And there is
little empirical basis to suggest that political elites are tailoring their behavior to suit the
imperatives of the media sector (as the mediatization thesis requires) rather than tailoring the
behavior of the media to suit their own political imperatives.
But it appears, from my analysis throughout this chapter, new processes of journalistic
professionalism are underway within Cuba, and new publications continue to surface which
customize their content for the tastes and preferences of scores of Cuban media “consumers”
(even if these consumers are purchasing their products on a black market). It is unclear whether
Cuban authorities will continue to permit this cycle to progress and a true spirit of political
independence will begin to flourish within Cuba’s journalism field the way it has, to some
extent, within China’s.
One government official made a comment in our interview which would place a check
upon such a hope. Reflecting on China’s economic liberalization and the more permissive public
sphere which has emerged there over the past decade, he said, “Cuba is not like China.”
Suggesting that China, given its large economy, faced more pressure to sell out its communist
principles in the face of globalization, he commented, “We’d prefer to remain communist the
way Vietnam has remained communist” (Capo, personal communication, January 2014). Still, it
was clear from my short research trip to the cities of Havana and Trinidad that the Cuban public
was genuinely dissatisfied with – and distrustful of – the news and information they receive from
the state media, and eager to access alternatives. As one informant told me, some affluent
183
families in Havana’s wealthy neighborhood of Miramar have been, for many years, rigging
satellite dishes to their roofs to get television stations from Miami. And Cubans are increasingly
accessing foreign news through flash drives and hard drives. But the combination of the
enterprising spirit of some young Cubans who have begun their own publications and the desire
among Cuban audiences for high quality news with a Cuban – but not necessarily governmental
– perspective create an appetite for further commercialization of the Cuban media. The Cuban
government faces a choice: they can give their citizens the opportunity to satisfy that appetite
through the economic and political liberalization of the Cuban press, or they can continue to
punish those that find alternative and unauthorized ways of satisfying that appetite (which would
slow the economic and diplomatic integration of their country with the international community).
In the meantime, the first step in the cycle of heat – with the commercialization of media
content and the increasing professionalization of journalists – is being taken. And as one Cuban
government official, quoted earlier in the chapter, anxiously reflected on the prospects for
privatization of his country’s media system, “once you provide a first step, people will keep
taking the steps.”

184

Epilogue: Diplomacy by the Heat of the Fire We Didn’t Light
In the Czech Republic, China and Cuba, the spaces of autonomy and polarization
illustrated in the first chapter are indeed being inhabited. Throughout my field research, I have
come to understand and appreciate the way in which media development and innovation are
being shaped by the particular economic cultures of professionalism and commercialization
while at the same time shaping the political cultures of pluralism, populism and polarization. The
cases I’ve investigated focus on countries that have emerged, or are emerging, from Communist
party control. This commonality presents a useful comparative opportunity, but these choices of
empirical cases was not intended to constrain my theory building and my suspicion is that the
some of the patterns I have begun to detect might be applicable on a planetary scale. Of course,
further confirmation for this theory will require much more research. Part of my optimism for the
theory’s global applicability stems from the fact that the phenomenon which is at the center of
both the spaces of autonomy and spaces of polarization – namely, the expanding culture of the
market-oriented media – is nearly ubiquitous. Even some of the most apparent exceptions to this
trend, such as the global expansion of China’s state-run television through CCTV-International
and of Russia’s statist RT, appear to be exceptions which might prove the rule. And even these
two properties showed at least a performance of, if not an affinity for, a commercial media
culture (if not for a commercial economic model) when they refer to themselves as the “CNN-
International” of China and Russia respectively.
To be clear, the theoretical ideas I’ve begun to develop here are not etiological. I am
making a case merely for resemblance between the culture of the U.S. press and that of other
national media, and the process by which this culture has spread remains a mystery, not much
more than a matter of speculation. I don’t claim the global emergence of a culture of a
185
commercial media is attributable to the concerted efforts of U.S. foreign policy or the
expansionist tendencies of U.S. media companies. I leave those arguments to theorists of cultural
imperialism and the international political economy of media institutions, respectively. The
discussion of the New World Information and Communication Order debates in chapter three
intended to bring into stark relief the characteristics of the culture of the commercial press and
how those characteristics have been articulated by its proponents and criticized by its opponents.
Though I detect the international prevalence of a commercial culture of the press in the
contemporary era, and assert this prevalence can be understood through the lens of globalization,
the spread of this culture does not have, at least as far as I can detect, any kind of monocausal
explanation related to a kind of post-cold war “triumph of capitalism” or promotion and
consolidation of American hegemony.
There are at least two reasons why these clarifications and caveats matter. First, while the
free flow of ideas and information is always consistent with the values contained within the
commercial culture of the press, the free flow model is not always consistent with the national
interests of the United States. This is most evident when considering how the commercial culture
of the press catalyzes political polarization and crystalizes nationalist identities. When public
spheres emerge in countries where dissent had previously been suppressed, they don’t solely
promise to destabilize the domestic political order through rational debate. Rather, Hume’s
notion that “reason is a slave to the passions” would predict how commercial journalism, which
appeals to the public’s passions rather than a public (or national) interest, could spectacularly
stoke the kinds of patriotic nationalism which destabilizes the international political order.
In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, the same commercial media culture which
allowed dissenting publishers and broadcasters to air their conscientious objections without fear
186
of legal penalty also produced a drumbeat to war as the majority of mainstream outlets shied
away from the kind of dissonant coverage which might alienate their patriotic consumers. We
can imagine how the flickers of patriotic sentiment increasingly visible in the more commercial
corners of the Chinese media might play out as the commercial culture of the press strengthens
its foothold there. Or we might wonder what the consequences might be of a true “free press” in
Egypt, when the Egyptian public’s attitudes toward Israel or the United States aren’t governed by
the same careful calculations of national interests which are made by the government sponsors of
the country’s state media. Of course, this is not to argue against the promotion of media freedom
as a universal ideal, and one which is necessary to true democracy. Instead, it is a cautionary
reminder that, as a matter of foreign policy, when democratic ideals are realized in political
cultures which are traditionally unfriendly to the West, they can have unforeseen and disordered
consequences. Craig Calhoun incisively demonstrated how the emergence of the public sphere
enabled radical social movements within early industrial cultures (2012), and some might expect
this history to be repeated as the global spread of a commercial press opens up new public
spheres. But radical social movements do not simply target domestic political figures.
The second reason the proliferation of the culture of the commercial press should not be
seen as simply serving U.S. interests and objectives is that the spread of the commercial culture
of the press does not necessarily benefit – and sometimes disadvantages – the economic interests
of U.S.-based multinational media companies. Early theories of globalization predicted the
international expansion of large consumer product companies – from Coca-Cola and
McDonald’s to Sony televisions and Levi’s jeans – would threaten cultural diversity. As these
companies scoured the globe for new markets, people throughout the world would be unable to
resist American food, German cars and Japanese technology and these new purchasing behaviors
187
would, over time, eclipse indigenous cultures. One description of globalization representative of
this early outlook reads:
“Starting from opposite sides, the high-tech and the high-touch ends of the commercial
spectrum gradually consume the undistributed middle in their cosmopolitan orbit. No one
is exempt and nothing can stop the process. Everywhere everything gets more and more
like everything else as the world’s preference structure is relentlessly homogenized.”
(Levitt 1983).

This account is typical of the genre: culture consumes people rather than vice versa, this
process is totalizing, “inevitable” and “relentless,” and people’s preferences are determined by
such a thing as a “preference structure.” It is true that some tastes – such as those for sugary
drinks of Coca-Cola and for the inexpensive fashion of Zara – have proven to have near
universal appeal and multinational consumer product companies have been successful in their
international expansion. But the argument that indigenous cultures are suppressed in the process
is unsupported by more recent research, which shows how these cultures – the shared attitudes,
values and beliefs of local populations – can remain remarkably variegated and resilient even as
the organizations and institutions which contribute to those cultures undergo structural change
(e.g., internationalization, deregulation, consolidation, etc.). While certain cultures which
coincide with these structural changes are becoming global
62
, even in an era of globalization,
content has remained irrepressibly local and, as cited at the beginning of this dissertation,
“cultures resist and evolve on their own” (Castells 2009, 121). If we conceive, as I do, of
audiences as active interpreters of media content and socially and culturally networked outside of

62
As a reminder, Castells identifies three levels at which culture is becoming global: a culture of commodification,
a cosmopolitan culture, a culture of hybridity.
188
their media consumption behavior, we can see how media organizations, if they are to be
successful, must be sensitive to the local beliefs, attitudes and customs in which they operate. In
this, media organizations with deep local ties have a competitive advantage.
Even a structural analysis – one which sees the economic and political power of
multinational media companies as more consequential than their cultural fluency and adaptability
– will be confronted with the conclusion that a culture of commercialism doesn’t always serve
U.S. business interests. Although Latin American countries like Brazil and Argentina have
rapidly commercialized their media sectors in recent decades, protectionist media laws strictly
limit the share of media companies which foreign entities can own or the amount foreigners can
invest. China is now the world’s third-largest advertising market, with some $50 billion
exchanged each year. But companies like the News Corporation, Walt Disney Company, Viacom
and Time Warner which have all tried to exploit this market have been stymied by political and
legal hurdles which restrict their reach and content and ultimately favor Chinese media
companies.
So the global proliferation of a commercial culture characteristic of the U.S. press doesn’t
always serve – and is liable to backfire upon – U.S. interests. It does this (1) by stoking political
polarization which potentially destabilizes governments (both democratic and undemocratic)
with which the United States maintains strategic alliances, (2) by fomenting commercially driven
patriotic fervor as new platforms are created where anti-American sentiment is more freely
expressed, and (3) by providing a kind of “home field advantage” to domestic media moguls who
benefit from more deeply rooted knowledge of local audiences (and political and economic
connections to the lawmakers who control their country’s regulatory infrastructure).
189
Pluralism and polarization emerge side by side not only within national political cultures,
but within geopolitical cultures as well. New spaces of autonomy are created when more people
can start an online news publication or even a satellite television channel, and this supports an
international culture of transparency and monitory journalism. While these processes are
essentially democratic, their outcomes can sometimes be antidemocratic.
In fact, a recent study by the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum
for Democratic Studies
63
showed a resurgence in authoritarianism occurring even in the midst of
a global expansion of democratic institutions and capital markets. According to this account,
authoritarian regimes “have turned the tables on the democracies. … Exploiting globalization
and the opportunities presented by integration with the West, these states have set out to
undermine the very institutions and arenas that welcomed them” (Walker 2016, 216). The new
authoritarians alternately genuflect toward, and crudely imitate, democratic processes and
structures all while consolidating power domestically, disbursing foreign aid to other
authoritarian regimes, providing “zombie” election monitoring, aggressively investing in state-
run media outlets with international reach (such as China’s CCTV-International or Russia’s RT),
and concocting “government organized nongovernmental organizations” (GONGOs) which
mimic legitimate civil society organizations (such as those brought by the Cuban and
Venezuelan governments to the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama).
These kinds of imposter democracies have been noticed by Joel Simon, the executive
director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Simon refers to these new authoritarians as
“democratators” who deviate from dictators in that they rule through manipulation rather than
through force. Although they often govern with the support of the majority, democratators are

63
The National Endowment for Democracy is funded through an allocation by the United States Congress.
190
not true democrats because they don’t balance out majority rule with that other necessary
precondition for a democracy: individual freedoms (of which human rights are a subset). Simon
writes:
“Democratators do not seek to exercise absolute control over the media because they
recognize that to achieve this in the Internet age they would have to close their societies
to the world. They tolerate, even encourage, private media but manage critical expression
through diverse measures such as national security prosecutions, punitive tax audits,
manipulation of government advertising, and seemingly reasonable content restrictions,
like prohibitions on graphic violence or hate speech” (Simon 2105, 33).

Put otherwise, the new authoritarian leaders allow dissent and pluralism within the
commercial press, confident that they can extinguish this dissent with economic incentives or
legal penalties if need be. And they can do so within full view of the international community,
given that they parrot leaders of democratic states when they invoke “national security” and
journalistic “fairness” or “balance” as rationales for suppression. This might be the reason Simon
– who was in Pakistan when the U.S. military killed Osama Bin Laden and watched as the
private cable news channels in Pakistan
64
vehemently criticized the country’s military leadership
for failing to defend against the U.S. invasion – does not echo much of the media criticism which
laments the excesses of commercial media. The common critiques that cable news and tabloids
present a “superficial” or “biased” or “sensationalist” account of events, can be

64
An example of how a commercial press can arise ostensibly to serve a nation’s geopolitical interests and have
unintended consequences for domestic politics: “In 2002, the former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf
liberalized ownership rules for cable television channels, partly as a political move to counter the influence and
popularity of Indian satellite channels that were widely available in Pakistan” (Simon 2015, 6).
191
counterproductive for his advocacy goals when those critiques are used by authoritarians
themselves to stifle expression.
Simon recounts a Venezuelan ambassador “who argued that his government should use
its authority to ensure that all news presented to the public was ‘truthful’” (Simon 2015, 25).
Readers within established democracies easily understand why Simon swiftly calls this a
“terrible idea” even while acknowledging the Venezuelan media have “at times been woeful.”
These readers are steeped in the culture of the commercial press, which internalizes John Stuart
Mill’s observation that “the general or prevailing opinion in any subject is rarely or never the
whole truth; it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any
chance of being supplied” ([1859] 1993, 60 - 61). This culture of the commercial press also
internalizes, especially in the era of the Internet, the axiom embraced by Tocqueville’s American
subjects: that “the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them
indefinitely” (Tocqueville [1835] 2007, 151). Democrats who shudder when they hear about
attempts from politically powerful actors to make the press “truthful” also smile knowingly when
they hear these actors – such as the Cuban official with whom I spoke – complain how the
commercial press is “disrespectful” or, in the words of U.S. presidential candidate Donald
Trump, “unfair.”
In the commercial press, the mediatization and polarization of politics are spurred by the
same cultural process which enable monitory practices by, and professional autonomy of,
journalists. The light is produced by the heat in that “incandescent” fashion. Those of us who are
familiar with this culture expect it to produce media content that many might find false, unfair
and even uncivil. We see the value in irreverence and even in the “vulgarity” Tocqueville
observed in the early American press – whether that’s in the gentle chiding the New York Times
192
gives Laura Bush for her advance team’s stagecraft or the gruff jabs of a right-wing talk radio
host. In a pluralist society, we understand that unappealing ideas or the unpopular reporting are
those in the greatest need of protection. In 1759, when the French authorities were burning a
book by Helvétius – the philosopher cited earlier as arguing “only a passion can triumph over a
passion” – Helvétius’s intellectual rival Voltaire responded, “I disapprove of what you say, but I
will defend to the death your right to say it” (cited in Hall 1906, 198).
In the current moment, even authoritarian leaders are required to yield to, or cultivate a
version of, the commercial culture press in order to establish and maintain their political
legitimacy internationally. It is true that the emergence of the culture of the commercial press has
not coincided with the universal realization of the democratic ideals and spirit of capitalism
which animate it. We’ve seen how undemocratic leaders have sought to exploit and undermine
this culture. Rather than seeing polarization as a benign byproduct of media freedom, the 2016
Freedom of the Press Report by Freedom House actually cites the “heightened partisanship and
polarization in a country’s media environment” as one of two factors contributing to declines in
worldwide media freedom. It shows also that only about one-third of the world’s countries – in
which merely thirteen percent of the world’s population lives – are home to a categorically free
press (Freedom House 2016). And the 2016 edition of the World Press Freedom Index, published
by Reporters Without Borders, observers a “disturbing decline in respect for media freedom at
both the global and regional levels” and points to ideologies hostile to media freedom coming
from not just state media, but “privately owned media” and “oligarchs” (Reporters Without
Borders 2016).
Yet the fact that the government officials, journalists and workers at nongovernmental
organizations are, throughout the world, poring over the results of a report by media freedom
193
watchdog organizations, and are sensitive, if not outright receptive, to its recommendations, is
evidence of how a monitory culture – a culture of transparency – has emerged as an international
norm. And that same Freedom House report showed how, throughout the past decades, the
percentage of countries that are home to a press they categorize as “not free” has decreased
markedly. Some credit for this trend – and some hope for its continuation – might just be
attributable to the dawn of the global proliferation of the incandescent, commercial culture of the
press, and to that dawn’s early light.

194
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Creator Hannah, Mark P. (author)

Core Title Spaces of autonomy and polarization: toward a theory of the globalization of economic and political cultures characteristic of American journalism

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 11/21/2016

Defense Date 06/02/2016

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