From Local to Global When local television is economically feasible, as is local news in the United

States, it is popular because people live most of their lives within a locality, they want to know more about it, and they often identify with it quite strongly. Local identity also becomes a framework for mediating national television, as

I showed in Chapter 8 and as I shall discuss later. In large nations, television

Making Sense of World Television 223 is usually produced in a major city that is geographically and culturally distant

from many of the places that view it. As a result, viewers may feel a critical dis tance from national television based on their awareness of the differences between their area of residence and the place where programs were produced. For example, Texans may be aware of how they differ culturally from people in New York or Los Angeles, just as people in northeast Brazil seem to be aware of how culturally different they are from fellow countrymen in Rio de

Janeiro or Sao Paulo (La Pastina, 2004b). That awareness provides a critical frame with which to view national or global televis.ion.

Television produced in a core producing city that serves a subnational region with a coherent cultural or linguistic identity is becoming more com mon in southern China, Hong Kong, Catalonia (Spain), Scotland and Wales, Quebec, southern Brazil, and various parts of India; however, it is still lim ited to places populous or rich enough to afford it. Some of these production centers have emerged as global cities: media capitals (Curtin, 2003) that pro duce information, media, and other goods, not only for the city itself and the nation, but also for larger regional or global audiences (Sassen, 2004). There are examples of such global cities in China (Curtin, 2003 ), Mexico (Canclini, 2001 ), and elsewhere. They produce for themselves, their nations, and audiences across transnational cultural-linguistic markets that share their languages and cultures.

National television still seems to be the most common form, even at the beginning of the 21st century, when the seeming coherence of nations is breaking down in many ways. The nation-state, where it is strong, still has many tools and levers to shape television, as Chapters 3 and 6 discussed in detail. However, supranational or transnational cultural spaces and markets are also gaining considerable force, as Chapters 4 and 7 discussed in detail. Television producers almost always still produce for a specific national market because national markets continue to dominate commercial sales and advertising. Most television exporters still make more money in their national home market than in exports, including such visible examples as the United States, Brazil, and Mexico. National television spaces and focus also

still correspond with the political desires or image-making needs of national governments, which control channel allocations, economic regulation, and their own advertising budgets. Increasingly, television producers also jump

from those national bases to roles within larger spaces defined by linguistic and cultural similarities or proximities (Sinclair et al., 1996).

However, some analysts, such as Curtin (2003 ), have argued that nations are losing centrality to other logics of production, in which global cities or media capitals, for example, Hong Kong or Shanghai, produce for their own

local markets, for national markets, and also for diaspora audiences, which

224 Chapter 9 are geographically distant but linked to the producing city by language and

culture. In the United States, immigrants from China, India, and Mexico watch channels imported from back home, or in the case of Mexican Americans, a mix of programming from back home and programming pro

duced in the United States in Spanish for their own specific needs. Some global producing cities such as Rio de Janeiro also produce for dispersed transnational audiences that still speak colonial languages like Portuguese that audiences have gradually acquired since the 1 500s. So Curtin and others,

for example, Canclini (200 1 ) and Sassen (2004 ), argued for the increasing centrality of global cities in cultural industries and cultural production.

A strong producer in a global city or national market can first dominate the local or national market, then export programs, then export technology and know-how, and finally shape channels borne by satellite to cultural linguistic markets that resemble the home market but are larger. Such oper ations include TVB (Hong Kong), TV Globo (Brazil), Televisa (Mexico), and All-Arab Television (Egypt). Exports from such nationally based groups pio neered cultural-linguistic markets, which are now courted by global groups like Murdoch and specifically regional groups like Al-Jazeera (Qatar), LBC (Lebanon), and Orbit (Saudi Arabia), which target regions like the Middle East where national television has left gaps in news or entertainment that regional groups move to fill.

In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, the Arabic-speaking world, the Chinese-speaking world, and other parts of Asian and Central Asia, people increasingly experience a layer of culture defined both by geo graphic proximity and cultural-linguistic proximity. In 2002, when the new government in Afghanistan removed the Taliban's ban on reproduction of images of people, photos of actresses from Bollywood, not Hollywood, flooded into shops and homes, according to the news coverage at the time. Much of the world experiences various cultural aspects of global cultures produced in Hollywood, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere via television and other venues.

Some audiences are dispersed globally but still united by cultural-linguistic proximity. One example is people who learned colonial languages and still both import and produce in those languages. Former French colonies import programming from France and produce for themselves in French, creating a geographically dispersed transnational culture of francophonie, which sup ports film, television, and music production in a number of places, from Quebec to Senegal. Similarly, former Portuguese colonies are linked in a Lusophone culture, or Lusofonia, which centers on both Brazil and Portugal-Brazil dominates in terms of television production-but extends to East Timor and a number of African countries. Former British colonies

Making Sense of World Television 225

are similarly linked, and as in the Lusophone cultures, television production is dominated not by the former colonial power but by a large former colony,

the United States. Anglophone people, as well as those who speak Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Turkish, and so on, have migrated globally in

numbers large enough to create a diaspora of commercially attractive, trans national, cultural-linguistic audiences and markets.

The global level of television is clearly visible at two levels, one of structure and another of actual programming. Global corporations that are trying to operate in large parts of the world are easily identified. Groups

like Murdoch's News Corporation have ambitions to own satellite/cable TV channels everywhere. These corporations powerfully reframe the political economy of how television works everywhere via ownership, advertising, actual program flow, and programming ideas.

The mass audience in most places tends to see quite a bit of glocal pro gramming, globally inspired or even licensed but nationally or regionally produced. Although global flows of actual programs are visible, particularly via satellite and cable channels, they don't attract a majority of the audience in places where local, national, or regional material is available. Audience members in countries large or rich enough to produce quite a bit of pro gramming are probably exposed more to locally produced versions of global genres and formats, such as Big Brother, than to direct flows of television from abroad. For example, Brazilians see little foreign television program ming in prime time, but they are on their fifth version of Big Brother, which has been very popular. (See Chapters 6 and 7 for more analysis of the flow

and export of genres.)

So audience members worldwide are now exposed to two distinct levels of global influence. One is the direct flow of television programs first high lighted by Nordenstreng and Varis in 1 973 and examined in Chapters 6 and

7, along with the direct flow of complete channels via cable and satellite first highlighted by Schiller ( 1 9 8 1 ) and discussed in Chapter 7. The other is the copying or licensing of foreign formats (Moran, 1998), which brings with it

varied levels of cultural influence and ideology (such as a focus on aspiring to and taking on consumer roles; Fuller, 1 992). That process of glocalization long took place informally, as when format ideas for soap operas flowed

both globally and regionally (see Chapter 6). It has now taken a more for mally licensed and traded form, with the increasingly global traffic in pack

aged formats, such as Big Brother or Survivor (Moran, 1 998, 2004), which is examined in Chapter 7.

Audience members are also increasingly exposed to regional or geo-cultural flows of programs, such as the heavy regionwide flow of Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas, as well as regional satellite or cable channels in Latin

226 Chapter 9 America. New phenomena arise, such as the apparent dominance of Al

Jazeera as a news source in the Arabic-speaking world and among the dias pora of Arabic speakers worldwide. As of this writing, Canada was debating whether to permit Al-Jazeera to be carried on Canadian cable services

(Ignatius, 2006), weighing the competing demands of Arabic audiences and those upset by Al-Jazeera's critical coverage of actions and policies

of the United States and the West, as well as leaders such as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney. Al-Jazeera has become a notable precedent; Telesur, a pan-Latin American TV news channel that challenges a perceived U.S. news hegemony and was started by Venezuela and several other Latin American governments, is being called a "Latin American Al-Jazeera" (Calderon, 2005).

From Local to Global When local television is economically feasible, as is local news in the United