Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New Edition) by Walter LaFeber

Author:Walter LaFeber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393350524
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

“The Higher the Satellite, the Lower the Culture?”

American “soft power,” as its advocates proudly termed it, was now fully in view.38 Soft power referred to the influence of U.S. culture and commerce, rather than to its military and political muscle. Transnationals such as Nike exemplified such soft power. Their influence was made greater by widespread use of the English language—the international language of computers, science, and many of the young who considered themselves “cool.” By the 1990s, some 70 percent of Western Europeans ages eighteen to twenty-four spoke English. (Only 20 percent of those over fifty-five years of age, however, could read or speak the language.)39 It was the young who idolized Jordan and the “Dream Team,” and who bought sneakers and Chicago Bulls’ clothing.

The transnational manufacturers also profited from continued spread of U.S. transnational communications. The ABC network bought into one of Germany’s leading television stations. ABC’s highly successful sports subsidiary, ESPN, controlled one-third of Europe’s largest sports network, Eurosport. The NBC network in the United States meanwhile took over Superchannel, a cable operation that reached sixty million Europeans. Only one percent of prime-time American television shows were produced overseas. But nearly 80 percent of Europe’s television programs originated in the United States. It was an impressive exercise of soft power.40

The new American capitalism did not go unchallenged. European critics claimed the networks were too parochial and U.S.-oriented. Transnationals responded by featuring European events while becoming more multilingual and playing down local American stories. These responses did not satisfy France’s Minister of Culture, Jack Lang. He believed the world should fear that “vast financial groups and entertainment industries will impose cultural uniformity on a a global scale [.]” Lang wondered, “Will technology enrich us … or might the truth be more ominous: the higher the satellite, the lower the culture?” After all, he added, “the disappearance of languages and cultural forms is the great risk today. Diversity threatens to be replaced by an international mass culture without roots, soul, color, or taste.”

Lang warned that soft power moved mostly in one direction because Americans were so closed-minded and provincial, if not grossly ignorant of other cultures. An author from Latin America or Europe could find readers more easily “in Moscow than in … Los Angeles. It is much easier for a European filmmaker to be seen in Tokyo than Atlanta.” United States culture, this “immense empire of profit,” had become a “financial and intellectual imperialism which no longer grabs territory, or rarely, but grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living.” The French minister exclaimed: “We must act if tomorrow we don’t want to be nothing but the sandwich board of the multinationals.”41

Advertisements of Nike and other U.S. corporations nevertheless flourished while their European sales boomed. The opposition of Lang and other critics caused not even a hiccup as American soft power continued to inundate foreign cultures. Rupert Murdoch’s multinational operation in China, however, suffered a significant setback.

Murdoch bought Hong Kong’s powerful Star TV. Nike, one of Star’s initial advertisers, had beamed programs into fifty-three countries, including China.

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