The Politics of Southeast Asia's New Media by William Atkins

Author:William Atkins [Atkins, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136860621
Google: msUeAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-19T05:54:47+00:00

Taken together, the two parts to this chapter underscore the importance of economic structures and relationships in setting the tone for a developing communications environment. They trace the circumstances where economically internationalized nations are able to maintain politically closed information systems by drawing on the resources of the state and those of a compliant domestic and international economic class.

Part I: From ‘Unambiguous Threat’ to ‘Friendly and Useful’

Rupert Murdoch’s comments in 1993 to a London audience, just after News Corporation’s purchase of Star TV, were to mark a crucial point in the debate over international television services in Asia: ‘Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere … satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry societies to bypass state-controlled television channels …. The Bosnian Serbs can’t hide their atrocities from the probing eyes of BBC, CNN and Sky News cameras’ (Murdoch, 1993). Apart from being an exercise in corporate self-flattery – elevating the fledgling News Corporation service Sky News alongside the BBC and CNN – the statement was squarely aimed at a European audience. However, the very technology he was lauding beamed Murdoch’s presentation live from London to a Hong Kong breakfast programme, where, in all likelihood, Chinese government officials were watching. While Murdoch’s rhetoric was consistent with the neo-liberal, economic rationalist broadcasting policies that had been adopted by governments in the USA and much of Europe, it was clearly at odds with messages News Corporation wanted to be sending to Asian governments. Today’s atrocities by Bosnian Serbs could be tomorrow’s intercommunal rioting or labour unrest in Southeast Asia or student unrest in Chinese universities.

To understand the anti-state tenor of the major transnational media corporations – led by high-profile moguls such as Murdoch and Turner – at the beginning of the 1990s, it is necessary to briefly focus on the European sphere. Their enthusiasm in promoting the ‘satellites and democracy’ linkage was spurred by the prospect of riches in the deregulating Western European market, where allegedly dour public service models were challenged by those of multichannel choice. News Corporation’s Sky Television – carried on the Astra/SES satellite – was at the forefront of the challenge to the European broadcasting order. Murdoch effectively articulated the public choice ideology in the guise of ‘public service’ to erode public and government confidence in public service broadcasting, most notably in Britain in the 1980s. ‘Anybody who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford is a public service,’ he proclaimed (quoted in Mellor, 1992:151).

The manipulation of the concept of democracy – by basing it on notions of individual consumerist choice rather than on the quality of the media and information environment required to facilitate democratic discourse – was essential to legitimate the ‘satellites and democracy’ concept in Western Europe. The implication that the mere presence of satellite programming would result in some sort of democratic pipeline arose similarly from a manipulated premise. As we have seen in

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