Tuning In The Global Village : How TV Is Transforming World Culture and Politics

Historians looking at the 20th Century from the next millennium will likely pinpoint 1945 as the most pivotal year since the voyage of Columbus.

Two nuclear bombs exploded over Japanese cities, providing a glimpse of the apocalypse. And an obscure British radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke found that it’s possible to relay pictures around the world almost instantly by bouncing radio signals off a few satellites orbiting high above the Equator.

Both developments changed the course of humankind.

Asked once what had caused the stunning collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Polish leader Lech Walesa pointed to a nearby TV set. “It all came from there.”

If it has helped topple totalitarian governments and promote global democracy, television has also--for better or for worse--led a modern Crusade, spreading pop culture over the Earth as medieval knights once spread Christendom.

In fact, nearly 30 years after Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “global village” to describe how the electronics revolution was shrinking the world and shortening the time between thought and action, the Media Millennium is at hand.

More than half of Americans alive today may not remember a time without TV in their home. They’re surprised if someone doesn’t have 25 or 30 channels to choose from. But for much of the globe, television is still relatively new--and changing fast.

It only arrived last summer in Vanuatu, a scattered archipelago with 165,000 people in the southwest Pacific formerly known as the New Hebrides. Crowds mobbed appliance stores to watch the new state-owned network’s first broadcast--the opening of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.

But thanks to Arthur Clarke, places like Vanuatu are fast going the way of the rooftop antenna. Today, there is hardly any spot on Earth untrammeled by a satellite “footprint”--the area, sometimes spanning whole continents, within reach of signals from its parabolic antennas.

The rapid inroads of satellite-based “borderless television” are changing the way the world works, the way it plays, even the way it goes to war and makes peace. Even countries that have long limited what their citizens can watch on nationalized TV are slowly being forced to relax their vice-like grip.

Madonna writhes on MTV videos from Bahrain to Bangladesh. A deputy police chief in Moscow is distracted during an interview by Super Channel, a British cross between MTV and “Entertainment Tonight,” which blares incessantly in many Russian homes and offices. Dozens of pan-European satellite channels, beaming everything from highbrow French talk shows to Dutch pornography, trespass national borders without visas. “Los Simpsons” becomes a top-rated TV show in Colombia and Argentina.

A New Economy

Spurred by technological advance and the worldwide trend toward privatization, a global TV economy is growing at a blistering rate. Consider:

* More than 1 billion TV sets now populate the globe--a 50% jump over the last five years. The number is expected to continue growing by 5% annually--and by more than double that in Asia, where half the world’s population lives.

* Worldwide spending for television programming is now about $65 billion, and the tab is growing by 10% per year, according to Neal Weinstock, media project director for the New York research firm Frost & Sullivan Inc. TV programs are a major U.S. export now worth about $2.3 billion annually.

* The number of satellite-delivered TV services around the world is more than 300 and climbing rapidly, says Mark Long, publisher of the World Satellite Almanac. More than half of those services emanate from the United States--everything from the Arts & Entertainment Network to Total Christian Television. Truly global “super channels” such as MTV reach hundreds of millions of households, while CNN is seen in 137 countries.

* Scores of new communications satellites are planned for launch in just the next five years, which will mean a huge jump in the number of space-borne TV channels.

The cultural, political and economic effects of this global television revolution are enormous.

TV sets are more common in Japanese homes than flush toilets. Virtually every Mexican household has a TV, but only half have phones. Thai consumers will buy a TV set before an electric fan or even a refrigerator.

Parents in China complain that teen-agers are humming jingles from Nabisco and Coca-Cola commercials. Russians in the ecological sinkhole of Tyumen, in Siberia, rank the fate of Marianna, the beleaguered heroine of a Mexican TV-produced soap opera titled “The Rich Also Cry,” as their third biggest worry in life--after acquiring weapons for self-defense and raising their kids. Turkish schoolchildren adopt an argot dubbed “Turkilize” picked up from German-, French- and English-language satellite channels beamed in from Western Europe.

Kuwait City rooftops are a sea of parabolic antennas. Vans roam Bogota streets with miniature satellite dishes on the roof and a megaphone blaring promises of hookups for $150. In New Delhi, “dish wallahs” nail satellite receivers to crowded apartment buildings. Nearly 20% of all Polish households have installed a dish over the last three years. Ivory Coast distributors have so flooded the dish market that they can no longer even give them away.

The Iraqi army carted away 50,000 satellite dishes when retreating from Kuwait--inspiring some CNN staffers to joke that what the Iraqis really wanted was uncensored television, not oil. Philippine troops surprised a guerrilla camp in the mountains because the revolutionaries were engrossed watching MTV from a homemade satellite hookup. Fiji schools reported record absenteeism and “TV hangovers” after live satellite television was introduced for the first time because students stayed up until 3 a.m., mesmerized by American sitcoms.

Shaping History

Whether in the situation room at the White House or in living rooms at home, it is clear to viewers that television is no longer simply a limp witness to history.

Television is how most people now experience history, as happened when viewers watched live satellite pictures of Scud missiles whistling down on Israel during the Gulf War. Conversely, history is now shaped by television--a reality eloquently symbolized by East German youths when they hoisted MTV flags over the Berlin Wall as it was torn down.

Oxford political scientist Timothy Garton Ash dubs television “the third superpower” whose influence will only grow as satellites and cable revolutionize its content.

A complex set of problems and issues arise from that power.

Ash warns that borderless TV threatens to make even more painfully obvious the economic gulf between rich nations and poor ones. Diplomats in Libya contend that television is undermining the regime of Moammar Kadafi by tempting the country’s relatively poor and otherwise largely sheltered population with the consumer product delights seen in Italian commercials.

Even more alarming to some is the prospect of a world full of couch potatoes. The French now spend more time watching TV than working. Spanish schoolchildren watch more than their American counterparts.

Some worry that all that TV watching will make the rest of the world lose its appetite for reading--as has already happened to two generations of Americans.

With satellites beaming down literally hundreds of TV channels over whole continents and oceans, countries lose control over the information crossing their borders--an unstoppable migration of ideas, images and culture that raises basic questions about the meaning of national sovereignty in the modern world.

“The nation-state is less and less able to control what goes in and out of it,” said Everrete E. Dennis, a media scholar and executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. “It really makes customs and other nuances from the past kind of irrelevant.”

What is happening around the world is the outcome of nearly two decades of global deregulation, spreading capitalism and advances in technology that are making electronic communications perhaps the world’s preeminent growth industry.

“Technology has made it possible to add a number of channels in a variety of ways,” said Eli Noam, an expert in global television at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in New York. “And the old state-run broadcasting systems are running out of steam.”

While international radio dates to the 1930s, borderless TV did not mature until the 1980s.

Billions in Advertising

The surge in communications satellites hurled into orbit--literally hundreds since 1965, with more than 70 additional “birds” planned through 1996--stems from the mushrooming demand for telecommunications pathways to transmit telephone, data and TV signals around the world.

The global market for communications satellites is projected to reach $6.1 billion in 1996. Satellite time is now so readily available it costs a paltry $750 to $1,000 an hour for a link between North America and Europe.

Many of the new channels are being financed by advertising generated from an increasingly industrialized world looking for new outlets for its consumer and manufactured goods.

In Europe, TV advertising is expected to more than double to $36 billion by the turn of the century. The Pacific Rim’s nascent TV ad market--just emerging from years of heavy-handed government regulation--has already reached $14 billion. With worldwide satellite networks, the Holy Grail of marketing--global advertising--is finally a reality.

Europe, with a potential market of 320 million viewers, today has twice as many hours of programming to fill as it did a couple of years ago. The number of channels has exploded--to 120 from 39 in the past decade--and could reach 250 within three years. More than 95% of the homes in Belgium now get at least 25 cable TV channels--the highest penetration anywhere in the world. Satellite channels attract half of the TV audience in some Western European countries.

Ever higher-powered satellites not only carry more programs but also allow for smaller and cheaper receiving dishes, making it virtually impossible for governments to regulate their spread. When the Colombian government ordered that the country’s estimated 300,000 owners register their satellite dishes, only 50 complied.

“In another five years, there will be direct broadcast satellite all over the Arab world,” said Abdallah Schleifer, professor of television journalism at American University in Cairo. “And whether (people) want it or not, everyone is going to have access.”

Historically, the empowered elite have always sought to suppress the wider distribution of ideas, wealth, rights and, most of all, knowledge.

This is as true today as it was 536 years ago, when the German printer Gutenberg invented movable type to print the Bible. For two centuries afterward, government tightly controlled what people could read through the widespread exercise of “prior restraint.”

Then, in 1695, the English Parliament abolished pre-publication censorship--an act as significant for freedom of the press as the 1791 ratification of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Some governments still go to mind-boggling lengths to make the news fit their political purposes.

When Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by the Russians in 1983, killing 269 people, the top story on the South Korean evening news was about President Chun Doo Hwan instructing village leaders to start a road cleanup campaign.

The Chinese government doctored videotape of the 1989 Tian An Men Square massacre, reversing the order of events to make it appear the killings were a justified reaction to mob violence.

Just as censorship of the printed word could not continue with the emergence of democracy in 17th-Century Britain and 18th-Century America, so today suppression of the electronic media is thwarted by technology and rapidly growing economies around the world.

The growing middle class in newly industrialized Thailand is typically growing impatient with old-style government censorship.

Currency traders complained that Bangkok banks racked up huge losses during the Gulf War because they didn’t have instant access to news of market-moving developments. A little over a year later, when officials tried to censor news reports of violent attacks against anti-government demonstrators in Bangkok, Thais scrambled to buy gray-market satellite dishes so they could see unfettered foreign news broadcasts.

Ever since the Gulf War, customers dine at one of Kuwait City’s most popular seafront restaurants in front of a battery of giant-screen television sets tuned variously to CNN, BBC-TV, Kuwait’s own two government channels and a state-run station in nearby Bahrain. Over dinner, they debate the contents.

If you can’t lick ‘em, some governments apparently feel, you may as well join ‘em. There are presently more than 40 established or planned government-run satellite TV channels. Many have the same propagandistic purpose as their terrestrial predecessors, but some are reacting to the new marketplace.

Egypt’s Space Channel, for example, originally launched to entertain homesick Egyptian troops in the Saudi desert during the Gulf War, is seen as a response to Middle Eastern Broadcasting’s Pan-Arabic news channel, owned by Saudis with royal connections.

Like ambitious states that want to join the nuclear club, a country today barely ranks as a world-class power unless it lofts a satellite bearing its own acronym: Asiasat, Aussat, Turksat, Thaicom, Arabsat, Insat, Indonesia’s Palapa and Spain’s Hispasat, to name but a few.

“It’s frequently a question of political sovereignty, not just economic rationality,” said Meherro Jussawalla, a research economist with the East-West Center in Honolulu. “Each country wants to control its own satellite system for domestic purposes.”

Cultural Control

Even more than on politics, however, the greatest influence of satellite television is on culture. Whereas it used to take decades or centuries for one culture to seep into another, television today can spread lasting images in a matter of seconds.

“Foolish programs coming in foreign languages to our cable television stations are as much a danger to us as some attacks on our frontier,” threatening Israel’s culture, heritage and language, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said not long ago.

Ironically, Peres shares this concern with Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria who now call satellite receiving dishes-- les antennes paraboliques in French-- les antennes diaboliques.

While devout Muslims march through the streets of Algiers, satellite TV programs from France’s TV5 and Italy’s RAI 1 show naked women astride naked men and an Italian strip game show called “Tutti Frutti.”

Furious British politicians are seemingly powerless to block a pornographic satellite channel beamed from Holland called “Red Hot Dutch.” Spanish intellectuals worry that Mexico’s booming export of telenovelas (soap operas) masks its cultural imperialist ambitions. American Christmas shows in Ethiopia caused a rush among Ethiopians to find Christmas trees.

Occasionally, the attempts to block these images are comical.

On Egyptian TV, which abides by strict Islamic code, kisses on reruns of “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest” are edited out after the first split-second smooch. Even that’s too racy for neighboring Saudi Arabia, which protests that viewers in Jeddah can receive the Egyptian TV signals and people in the south can watch Yemen’s televised Parliament.

When Pakistan--a country where even state-run TV’s female newscasters are veiled--allowed CNN into the country, Islamic religious leaders quickly objected that the most popular show on the network was “Style,” featuring stunning women modeling the latest fleshy fashions. At first, authorities tried to superimpose black bars on the screen to block out the women’s skin. But the models moved so fast that several knees and elbows sneaked through. Finally, the authorities blacked out the entire picture, permitting only the audio track of the latest creations from Paris and Milan.

Satellite dishes “bring in all kinds of evil and corruption,” said Saudi Arabia’s chief Islamic scholar, Sheik Abdul Azziz ibn Baz, who ruled that the dishes violate tenets of Islam. The roots of such fears can run deep, as they do between Japan and South Korea, where Koreans remember Japan’s colonization and attempts to wipe out its language and culture.

When Japan started satellite broadcasting, Korea--fearing another cultural invasion--protested and demanded that Japan adjust its “footprint” to exclude the country.

Neither quotas nor religious edicts are likely to slow the onslaught of borderless television. Rather than homogenizing the world, it is likely that the revolution will instead lead to a greater diversity in programming, especially as developing states become more sophisticated in the use of the medium.

The global village won’t be called “Dallas.”