The cultural imperalism thesis and qualitative audience research – more than revisionism and cultural populism?

ABSTRACT

The question if and how the huge imports and the worldwide dominance of popular US media products (such as television entertainment programmes) ‘affect’ local cultures has been a well-developed topic in international communication research. Since the 1980s the literature on transnational media effects has been accumulating very fast, due to a growing number of approaches and schools dealing empirically with it. In this article we focus on the special contribution of ‘new’ audience studies such as reception analysis and other types of qualitative audience research. For a couple of years there has been a quite virulent debate on how the results of these new audience studies have to be interpreted and integrated into the whole body of literature on transnational media dominance and cultural imperialism. For some scholars these approaches are nothing less than indicative of a new revisionist and relativist ‘paradigm', while others rejected their contribution as a persistent effort to minimise or discredit the idea of çultural domination. In this article we propose a broad framework for a better understanding and interpretation of the real contribution of qualitative audience studies to the whole transnational media debate. The central argument is that the debaters on both sides of the spectrum (defenders and opponents) have not been careful enough about the intrinsic information value of the new audience approaches in general and about the diversity and ambiguities of concrete audience studies. Although reception analysis cannot be considered a new full international communication paradigm, it is highly sensitive in investigating specific areas of the transnational media issue, but within its specific methodological limits.