A powerful trend is clearly underway in the direction of greater similarity in the way the public sphere is structured across the world. In their products, in their professional practices and cultures, in their systems of relationships with other political and social institutions, media systems across the world are becoming increasingly alike. Political systems, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly similar in the patterns of communication they incorporate.

We will explore this trend toward global homogenization of media systems and the public sphere, focusing particularly on the relations between media and political systems, and on the industrialized, capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We will organize our discussion of how to account for this trend around two pairs of contrasting perspectives. Much of the literature on homogenization sees it in terms of Americanization or globalization: that is, in terms of forces external to the national social and political systems in which media systems previously were rooted. Other explanations focus on changes internal to these national systems. An important distinction can also be made between mediacentric perspectives, for which changes in media systems are autonomous developments that then influence political and social systems, and those that see social and political changes as causally prior to media system change.

AMERICANIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION

The phenomenon of homogenization in world media systems was first emphasized as a scholarly issue in the cultural imperialism literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural imperialism theory was obviously a theory of external influence (e.g., Schiller 1969, 1976; Boyd-Barret 1977).