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tie 15 million viewers to a side of capitalism the regime is not anxious to promote. Prime Minister Li Peng talks a tough line, but so far no dishes have been removed and it is hard to imagine him winning a war against McWorld, particularly since in other domains of the economy he is working so hard to join it.8 He has good reason to worry, however, for what the Chinese are seeing courtesy of their dishes is unadulterated Western fare including the BBC, CNN, MTV, and an English-language sports network. The communications firms that serve Asia have not been seduced into diversification by the daunting prospects of trying to find appropriate programs for India and China. On the contrary, as the spectator venues and the distribution conduits keep evolving and multiplying and the markets keep expanding, the messages and the products being churned out get ever more homogenous. The commercial purveyors of satellite TV are in any case interested in profits not politics, and Rupert Murdoch was not averse to pulling BBC news-programming from Star Television to placate the Chinese government.

The Hong Kong—based Star satellite network originally appeared as an independent Asian rival to Western companies, but four of its five channels are English-language broadcasts and toward the end of 1993 it sold out to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for a little more than a half billion dollars. The Australian-born naturalized American Murdoch owns, in America alone, Fox Television, Twentieth Century Fox Film, TV Guide, HarperCollins Publishers, and the New York Post. In addition to his global newspaper-and-magazine empire, he also controls Fox Television as well as a 50 percent share in British Sky Broadcasting (Europe’s dominant satellite broadcaster): with Star TV in his pocket, he adds another thirty-eight nations with a potential audience of two-thirds of the world’s population.9 That means that several billion Asian ears are cocked in his direction. Yet the only thing we know for sure about Murdoch’s intentions is that they include neither the preservation of indigenous cultures nor the democratic and civic uses of media and telecommunication networks. He might seem a threat in China, where—as in Singapore—satellite dishes are forbidden (but manufactured by the army and widely used). But Murdoch agreed to withdraw the BBC World News from Star in return for less Chinese resistance, knowing perhaps that it is not CNN or the BBC but MTV that is McWorld’s real Trojan horse in alien cultures and hostile states.

Music Videos—McWorld’s Noisy Soul

MTV OFFERS A fascinating picture of the rapid changes that have given American television and music a global grip on audiences. The music television video was born only in 1981, an offspring (ironically) of performance art and experimental television on the cultural margin; the kind of work presented at innovative performance studios like the Kitchen in New York. Within five years, the MTV network had become a mainstream colossus, propelling its owner Viacom into a media limelight from which it has preyed ever since on a widening spectrum of rival media outlets. When its owner, Sumner Redstone’s Viacom, snatched victory in the war for Paramount from Barry Diller’s QVC teleshopping network, Viacom emerged as one of the world’s most powerful media monoliths. Meanwhile, though mauled by Viacom, QVC has continued to mall television. But the world’s largest electronic mall is neither network television nor the shopping network, but MTV itself that exists exclusively as a marketing tool for the music industry. As John Seabrook has written, “one of the reasons MTV is a landmark in the history of media is that the boundary between entertainment and advertising has completely disappeared.”10

By the mid-1980s when the group Dire Straits used MTV to launch its megahit “Money for Nothing” (with its own backhanded commercial tie-ins), MTV had gone international. In early 1993, its global audience stood at nearly a quarter of a billion households (60 million in the United States) with over a half billion viewers