Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [67]
Indigenous-language MTV programming is available in most countries, but although Orlando Patterson would like to think that “world musical homogenization” is simply “not occurring,” young watchers often prefer American, which is, after all, what MTV is promoting. Sumner Redstone, the owner of MTV and three times the average age of his employees there, sounds like Gillette chairman Zeien when he insists that “kids on the streets in Tokyo have more in common with kids on the streets in London than they do with their parents.”12 In Belgium, a Flemish-language MTV program was canceled and replaced by English as a result of complaints from local Flemish viewers.13 Anglo-American pop accounts for most of MTV’s music, and where local groups get airtime they generally imitate the Americans. Critic Helmut Fest complains that local European groups appearing on MTV are consigned to the “ghetto slot—a kind of ‘look-how-curious-and-quaint-these-continentals-are’ approach.”14 In Berlin, if you get tired of MTV, you can also get the best bands on David Letterman’s Late Night on another channel.
Asia affects to go its own way, and then marches in lockstep with America. The new Asia Television Network (ATN) is nominally pursuing cultural preservation, and it has started the first all-Hindi network on the subcontinent, but it is simultaneously broadcasting MTV-Europe in order to compete with its rival, Star.15 Star has its own Asian version of MTV (with plenty of American hits), so Indians and Malaysians and Pakistanis can now choose from two “indigenous” MTV channels that offer the same bland pop American musical fare—or local imitations thereof. Once new media are in place, however conservative the cultural intentions of users, the door is wide open to the outside world.16
MTV’s audience, united for all its ideological differences and cultural reluctance by satellite and the United Colors of Benetton, includes not just Taiwan but China, not only Israel but Iran and Saudi Arabia, secessionist Georgia as well as progressive Hungary, Brazil no less than Mexico, Bangladesh and Vietnam as well as India and Hong Kong, and, along with South Korea, North Korea too (see map, pages 106–107). Satellites have little regard for Jihad and are messengers for McWorld in the most obstinate of ethnic enclaves. One nearly hysterical Islamic youth confesses to an Iranian newspaper, “I can’t study anymore, I have become impatient, weak and nervous. I feel crippled … so vulgar and stimulating” are the images of Western TV and MTV being beamed down from satellites.17
Music Television’s Reach Around the World
Self-critical Americans worry about MTV’s “cultural colonialism,”18 but when the supposed targets in Eastern Europe are warned, they wave off the caveats insisting that rock music is about freedom—a weapon against both the old Communists and the new nationalists. And, of course, in the near run they are right: in today’s reactionary Beograd (Serbia), dissident radio stations like B-92 play Western rock music to signal their disdain for ethnic parochialism, much as Russian dissidents once wore jeans and smoked Winstons and spoke rock to power to unnerve their Communist masters. Just a few years ago, Bill Roedy, MTV’s European director, was writing about “being part of the process of democratization in Eastern Europe.” MTV, he enthused, “is more than a TV channel. For some audiences, we’re a connection to the rest of the world. We’re a window to the West with our free flow of information and freedom of expression.”19 Free expression, perhaps, but “information”? “Democratization”? German hate groups also groove to