European Television Programming

Exemplifying and Theorizing Glocalization in the Media
  • Andrea Esser
Chapter
Part of the Europe in a Global Context book series (EGC)

Abstract

When, in the 1980s and early 1990s, private commercial television was introduced in the majority of European countries, old fears about the hegemony of American popular culture resurfaced. However, concerns that the attendant influx of American programmes would weaken national cultures and diminish Europe’s cultural diversity soon eased. Domestic programmes mostly seemed to draw higher audience figures, and from the mid-1990s national production sectors and output were growing. In academia, this led to the quickly cemented and widespread belief that audiences per se prefer local to imported programmes — the appeal of the latter diminished by a “cultural discount” (Hoskins and Mirus, 1988) — and most media scholars came to agree that national television markets would remain strong, followed in importance by geo-linguistic or geo-cultural markets offering close “cultural proximity” (Straubhaar, 1991, 2007; Sinclair et al., 1996; Keane et al., 2007). Television’s internationalization, they opined, was confined by entrenched cultural difference and resilience.

Keywords

National Culture Audience Rating Production Team Television Format Cultural Imperialism 
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© Andrea Esser 2014

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  • Andrea Esser

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