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Until the 1980s, most of the world’s broadcasting organisations were owned or controlled directly by the state. Even in the United States, broadcasting was subject to tight regulation by government bodies, because broadcasting had been understood as a limited and powerful resource which dominated people’s leisure activities (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 112-113). That is, a national monopoly regulated by the government was widely accepted in broadcasting in most countries in order to achieve high quality with low cost.

Hesmondhalgh describes the three ways in which governments have intervened in communication, media and cultural markets as follows:

- Legislation: to create laws concerning general issues such as competition and contracts, more specifically pertaining to cultural issues, such as copyright, obscenity, privacy and so on. These are subject to constitutions and to decisions of courts.

- Regulation: via these laws, governments create agencies that monitor a

particular industry or group of industries and have powers to affect the behaviour of companies, other institutions and actors.

- Subsidy: directly, via grants in order to supplement the provision of texts provided by the private sector, in areas such as the theatre, ballet, opera, fine arts and so on, or indirectly, by allowing research and other knowledge created in the public sector into the private sector. (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 106-111)

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, however, the established rationale justifying high degrees of government intervention in the broadcasting industries appears to have disintegrated for various reasons. On the one hand, technical improvements in the broadcasting industry were bringing about a new era of diversity and choice in broadcasting services. In place of the more limited capacity of analogue broadcasting, new technologies such as cable, satellite and digital were able to offer almost unlimited capacity for broadcasting and multi-channeling. In particular, satellite television techniques, which transgressed borders, encouraged broadcasting companies to allow greater commercialisation and competition on a global scale (Sinclair et al., 1996: 3; Keane, 2007:

25).¹⁹ In these changing circumstances, the tight regulation of a conventional television system within a country in the name of public service and the public interest could not be sustained. As Hamelink states, ‘the communication structures of many countries were revamped into becoming more market, less state’. (1997: 96)

On the other hand, it is likely that the shift in cultural policy towards the cultural industries since the mid 1990s has also encouraged the deregulation and internationalisation trends in the broadcasting industries. The term ‘creative industry’, coined by the New Labour government in Britain in 1997, focuses mainly on the economic growth and export earnings of the cultural industries (Garnham, 2005: 16). Schlesinger points out that the core purpose of the Creative Industries Task Force set up by the UK government in 1997 was ‘to recommend steps to maximise the economic impact of the UK creative industries at home and abroad’. (2007: 378-379)

Thus the creative industries extended the boundaries of cultural policies to include more commercial genres, such as film, popular music and broadcasting, as well as the traditional

19 According to Chan, media commercialisation is defined as ‘the process by which the media become dependent on market responses for revenue’. (Chan, 1996; cited in Hong and Hsu, 1999: 226)

‘high’ arts (Garnham, 2005: 16). Indeed, the strategy for the creative industries, promoting them as ‘a key form of economic competition’ (Schlesinger, 2007: 378), seems not just to have included popular culture genres, but also to have emphasised the role of popular culture as one of the vital elements in the cultural industries. This doctrine of the creative industries quickly became global. Since the early 2000s, some non-Western countries have attempted to construct an alternative version of their creative industries, based on Western culture and values (Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, 2005: 3; Keane, 2009: 431; Kong et al., 2006:

174). Along with the global permeation of new policies in favour of media marketisation, cultural industries corporations have required the lifting of regulations in order to compete in national and global markets (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 114). Consequently, the common model of state control of the broadcasting industry has gradually crumbled.

Hesmondhalgh is concerned that privatisation in the media industries, one major processes of marketisation, has been encouraged by government policies. According to him, marketisation, referred to as the ways in which ‘market exchange increasingly came to permeate the cultural industries and related sectors’, has privatisation, the lifting of restraints and the expansion of private ownership as its three main processes. Among these, privatisation is defined by Hesmondhalgh as the process of ‘many enterprises and institutions, which once government-owned, were privately owned in order to pursue more profits of businesses’. (2007: 110) He concludes that, as the result of privatisation, more marketisation has permeated the broadcasting industries (ibid.).

As Hesmondhalgh states, governments have willingly shifted their broadcasting policies towards marketisation through fostering privatisation and lifting regulation. Research has highlighted how governments have been supportive of these changes because they wanted to enable their own cultural industries to compete in a new global cultural industry sector (Hamelink, 1997: 96). Crucial changes, such as deregulation and privatisation, in the broadcasting landscape eventually emerged throughout the 1980s and 1990s at the international level.

As a general rule, ‘policies are fundamental in triggering or inhibiting transformation in the cultural industries’. (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 135) Presumably, this is particularly so in the case of the shift in broadcasting policies, which had had a strong tradition of public ownership and regulation. Indeed, many governments appear to have realised that they could improve the competitiveness of their domestic broadcasting production through

media marketisation. In other words, governments seem to have welcomed more than feared the advent of commercialisation in the broadcasting industries. Therefore, in the context of the newly developing global market, broadcasting companies and policy makers appear to have shared a similar goal of maximising economic benefits and made forays into new markets with their own broadcasting products. As Karthigesu points out, ‘the trend in broadcasting has become more commercialised, either by governments’ own initiatives or by private sector dynamism’. (1994: 76) Together, these changes indicate that government policies were ‘moving towards the dismantling of regulatory apparatuses in the broadcasting world’. (Sinclair et al., 1996: 2)

The marketisation processes, that is, the increase in private media ownership and deregulation by government, appear to be the global norm rather than an aberration within a few Western countries. It is not difficult to find examples of the spread of a commercialising atmosphere in the broadcasting industry in the developing world, such as in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. In these countries, changes in the broadcasting industry coincided with a change of state regime (Eastern Europe), with the collapse of military authoritarianism (Latin America and Korea), or with the rise of capitalism in a communist regime (China). All of these have increased the importance of the cultural industries in the minds of business people as well as policy-makers.

Harvey analyses the global trend of marketisation in the broadcasting industries from a more political perspective. She maintains that the collapse of the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s led to the growth of a diverse market, which ‘calls for a lessening of state power such as lower taxes and less state control’. (Harvey, 2003: 101) With the strength of Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain, state intervention and regulation in the public interest became increasingly marginalised. The controlling power of political elites over the media has lessened and giant media corporations with multi-national capital have appeared as the new dominating power in the media industry. Harvey concludes that, through the tides of political and economic change on a global basis, ‘state provision has had to be dismantled, disabled or limited in order to create a new set of market relationships where citizens become consumers, providers become investors, and profitability becomes the motivating force in the economic cycle’.

(Harvey, 2003: 102) In this context, it is an inevitable consequence that the influence of

public service broadcasting has also gradually declined.²⁰

The expansion of the broadcasting industries, facilitated both by technical evolution and by government deregulation, has inevitably resulted in a growing demand for new programmes. In the early stages of the new cable and satellite services, there was heavy dependence on imported US television programmes, but each channel then attempted to find more economical and indigenous programmes from new sources (Sinclair et al., 1996:

3). Notwithstanding the pre-eminence of US programmes, the new international broadcasting landscape has subsequently stretched beyond traditional US products and become more heterogeneous. Even English-speaking regions like Australia, Canada and Britain have produced programmes with their own unique national characteristics, although they have assimilated the genre conventions of US television (Sinclair et al., 1996:

12-13; Curran, 2006: 137).

It seems that the hunger for new programmes in the international broadcasting market, which has been intensified by the marketisation of the broadcasting industries, and the increasing demands of more diversified audiences in line with the increase in the number of channels available, has stimulated the productivity of indigenous programme production within some peripheral regions. Consequently, several broadcasting industries have succeeded in developing an export capacity, even though this has remained regional rather than global and the volume is not as great as that of the dominant US productions. In this context, it is worth noting Tracey’s observation that the ‘very general picture of TV flow is not a one-way street; rather there are a number of main thoroughfares, with a series of not unimportant smaller roads’. (1988: 23)²¹

Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham argue that the prosperity of new peripheral producers does not mean the decline of the strong influence of US broadcasting products in the international broadcasting landscapes. According to them, new regional broadcasting production centres tend to have hybrid characteristics of their own and US products

20 Although Harvey admits that the role of broadcasting as a ‘public sphere’, as defined by Habermas, has weakened and expresses concern that the permeation of commercialism in the broadcasting industry will lead to the energetic expansion of capitalism and may even threaten relationships with the institutions of democracy (2003: 109).

21 Interestingly enough, Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham foresaw as early as 1996 that some Asian countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Korea, might produce competent television content to export within their own region in the near future (Sinclair et al., 1996: 3-4)

(Sinclair et al., 1996: 12-13). Their argument is consistent with Hoskins and McFadyen’s prognosis that ‘US production will continue to increase, but it will also constitute a smaller share of an expanding market in world terms as regional and national production also expands’. (Hoskins and McFadyen, 1991: 221) In this regard, it is worth quoting Hall’s statement that: ‘a peculiar form of homogenisation does not destroy but rather recognises and absorbs those differences within the larger, overarching framework of what is essentially an American conception of the world’. (Hall, 1993; cited by Iwabuchi, 2008:

145) In other words, the increase in the regional circulation of television content may be seen as ‘the further homogenisation of Americanisation at a deeper level in terms of the spread of production conventions such as genre, format or marketing strategies’. (Morley and Robins, 1995; cited by Iwabuchi, 2008: 145) In this context, these accounts do not accept the notion of cultural proximity as a major generator of increasing programme trade within a region. Rather, they tend to regard the new circulation of international television programmes as an extension of the dominant influence of US mass culture within the frame of the marketisation concept.

Overall, it is likely that the new landscapes of the broadcasting industry, tending since the 1980s towards commercialisation, and the entry of transnational media corporations have led to marketisation processes in the broadcasting industries which are favoured by government policies allowing deregulation and increasing private ownership in a global scale. This trend has overlapped and interacted with the appearance of small, but notable multi-directional flows of broadcasting content within greater regional circuits, and has complicated the previously simple map of international programme trade which consisted mainly of one-way broadcasting flows from the United States to other countries (Varis, 1984; cited by Sinclair et al., 1996: 7). In this respect, it is highly probable that the deregulation processes of individual governments affecting the broadcasting industry have helped to enhance the new trend in international programme trade, and vice versa.

However, the marketisation and internationalisation trend in broadcasting has different implications in different social contexts in Asia. This chapter now analyses the rapid development and opening up of East Asian countries’ broadcasting industries, and investigates in particular why the flow of media marketisation has had a limited impact on Asian countries even though it has been one of the most obvious and dramatic changes in the Asian media.