ABSTRACT
Up to the 1990s world media markets in print and broadcasting were still dominated by national enterprises, whether public or private. A central claim of theorists we examine in this chapter is that the dominance of state-based national media has been eroded. This can be formulated as a key question: is the global and transnational eroding the national and local? It is a question of immense importance but, formulated thus, it also invites a zero-sum analysis in which the transnational is either shown to weaken and displace the ‘national’ or instead we ‘prove’ the durability of the national media. This chapter argues that we do need to rebut certain, influential globalisation claims and redress a bias in the literature, but that we also need to try to better understand how diverse processes interact in the transnationalisation and transformation of media systems.
