ABSTRACT
Critical political economy is closely associated with a critique of imbalances and inequality in the global flow of media and cultural goods. Radical scholars advanced the concept of cultural imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s. Its major achievement, argues Nordenstreng was to challenge the then dominant, benign account of Western modernisation. Radical scholars argued instead that Western culture was being imposed on newly independent states in the third world, eroding cultural autonomy. The variety of factors explaining American cultural dominance makes the case for a synthesis of strictly political economic and broader cultural explanations. In advanced capitalist economies the period from the 1950s to the early 1970s had been marked by economic growth and rising living standards. Two radically different perspectives, transnational corporate domination and cultural globalisation, agree that transnational media are eroding national media. Cultural imperialism was too crude and vulnerable both to critique and to geopolitical and cultural changes.
