ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a key feature of the re-invention of the media over the last several decades is an ongoing restructuring of the power relations between the media and the state. The media's commercialisation, the decline of the mass media paradigm the development of the digital environment contributes to this restructuring, but always in contingent and located ways. The chapter discusses the relation between television and the nation-state, rather than the media more generally. It describes the 'return of the state' as an important factor in the consideration of the changing climate for global communications. The chapter focuses on the fringes of the customary locations for the discussion of the globalisation of the media, that is, beyond the Anglophone nation-states in the West. Since modernisation is always a national project, this approach reinforces the need to pay attention to the details of how modernity is defined and operated in individual nation-states.
