A Theory in the Service of Media Imperialism

Abstract

Recently, the debate on media imperialism has been undergoing a revival. To expand the debate, this paper critically analyses Audience Theory since this concept was initially deployed to counter the notion of media imperialism. This paper argues that the Audience Theory empirically, theoretically, and logically goes off on tangents in the case of the media imperialism debate. Theoretically, Audience Theory oversimplifies, if not trivializes, the media imperialism debate because it conceptualizes media imperialism as the ‘domination of the West over the Rest’ while simply ignoring the dependency factor. Audience Theory belligerently refuses to engage with counter evidence or counter concepts.