International Communication Gazette

This overview article operationally defines Asia as the three subregions constituting the South, the Southeast and the East. It discusses the Occidental and the Oriental (i.e. Asian values) views of press freedom and argues the case for placing this debate within the framework of Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, it looks at the relevance of old media, as well as old media theory, in the context of the new media that have become essential for global competition. It provides the rudiments of a structural theory suitable for communication analysis in the era of globalization.

This study examines the trend of commercialization in the broadcast media in Asia's four newly industrialized countries (NICs) - Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong - and its impact and implications. The central theme of this study is to investigate the `Asian characteristics' of media commercialization and their significance and limits. The direct and indirect, immediate and profound impact and the various implications in the Asian political and social context are discussed. As the focus of the study is on the four Asian NICs, changes in other Asian countries are also discussed as a reflection of some general traits of the region. In particular, this research suggests that: (1) the trend of media liberalization and deregulation in Asian NICs has been mainly manifested through media commercialization, and: (2) the most profound significance of media commercialization in the Asian political and social context is that media commercialization is an alternative or indirect way to achieve media democratization, which is the first step toward political and social democratization.

The advent of transnational satellite television in the early 1990s caught Asian governments unawares. It captured the imagination of audiences in many countries under the footprint of satellite broadcast, who had long been accustomed to unimaginative public broadcasting and/or government-controlled commercial broadcasting. The new transnational medium fostered a dramatic growth in the sales of satellite dish antennae and the establishment of cable networks, illegal and quasi-legal. Complacent about their dominant market shares, domestic broadcasters were often slow to face up to any threat to their audience shares. Overtaken by events, governments in the region naturally reacted with a range of regulations and policies to what was perceived as cultural imperialism which would undermine their national sociocultural agenda. This article develops a typology of policies concerning consumer access to the new medium adopted by governments in Northeast Asia and their metamorphoses over the first five years. Since the regulatory policies are not sufficient explanations of the impact on the domestic media industry, this article also discusses other significant factors in the penetration of STAR TV, the pioneering transnational television broadcaster.

Based on a comparison of the contexts in which the regulatory structure of television broadcasting has been shaped and developed in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, this article explains the way in which each state, implicitly or explicitly, justifies the shape and development of its regulation of television broadcasting. It argues that despite the different perceptions and principles of television broadcasting held by each of the three countries, the context of regulatory structure and change in all three has been more influenced by political, rather than other factors, such as economic or technological changes.

This article discusses the impact of multilateral trade negotiations, particularly trade in goods and services and its consequences for communications futures in India. It argues that the neo-liberal policies espoused by the World Trade Organization have begun to shape domestic practices and inform attitudes to communications priorities. The article specifically highlights issues related to intellectual property and charts the travails and dilemmas of local communications industries as they respond to liberalization in every communications sector, inclusive of information technology, broadcasting, film and the press. It also grapples with issues related to media imperialism, and suggests that despite new opportunities to reverse one-way flows, the systemic and systematic incorporation of countries like India into the circuits of globalization inevitably leads to them becoming mere appendages of transnational powers. The article implicitly takes the position that people's expressions in support of the right to communication are fundamentally important to stemming the flow of a rampant neo-liberalism, with its accents on quantity, technological rationality and privatized futures.

Along with Japanese children, other Asian children are watching such cartoon shows as Doraemon, Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon. Animated cartoons, accounting for 58.3 percent of Japan's television exports, reach Asia's large youth population, just as the birth rate in Japan is declining. In Asia, animation constitutes the largest category of children's television programming (28.4 percent) - almost all of it imported. However, cartoons do not rank high on research agendas; the girls' market is particularly neglected, even though Asian girls more than boys may receive a television `education' at home. This study found that television cartoons marketed toward boys out-number girls' cartoons by 2:1 on domestic and satellite channels. Using responses from an Internet mailing list devoted to Japanese cartoons marketed to girls, the author identified Sailor Moon as the most influential series of the 1990s. The study explored Sailor Moon as a role model as well as the heroines of programs broadcast on pan-Asia satellite services. It finds the lack of children's television imports into Japan of greater concern than the values or volume of Japan's cartoon exports to Asia.

In Western media coverage, Japan is portrayed as a country defined by its difference from the West. The repeated emphasis on cultural difference is a coded way of discussing racial difference. Examples discussed include British press coverage of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. A similar `racial' conception of culture also underpins academic analyses of Japanese cultural difference, for example in anthropology. Far from offering an explanation, the tendency is to mystify culture by treating it as the starting point for analysis, rather than examining its social and historical roots. Cultural studies has attempted to challenge essentialist conceptions of identity and difference by treating cultural phenomena as operating `like a language'. Yet similar problems - of dehistoricizing culture, naturalizing differences and making culture appear as a determining force - beset this approach too.