Murdoch's dilemma, or 'What's the price of TV in China?

This article examines the development of global media baron Rupert Murdoch's satellite services in East Asia over the past ten years. This article also reflects upon the ways in which global satellite television systems are in fact grounded by a set of forces that are materially and culturally specific to societies that fall within their footprints. Such findings suggest that further development of the scholarly literature regarding media globalization will require more careful attention to the institutional logics of media organizations. Although anticipated by earlier work on international media, theories of globalization first emerged during the early 1990s when satellite television was expanding rapidly in Europe and Asia. Numerous scholars have advanced hypotheses about the ways in which distant media imagery penetrate and transform local experience, creating what many refer to as the phantasmagoric quality of everyday life. Most centrally, researchers have suggested that electronic media accelerate processes of social integration by restructuring the perceptions of time and space. Television has a significant impact on power hierarchies because it exposes the backstage behavior of elites on the one hand, while on the other hand it produces feelings of intimacy with distant others who previously were feared or reviled.