Media Imperialism And Information Inequality

1000 Words4 Pages

Information inequality traditionally occurs because of the differences of political system or educational system in many territories in which lead to different level of access to information sources. However, the divergence of technology creates different interpretation on information inequality as it reflects the imbalance access to information especially societies in developing countries. To get a better understanding of information inequality in the world, media imperialism does play a significant role on how this issue happens. Boyd-Barrett (1977) defined media imperialism as: The process whereby the ownership, structure, distribution or content of the media in any one country are singly or together subject to substantial external pressures from the media interests of any other country or countries, without proportionate reciprocation of influence by the country so affected. Western dominance, mainly US-based media in mass media shows their supreme control on the distribution and contents of the media products to solely promote their western cultures and qualities. Earlier during the emergence of modernization theory, it proposes the idea to transform the poorer countries to be more westernized and expand the range of mass media. However, it just ended up with information inequality and media dependency of the countries on them while they were applauding the growth of their dominance. Besides, Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank which are the dependency theorists argued

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