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Media and National Identity ¹
by Muyiwa Adekeye

This is an excerpted article from a chapter in the Master's thesis of Muyiwa Adekeye to the graduate school of journalism, university of Cardiff in Wales, UK.

Identity is mainly about culture. As the mediators of culture, the mass media play a role in creating and sustaining a common public culture (Smith, op cit:111.) Books, newspapers, film and radio have all helped to forge nations, but the media itself is part of a contested cultural terrain, given its power to help preserve or undermine a cultural space or collective identity (Schlesinger, op cit.) That is why even stateless nations are keen to enlist the media in a nationalist project. Nation-states too consider the media as vital to constructing and maintaining a collective identity. Fears that Western domination of their news and entertainment media would promote the erosion of their national cultures inclined Third World states to campaign for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s. An echo of this view of the media as a tool for cultural defense is sounded by the European Union's attempt to create a European audio-visual space. The connection between the media and identity is not an idle matter:

"...Our sense of ourselves - as individuals and as members of communities at various levels - whether families, regions, nations or supra-national communities ...[are not] a set of political abstractions, for they are finally, matters of our (mediated) everyday lives." (Morley and Robins, op cit:69)

Transnational forces have invaded this sphere of mediation. The boundaries that shielded national broadcasters have been breached; the laws that protected them have been changed. With physical obstacles breached by technology and legal barriers by deregulation, global media corporations have emerged. Their operations have shattered the traditional conception of the role broadcasting plays in national life. National broadcasters like the BBC were credited with helping to forge a sense of community, national identity and political citizenship. The transnational broadcasters are dedicated to different ideals. Companies like News Corp. and Time-Warner are creating consumers, not citizens. They entertain audiences to capture them for advertisers (Bagdikian, 1997:179; Herman and Chomsky, 1986:16.)

Electronic communities are replacing national communities. Television programs can be produced and transmitted to audiences far away. Although the producer is able to address several national audiences, he constitutes them as one. Television is thus able to construct a single audience, but is unable to provide a common identity. The separation of production from the audience is described as the de-territorialization of the media; new forms of fragmentation accompany this development. Audiences are increasingly segmented not along national lines, but along class and interest lines. Channels dedicated exclusively to movies, sports, news, music and other interests have proliferated. Catch-all programming is out of vogue. Globalization threatens to sever the media from geographical space and has created global segments across cultures. Schlesinger argues that given these, television is now less important in forging national identity than newspapers and radio. As the next chapter will show, some nationalists consider television as the most important tool for national mobilization, especially when, as in Wales, there is no national press.

Regional resistance to globalization has a media dimension. With emphasis on diversity and the variety of identities in Europe, regional interests seek to restore the connection between media and place by re-territorializing the media (Morley and Robins, op cit:17.) Even this is limited for the very reason that regional identity is itself prone to further fragmentation.

Yet place is bound to remain an obstacle transnational media cannot abolish. Place will remain important because even the recipient of transnational programming still has to live and work and perceive himself as belonging somewhere. It is obvious that the media could condition the perception of place, but that would not eliminate fragmentation. So long as people are rooted in place, that place's concerns and attachments continue to inspire an identity of sorts. Territory remains the most convenient basis for political and cultural mobilization. The resilience of territory and the importance of proximity to the sustenance of a cultural and political community ensure that local identity will thrive alongside transnational culture.

De Moragas, Spa, and Garitaonandia (1995:15) declare that it is impossible to sustain small cultural identities without their own media. In Britain, Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C), a Welsh language television station, exists as part of official efforts to defend and promote Welsh language and culture. S4C, despite having to serve a multinational state, remains unique in a highly centralized British broadcasting system.

1. This is an excerpted article from a chapter of Mujyiwa Adekeye's master's thesis, written while a student at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of Cardiff, Wales, U.K. Adekeye was also a former editor of The News magazine in Lagos.