Specifically, there was a perturbing collapse of the terms "local" or "regional" and "national" running throughout "McTV..." This starts on the second page of the article (360 in the version I have), with the following claim:
The popularity of formats...reveals two developments in contemporary television: the globalization of the business model of television and the efforts of international and domestic companies to deal with the resilience of national cultures.
Hm, I asked myself, and wrote down in the margins. Are these really national cultures? or regional? Further down the page, Waisbord contends that "television is...shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures." (Emphasis added) Here, and continuing throughout the article, Waisbord adopts a hyphenated approach to the local-and-national, or national-and-regional, that seems to me both imprecise and inappropriate.
Let's look at reality TV, which he uses to support many of his format arguments (which, for the record, I think are, in many ways, on point). Take the Real Housewives franchise. If this franchise were really reflective of national values, and local meant the same thing as national, would we really have a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, one of Orange County, and one of New York City? Isn't this far more reflective of regional sensibilities, and isn't it more interesting to reflect on the contrast between regional and national reception than to simply lump them all together? I guess one could make the assertion that only US viewers will understand the full implications of the different regional cultural stereotypes at play in these series, but especially in the case of Beverly Hills I don't think that's true. Which raises a whole new set of questions, about the international appeal of some regional shows over others, in a way that doesn't truly seem to involve US-national sensibilities at all.
This fuzziness around the local/national distinction was aggravated by Waisbord's simplistic, reductive and (maybe I'm overreacting but I found it) absurd discussion of language as a national unifier, or "a pillar of cultural distinctiveness and national identities." I understand where this instinct comes from, but as Waisbord notes himself, languages exist independent of national boundaries, and indeed this has been a huge problem in some of the more recent colonial projects of the West (as in the Middle East). Straubhaar puts it elegantly, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I read this, so I'll just quote him:
Nearly all television systems work within long-term patterns of language and culture that sometimes coincide with nation-states but are frequently either larger--the Arabic-speaking world--or smaller--serval states in India that have distinctive systems of language, culture, religion, and television.
Waisbord's resistance to acknowledging this basic fact about language undermines some of his more nuanced explorations of how accents in Latin America become national unifiers--though this is undermined, again, by the very regional qualities of accents in larger countries (like Mexico, or the US).
In short, while I think this article has its merits, it suffers from some pretty serious elisions and dissolutions between key concepts that I was happy to see addressed in the other readings we completed. In his arguments for the resilience of national cultures in the face of globalization, I found Waisbord in fact making more convincing arguments for the departure from national frameworks, as nearly every cultural element he identified as "national" is more properly described as "regional." But maybe that's because I hate the nation?
Oof, sorry for the screed...sometimes I get annoyed.
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