Anti-Americanism and television: The one where Pooh goes to Sweden

Date: 05/04/03

Do American television channels spread cultural imperialism?

WHEN the British government introduced a bill last year to make it possible for ITV, the country's top commercial broadcaster, to come under American ownership, it did not imagine that the bill would be going through the House of Lords at a time of such intense anti-American sentiment. Led by Lord Puttnam, the producer of such films as “Chariots of Fire” and a former production head at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, a rebellion is brewing. As well as fearing the prospect of any more media power being given to Rupert Murdoch, a possible buyer of Channel Five, another commerical British channel, Lord Puttnam has repeatedly argued that American ownership would result in a (further) flood of imported American programming on to British TV screens.

At the same time, war has given a new lease of life elsewhere in Europe to old worries about American ownership spreading cultural imperialism. Only last week, President Jacques Chirac urged French TV to set up a 24-hour TV news channel, in response to fears about the growing influence of American-owned networks such as Mr Murdoch's Fox News and AOL Time Warner's CNN.

There may be reasons to worry. The logic of vertical integration - owning both content and distribution - rests on the ability to spread the cost of television programming across as wide an audience as possible. “The big American players,” argued Mark Fishlock of the Creators' Rights Alliance, an industry body, recently, “have shelves of programmes, already made and essentially paid for...which can neatly and cheaply plug many a gap in British TV schedules.”

Even so, such fears can be easily overdone. Yes, familiar American imports, such as “Friends” or “The Simpsons”, appear in prime-time. But most other American programming neither airs in prime-time, nor attracts huge ratings.

The critics may love such series as Fox's “24” or Warner Brothers' “The West Wing”, but British broadcasters shove them into late-night slots precisely because so few viewers tune in. The days when “Dallas” or “Kojak” filled British prime-time are long gone. Today, the top 50 British TV shows are all home-grown, led by the local soap-opera staples, “Coronation Street” and “EastEnders”.

Britain is no exception. Between 1996 and 2002, the number of hours of American programming fell by 26% in Spain, 17% in Germany and 9% in Italy, according to Essential Television Statistics, a research group. Since 2000, the drop has been marked in all five big European countries.

Quotas alone do not explain this trend. The European Commission recently reported that broadcasters in every European Union country are now far above the minimum 40% quota for EU-made programmes, devoting on average 62% of airtime to them. The top series in France in 2002 was “Fabio Montale”, a French cop series; in Spain, it is “Ana y los 7”, a Spanish soap. In short, consumers want local.

But what if an American company owns the distribution channel? Surely the logic of vertical integration is to force-feed already-made stuff down the tubes? In Europe, the only examples are pay-TV channels, such as Disney, MTV, or CNN. Yet, in each case, the most successful strategy has been, in the words of Chris Cramer, head of CNN International, to “de-Americanise” content. In 1996, 70% of programming on CNN International was American; by 2001, this had dropped to about 8%.

I want my local MTV

It was Viacom's MTV that pioneered this model. The company had originally thought that, because pop music is a genuinely global product, a single channel would prosper everywhere. But it soon learned that success depended on creating local versions of the channel. Since 2001, it has launched 14 new MTV channels, most recently MTV Romania and MTV Indonesia, bringing the global total to 38. Each is tailored to local tastes, literally: a top show on MTV Italy is “MTV Kitchen”, where musicians show off their favourite recipes. In Indonesia, MTV broadcasts a “funky but respectful” call to prayer five times a day. Sensitive to the damage that its link with America could do to its brand, MTV constantly tests its image. “We don't even call it an adaptation of American content: it's local content creation,” says one MTV executive. “The American thing is irrelevant.”

For all the fears about Mr Murdoch trampling over British TV, he too has become a disciple of localisation. When he bought Star TV in 1993, the plan was to use his Fox films and TV programmes to fill a pan-Asian channel. But it was not until Star hired local producers to make soaps, comedies and game shows for customised channels, in languages from Hindi to Mandarin, that the business began to prosper.

Even Disney, icon of Americana, has adopted a similar strategy. It recently launched a local version of the Disney Channel in Scandinavia, mixing familiar Disney characters, such as Nalle Puh (Winnie-the-Pooh), with local favourites, such as Pippi Longstocking. In Britain, over half of the output on Playhouse Disney is now British-made. A British studio makes for Disney a children's art series in various languages - in the best BBC tradition, complete with ample supplies of sticky-backed plastic and squeezy bottles - which is then broadcast to children in such countries as Mexico, Germany and France.

The key to this approach is to get the economics right, so that the extra cost of local production is commercially viable. Boosting locally raised revenues is critical. The more established a channel becomes, and the wider the audience it attracts, the greater the advertising base and the bigger the pot that can be devoted to local production. Ad revenues at MTV Europe, for instance, leapt by 32% in 2002 compared with 2001; as a result, MTV in Britain has doubled its programming budget for 2003.

Plainly, this strategy has limits. Consumers may be less satisfied with local versions of American-owned news, for example, than with kids' programmes. Hence Mr Chirac's push for a 24-hour news channel, just as CNN is said to be considering the launch of a French-language CNN.

For now, though, the moguls are making reassuring noises. As Viacom's Sumner Redstone, who has not denied being interested in Britain's ITV, put it recently: “In our programming, we have always been very attuned to local tastes. The idea that we would dump US programmes is absurd.” Even so, it appears that politicians do not trust Americans not to pump their own stuff down European tubes, and are putting other obstacles in their way. The British government is stepping up regulation of content even as it frees up ownership. Politicians, it seems, find it as hard to trust their own couch potatoes to watch what they deem suitable as they do to trust Americans to show it.

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