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Discovering the World

Review by
Janice Peck
University of Colorado at Boulder

Media Globalization and the Discovery Channel Networks, by Ole. J. Mjos. New York & London: Routledge, 2010. ISBN: 0-415-99246-X. 224 pp.

From its 1985 launch in the U.S. as a solo cable television channel reaching a modest 156,000 homes, the Discovery Channel has grown into a global media powerhouse. Today, Discovery Communications commands multiple TV channel networks, delivers its wares via the Internet and mobile telegraphy, and boasts of being “the world’s number one nonfiction media company reaching more than 1.5 billion cumulative subscribers in over 180 countries” (http://corporate.discovery.com/our-company/overview/). Charting, explaining and assessing that trajectory—while also shedding some light on “the relationship between media and globalization” (1)—is the aim of Media Globalization and the Discovery Channel Networks.

A former media professional with experience in television documentary production, author Ole J. Mjos received his Ph.D. in Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, UK, in 2007. This book originates in his doctoral dissertation, which examined the expansion of Discovery Communications’ television networks into Europe. As a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, Mjos is currently engaged in research on another global media giant: the News Corporation. Both projects seem to share a similar, sociology-based approach as case studies of large global media conglomerates focusing on their general economic strategies and put into service as explorations of larger issues surrounding media globalization (243).

Mjos opens the book proposing to assess Discovery’s global practice and impact in terms of three concepts: “cultural homogenization” (global media “create cultural sameness” [8]); cultural hybridization (a “mixing of culture” leading to “new cultural expressions” [13]); and cultural heterogenization (the power of “localization” and the endurance of national and local cultural and linguistic preferences”[15]). The book proceeds to trace Discovery’s beginnings in the 1980s deregulation frenzy spearheaded by Reagan and Thatcher that soon swept the globe in tandem with the spread of neoliberal political-economic policies. It treats Discovery as an exemplar of global media and television enterprises and carefully charts the process by which the company consolidated its activities and operations in the U.S. before expanding to Europe, Latin American and Asia. The book also considers the role of branding and marketing within that expansion; the economic logic behind the globalization of production in film and TV industries; and the ways global media enterprises try to balance the profitability of standardization and economies of scale with the need to attract specific national or regional audiences by “localizing” their content.

A strength of the book is its extensive history of the rise of Discovery. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to the “globalization of factual entertainment,” which recounts the extraordinary growth of “factual” television programming and the migration of the documentary form from public to private television systems. Through the 1980s the major buyers of documentaries were national public broadcasting systems—especially in Europe, but also in the U.S. to a lesser degree. The combination of deregulation in the 1980s and the dawn of satellite television in the ‘90s spurred a proliferation of channels, which could be differentiated thematically and targeted at specific audiences across national borders, thereby driving global demand for factual programming. These developments, Mjos proposes, were responsible for the Discovery Network’s initial success in the U.S. and provided the foundation from which it launched its mission to “blanket the world” (3). Central to that mission was Discovery’s 1998 partnership with the BBC—a marriage that benefited both parties’ international growth as they shared the costs of producing programs, developing channels and distributing and marketing the BBC America channel.

Today the U.S. and U.K. are the world’s largest domestic TV markets and the world’s biggest exporters of factual television programming. That economic dominance has important consequences for the programming created and distributed by Discovery. As public service broadcast systems lost public financial and ideological support, and commercial enterprises such as Discovery have taken their place as the major source of “factual” shows, the programming increasingly came to exhibit the qualities we might expect: avoidance of controversy, timidity regarding political issues, deference to the state, and a penchant for spectacle. Mjos cites Cynthia Chris’s observation that thanks to Discovery’s “repopularization” of the documentary form, the programming is increasingly placeless, timeless, “preoccup[ied] with sensationalistic subjects,” and driven almost entirely by commercial values and priorities (Chris 2002, 22). As Mjos’s insightfully notes late in the book, it is this very paucity of any sustained “critical portrayal of the real world” that has given Discovery the “crucial ability to cross cultural, political, and religious boundaries unhindered” (147).

In light of these astute observations, I wonder about the value of the conceptual triad—“cultural homogenization,” “cultural hybridization,” “cultural heterogenization”—that the book sets out to “test.” In the conclusion Mjos notes signs of all three phenomena at work in Discovery’s practices and products, leading him to speculate that all “contribute to an understanding of Discovery’s televisual culture” and thereby “confirm the complexity of the globalization phenomenon” (146). This statement may be true, but it’s somewhat trivial. Who would argue otherwise? Mjos offers as the study’s key theoretical contribution the claim that Discovery combines “the seemingly contradicting processes of standardize to globalize and standardize to localize” (146-47).  This is another bow to the obvious. All large media enterprises navigate the challenge of how to create content broad enough (i.e., standardized/homogenized) to attract a large audience dispersed across space/time, yet possessing enough degree of specificity (geographic, linguistic, cultural, etc.) to hold the attention of different segments and individuals within that mass.

Mjos’s theoretical apparatus and conclusions thus seem slight compared to the task of investigating and illuminating the many important issues raised in his case study. The story of Discovery Communications’ ascent to world dominance is also the story of the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, with its devotion to deregulation, privatization and marketization and the consequences of that political-economic agenda for the content—and ideological power—of “factual” media: the infinite propagation of infotainment, the sharp decline of serious journalism, the implications of both trends for the possibility of a critical, informed, self-governing populace. In the face of the de-politicizing effect of these powerfully intertwined developments—and the role of media in same—the question of whether “globalization” is best labeled “homogenization,” “hybridization,” or “heterogenization” seems, by comparison, merely academic.

Works cited:

Chris, Cynthia. (2002) All Documentary, All the Time? Discovery Communications Inc. and Trends in Cable Television. Television and New Media (3): 7-28.