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This book develops a nuanced decolonial critique that calls for the decolonization of media and communication studies in Africa and the Global South. Last Moyo argues that the academic project in African Media Studies and other non-Western regions continues to be shaped by Western modernity’s histories of imperialism, colonialism, and the ideologies of Eurocentrism and neoliberalism. While Africa and the Global South dismantled the physical empire of colonialism after independence, the metaphysical empire of epistemic and academic colonialism is still intact and entrenched in the postcolonial university’s academic programmes like media and communication studies. To address these problems, Moyo argues for the development of a Southern theory that is not only premised on the decolonization imperative, but also informed by the cultures, geographies, and histories of the Global South. The author recasts media studies within a radical cultural and epistemic turn that locates future projects of theory building within a decolonial multiculturalism that is informed by trans-cultural and trans- epistemic dialogue between Southern and Northern epistemologies.

Established in 2004, Maori Television has had a major impact on the New Zealand broadcasting landscape. But over the past year or so, the politics of Maori Television have been brought to the foreground of public consciousness, with other media outlets tracking Maori Television's search for a new CEO, allegations of editorial intervention and arguments over news reporting approaches to Te Kohanga Reo National Trust.Based on a Marsden Grant and three years of interviews with key stakeholders – staff, the Board, other media, politicians, funders and viewers – this is a deep account of Maori Television in its first ten years. Jo Smith argues that today's arguments must be understood within a broader context shaped by non-Maori interests. Can a Maori broadcaster follow both tikanga and the Broadcasting Standards Authority? Is it simply telling the news in Maori, or broadcasting the news with a Maori perspective? How can it support te reo Maori at the same time as appeal to all New Zealand? How does it function as the voice of its Maori stakeholders?Offering five frameworks to address the challenges of a Maori organisation working within a wider non-Maori context, this is a solidly researched examination of Maori Television's unique contribution to the media cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Three seasons of NZ Idol , the New Zealand adaptation of the global Idols format, were aired on public broadcaster TVNZ’s channel TV2 in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The final episode of the first season was the most-watched television programme in New Zealand in 2004, with 1.4 million people, a third of the New Zealand population, tuning in (South Pacific Pictures, 2004). In terms of ratings NZ Idol has been one of the most successful locally made television programmes of the last decade. At first glance, NZ Idol has also been very successful in representing ethnic and cultural diversity. In the auditions phase of the show young New Zealanders of 16 years plus from a range of backgrounds are featured, and in the subsequent phases the audience gets to know a selection of them intimately. The winners of all three seasons (Ben Lummis in season 1, Rosita Vai in season 2, and Matt Sounoa in season 3) have Pacific Island roots, and as a result three young “brown” people were crowned “New Zealand Idols.” This is remarkable, since according to a previous study by Misha Kavka (2004: 231) non-white people have largely been absent from New Zealand reality TV programmes. A closer look suggests, however, that featuring contestants from different cultural backgrounds in NZ Idol generally serves a particular nation building agenda that New Zealand is heavily involved in as a postcolonial society, in which ethnic minorities are subjected to representations that favour the interests of dominant cultural groups. The aim of this nation building agenda is to establish a new and distinct sense of national identity which will set New Zealand apart from Britain, the former colonial power, and other English-speaking nations.

During the last decade, popular television formats have been replicated across the globe for local or regional consumption as program imports, adaptations, clones or imitations, raising questions on the possible ramifications of such cultural inflows. For Africa the international program flow and the influence of Western media content has been a contentious issue for decades, underlying the cultural imperialism thesis of the 1970s and 1980s, and the centre– periphery paradigms which conceptualized the series of dependency relationships. In African media research concepts like cultural colonialism, media imperialism, neocolonialism, Americanization, homogenization, have been used to denote the unequal flow and influence of Western media products in Africa. Within the framework of media globalization some scholars have even propounded a scenario of the emergency of a global culture mediated by the dominant Western media. The central issues in African media discussions have mainly revolved around the flow of finished media programs and their perceived detriment to local cultures and identities. What is missing in the African research literature is the attention to television formats, a phenomenon described by Keane et al. (2002) as a vehicle for localization, since what is imported is not the content itself, but a recipe for creating a local version. Global reality format shows thus create a new picture.

In this chapter, we argue that there are several layers of genre, proto-format commercialization of program elements, and current commercially licensed formats. Some genre traditions, like melodrama, tend to be large, over-arching categories that already have a long history before television (Martín-Barbero 1993). Specific genres of television production, like the U.S. soap opera or the Latin American telenovela can develop within that larger tradition. Even more specific genres, like the Brazilian socially engaged or historical telenovelas, versus the romantic Mexican Cinderella story telenovela (Hernandez 2001), develop or emerge over time within those genre traditions. Television formats are now often distinguished as a parallel category which looks at forms of television that are packaged for licensing, transfer across cultures, and localized adaptation or implementation by regional, national or local networks. Specific formats are often imported and adopted. They can feed into genre development, grafted on to older traditions.

From the 1967 live satellite program "Our World" to MTV music videos in Indonesia, from French television in Senegal to the global syndication of African American sitcoms, and from representations of terrorism on German television to the international Teletubbies phenomenon, TV lies at the nexus of globalization and transnational culture. Planet TV provides an overview of the rapidly changing landscape of global television, combining previously published essays by pioneers of the study of television with new work by cutting-edge television scholars who refine and extend intellectual debates in the field. Organized thematically, the volume explores such issues as cultural imperialism, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, ethnicity and cultural hybridity. These themes are illuminated by concrete examples and case studies derived from empirical work on global television industries, programs, and audiences in diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts. Developing a new critical framework for exploring the political, economic, sociological and technological dimensions of television cultures, and countering the assumption that global television is merely a result of the current dominance of the West in world affairs, Planet TV demonstrates that the global dimensions of television were imagined into existence very early on in its contentious history. Parks and Kumar have assembled the critical moments in television's past in order to understand its present and future. Contributors include Ien Ang, Arjun Appadurai, Jose B. Capino, Michael Curtin, Jo Ellen Fair, John Fiske, Faye Ginsburg, R. Harindranath, Timothy Havens, Edward S. Herman, Michele Hilmes, Olaf Hoerschelmann, Shanti Kumar, Moya Luckett, Robert McChesney, Divya C. McMillin, Nicholas Mirzoeff, David Morley, Hamid Naficy, Lisa Parks, James Schwoch, John Sinclair, R. Anderson Sutton, Serra Tinic, John Tomlinson, and Mimi White.

This text provides readers with useful summaries and evaluations of key arguments relating to the development of television as an industry across the globe and its potential cultural impact. There is a continual insistence in the book on the need to connect issues of industry with those of culture.