CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Values that people cherish manifest in their daily lives. Africans have distinct traditional values embodied in the culture they cherished even before the coming of colonial adventurers. The preservation of the peoples’ culture is evident in both the traditional institutions and the channels of communication dominant among the people. Unfortunately, the media of communication available were not developed beyond their common boundary; hence, African traditional culture could not be appreciated by the outside world. Meanwhile, development in media technologies made it possible for the culture of the Western countries to be packaged in forms of soap operas, music, films and cartoons and exported to different parts of the world. These popular genres have become the standard for measuring entertainment around the world. The effect is that Western values have spread to every nook and cranny of the entire globe.
The mass media in the Western countries continue to portray the countries in the Southern hemisphere as areas which were ridden with coups, earthquakes, dictatorships, political instability, HIV/AIDS, conflicts, catastrophe, hunger, famine, corruption and other dangerous scourges. These issues which fit into the West’s stereotype of developing countries as well as the economic benefits they stand to gain over these developing countries especially in Africa necessitated the call for the establishment of a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). Although the debate for a new world order succeeded in raising fundamental issues, it however failed to address the very issues that led to the agitations.
Developing nations had no developed mass media system until after their independence. Even the media systems dominant after independence in these countries, are products of systems inherited from their colonial masters. Thus, broadcast contents showed on national television in most of these countries were thought initially to be tools of entertainment and information without any element of suspicion, until the mid-seventies when the debate on media and cultural imperialism caught the consciousness of culturalist and communication researchers.
Sobowale (1988, p.17) raised this observation in his comment on the negative impact of the commercialization of the Nigeria Television Authority to national development when he said,
a trend that some communication scholars and some experts consider dangerous has emerged in the commercialization of news by the Nigeria Television Authority. If this trend is not checked, it may mean that only those who could pay for their activities, no matter how unimportant or irrelevant this may be would receive coverage by the NTA with the exception of the government which owns it. The consequences of such a situation are better imagined than described.
Even after the deregulation of the broadcasting industry in Nigeria, the few cultural programmes on air, like The Village Headmaster, The New Masquerade, Tales by Moonlight, as well as other local music and drama, all gave way to foreign soap-operas like Secret of the Sand, Touched by an Angel, Until my Last Breath, Catalina and Sebastian, Second Chance, MTV music, which are aired at little cost to the stations but with much economic benefit. According to McQuail (2005, p.255) the implication of the above assumption is the transmission of overall cultural or ideological content which often has been interpreted in terms of Western values, especially those of individualism, secularism and materialism.
| Project details | Contents |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 69 pages |
| Chapter one | Introduction |
| Chapter two | Literature review |
| Chapter three | methodology |
| Chapter four | Data analysis |
| Chapter five | Summary,discussion & recommendations |
| Reference | Reference |
| Questionnaire | Questionnaire |
| Appendix | Appendix |
| Chapter summary | 1 to 5 chapters |
| Available document | PDF and MS-word format |
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