American culture is not dominating the globe.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: We Aren't the World

In the mid-199os, the well-known French filmmaker Claude Bern warned that without protection from American cultural exports, "European culture is finished." He had plenty of pessimistic company. In that era, French Culture Minister Jack Lang spoke in terms of America's irrepressible "cultural imperialism." The popularity of a work like Jurassic Park was identified as a "threat" to others' "national identity." Strict programming quotas were enacted to prevent U.S.-made TV shows from over whelming foreign primetime.

Meanwhile, scholars such as Herbert Schiller had worked out theories explaining how the American political empire was founded on its expanding communications empire, and critics such as Ariel Dorfman were busy publicizing the poisonous imperialistic messages buried in the adventures of such despoilers as Donald Duck.

Today, similar jeremiads are blowing as strong as ever: The leading prophet of cultural doom these days is Benjamin R. Barber, an academic growing hoarse as he warns against the dull global "monoculture" he thinks is being imposed by American capitalism. (See "Tempest in a Coffeepot," January.) But mounting evidence suggests that all this fulmination has been entirely pointless, and that cultural pessimists have been as clueless about the processes shaping the world as were their social, economic, and political forebears.

In January, for example, The New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that exported American TV programs had largely lost their appeal for overseas audiences. According to the Times, these shows increasingly occupy fringe time slots on foreign networks," leaving the prime-time hours to locally made shows.

"Given the choice," wrote London-based reporter Suzanne Kapner, "foreign viewers often prefer homegrown shows that better reflect local tastes, cultures and historical events." The problem, it turns out, is that many foreign broadcasters had not been giving their viewers much choice.

Why not? Many foreign networks had been created in a wave of 1980s privatization and lacked the financial and creative resources to produce their own programming. For a while, the most effective way to fill their schedules was by purchasing shows, especially American-made series. But as U.S. producers continued to drive up the price of their products, the now more-experienced broadcasters opted to make their own programs.

In brief, the foreign broadcasters chose neither to whine about nor to spin theories about...