Price's Media and Sovereignty
In Price’s book Media and Sovereignty, media policy and effects have a strong impact on national sovereignty, with several important factors providing the defining conditions. Media can affect national sovereignty. They can introduce new ideology, promote new national identity, devalue traditional value system and challenge existing social structure and norms. It can shake the foundation of a government’s control over its country. Aware of the powerful impact of media, governments try to retain their sovereignty by exert their formal or informal power to control and/or intervene media policies and practice within and beyond their national borders.
The effect of media on national sovereignty is conditioned by many factors, including geopolitical, technical, ideological, economic, cultural, social and historical ones. Price especially emphasized the geopolitical, technical, and economic factors. Though not endorsing technology determinism, Price believes that the pace and pattern of introduction of new technologies has a major impact on national responses in terms of sovereignty (p.235). States with more advanced technologies have more power and agency. When the US planes jammed SRT signals while simultaneously broadcasting its own information, the Bosnian Serb government could only protest, though furiously.
The effect of media on a country’s sovereignty is determined by its political and economic stability and development, its dominant ideology and social norms, and its history of free trade and national security concerns. Due to globalization, it is also affected by these factors in its neighboring or even non-neighboring countries. The unique combination of all these factors leads to specific consequences on media policy and national sovereignty. Any change in the combination will affect the consequence. Media policy may have unexpected outcome when some of the factors are overlooked or misunderstood.