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Chapter 10: WorldSpace Satellite Radio and the South African Footprint
- Rutgers University Press
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10 @ WorldSpace Satellite Radio and the South African Footprint ben aslinger The launch of WorldSpace’s AfriStar satellite in October 1998 made three beams of up to eighty channels available to subscribers on the African continent . WorldSpace is a subscription-based satellite radio service founded in 1990 by Noah Samara designed for emerging markets in Africa and Asia. WorldSpace’s AfriStar and AsiaStar satellites, launched in 1998 and 2000, respectively, each have three beams—East, West, and South—that transmit a mix of news, music, and entertainment to subscribers with branded WorldSpace receivers. WorldSpace is an interesting case study as a venture that attempted to find a middle ground between explicitly prodevelopment satellite and communications projects (influenced by modernization theory) and brazenly neoliberal commercial ventures such as Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV. WorldSpace’s activities illustrate tensions created by the company’s attempts to reconcile the utopian visions of modernization theory that treat satellite communication technologies as a source of economic and cultural uplift with the rapidly evolving strategies of the culture industries in an age of unstable and capricious flows of transnational capital. WorldSpace’s offices in Johannesburg handle the technical and administrative issues for AfriStar’s southern beam, and the South African context makes an excellent case study for analyzing how the satellite broadcaster chooses between global, national, and local radio broadcasters in creating its programming lineup.1 South Africa’s British and Dutch colonial histories, apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the rise of a more inclusive parliamentary democracy with the election of Nelson Mandela have drawn international media attention to the country and have placed the nation at the center of debates surrounding African politics. WorldSpace’s programming determines which musical, national, regional, and political cultures will become part of AfriStar’s cultural footprint. The introduction and marketing of satellite radio in Africa gives scholars an opportunity to see the continuities and discontinuities between “old” and “new” media and examine which broadcasters are invited to participate in the new media economy of satellite radio and which broadcasters are reinscribed into terrestrial radio and regional, local, and/or language-based spaces. I argue that WorldSpace’s South African programming evidences tensions between neocolonialism and pan-African politics and between regional, local, national, and transnational broadcasting interests. For-Profit Development? As WorldSpace began lining up broadcasters and entering various national markets, the company had to navigate the tension between the utopian rhetoric of its modernist development mission and its status as a transnational media company. WorldSpace’s difficulties in reconciling development and economic neoliberalism raise the question of whether it would be possible for any for-profit enterprise to satisfy both stockholder desires and development objectives. These tensions surfaced early on in profiles of WorldSpace CEO Noah Samara. While some journalists treated Samara as a visionary and emphasized his personal stake in the company and his idealism , others treated him as a profit-driven media mogul.2 Marina Bidoli opens her 1998 story on WorldSpace by asking if Samara is “Radio Gaga or the Rupert Murdoch of the Developing World?”3 Certainly, the potential comparison to Murdoch likens Samara more to a defender of free flows and neoliberal economic policies than to a humanitarian, development-driven executive. Samara’s mogul status was bolstered by the fact that he had a 91 percent stake in WorldSpace before the company’s initial public offering (IPO); his 67.3 percent share of the company after the IPO helped fuel a kind of cult of personality surrounding the CEO.4 Samara’s and WorldSpace’s insistence that the company’s main mission was to develop communication infrastructures in the developing world resuscitated a kind of 1990s technological boosterism in journalists. Gracia Hillman, president and CEO of WorldSpace Foundation, said, “The ability to widely disseminate information about the treatment and prevention of HIV/ AIDS and other diseases is the very reason the WorldSpace system was created .”5 Anitha Soni, managing director of WorldSpace Southern Africa, stated in 2001 that the company’s business efforts “are in line with our mission to create information affluence in those parts of the world where lack of appropriate infrastructure and prohibitive costs continue to work against access to information.”6 After presenting the WorldSpace technology to Ethiopian officials, including Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin and Education Minister Genet Zewde, Samara said, “If there is a computer that can give worldspace satellite radio 195 [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:04 GMT) a solution...