Thanks for taking the time to respond to my missive. I hardly disagree with any specifics that you listed, especially the highly negative role played by intellectual property rights. My concern is with a more general causal model of media influence. Are you implying that the media really make people think what they do, and the leftist denunciatory diatribes sometimes claim to explain their own dismal failure to capture people's attention?
I think it is a far more complex causal relationship of mutual causality - advertisers pickup up popular themes already existing in their target audience and gently manipulating and steering them in the desired direction, so the audience never ceases to believe that they reflections of their own thoughts on TV as opposed to something being broadcasted to them. And that indeed is not far away from the truth - good propaganda does reflect what people actually think and want to think and only directs it in the desired direction. There is far more consensus and far less manipulation in propaganda than many media critics on the left want to admit.
Then you come with the concept of "cultural imperialism: which again is something from the denunciatory repertoire of the left that has little analytical value. The relationship that you describe, i.e. certain cultural products achieving dominant position in the natural effect of the market. The intense competition among various products force them to the lowest common denominator, which is pandering to the most basic human emotions and the most widely entrenched cultural stereotypes. Those products that do this most effectively - as many US commercial products do - win. End of story.
The concept of cultural imperialism not only does not explain anything new in this process, but obscures the fact that all commercial competitive markets work like that, whether they are US, French, Islamic or Chinese. US cultural products win because they do a better job in pandering to the debased popular tastes and instincts than the cultural products of other countries. Pandering to Third World anti-Americanism is not science but propaganda on a par with that produced by Hollywood.
Wojtek