Cultural Proximity
Joseph Straubhaar
Abstract
This chapter explores the evolution of the theory referred to as cultural proximity, which predicts that audiences will prefer national or, next, regional television. It also empirically examines it in terms of preferences for national and regional programming in Latin America, 2004–2014, based on a series of annual surveys conducted in eight Latin American countries. The first major prediction of cultural proximity—that audiences will tend to prefer local or national programming—is confirmed from the strong, fairly stable preference that the overall audience shows for national programming in the years studied. However, counter to the second major prediction of cultural proximity, that Latin American audiences would favor regional programming next, we found instead that U.S. programming was their second choice. We examine why that seems to be the case and has become stronger in the cable T.V. era.