Drawing on interviews with more than thirty international television executives from around the world, this article provides a case study of how distribution and acquisition practices in international television trade extract profit from television culture. While previous research in international television has tended to ignore or to oversimplify the importance of the distribution industry, this article demonstrates how studying distribution gives us insights into the contents and directions of transborder television flows that other methods and research foci miss. Specifically, the article explores how economic and cultural forces intersect to shape the global flow of African American situation comedies. As the television industry continues to globalize, cultural differences such as race will prove pivotal in attracting multinational viewers, and this article calls for more research into how such differences are commodied by the international distribution industry

In this study we focus on the film The Siege (1998), as an illustration of how mediated representations of terrorism serve as a vehicle for Orientalist discourse. This text serves as a specific location of struggle and negotiation over interpretations of media characterizations of Arabs, Arab Americans, Muslims, and Islam. First, we focus on how the film represents these communities and the religion textually. Second, we consider news discourse offering critiques of the film by protesting organizations, and the defenses articulated by some of the film's makers. Third, we explore the interpretations of young U.S. viewers as they resonate with competing facets of the text and with public perspectives. Despite the varied possibilities within the text, these interpretations privileged rather than challenged an underlying Orientalist ideology. Still, news media did acknowledge the contestation of dominant discourse, a potential step toward improved portrayals