page_title: Americanization
section_title: Media and popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Americanization / Media and popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: Guantanamo Bay Naval Base has a McDonald's franchise during the Cuban / Haitian refugee crisis in 1994
context_page_description: Americanization, or Americanisation, is the influence American culture and business has on other countries outside the United States, including their media, cuisine, business practices, popular culture, technology or political techniques. The term has been used since at least 1907. While not necessarily a pejorative term, it is most often used by critics in the target country who are against the influences.
  Americanization has become more prevalent since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and especially since the advent of widespread high speed Internet use starting in the mid-2000s. In Europe in recent years, there is growing concern about Americanization through Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple Inc. and Uber, among many other United States tech industry companies. European governments have increasingly expressed concern regarding privacy issues as well as antitrust and taxation issues regarding the new American giants. The Wall Street Journal in 2015 reported "deep concerns in Europe’s highest policy circles about the power of U.S. technology companies."
context_section_description: Hollywood (the American film and television industry) since the 1920s has dominated most of the world's media markets. It is the chief medium by which people across the globe see American fashions, customs, scenery and way of life.
  In general, the United States government plays only a facilitating role in the dissemination of films, television, books, journals and so on. However, during the occupation of former Axis enemies countries after World War II, the government played a major role in restructuring the media in those countries to eliminate totalitarianism and promote democracy, against communism. For example, In Germany, the American occupation headquarters, Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in 1945 began its own newspaper based in Munich. Die Neue Zeitung was edited by German and Jewish émigrés who fled to the United States before the war. Its mission was to destroy Nazi cultural remnants, and encourage democracy by exposing Germans to how American culture operated. There was great detail on sports, politics, business, Hollywood, and fashions, as well as international affairs. Americanization would continue to spread out over the Iron Curtain even before the fall of the Soviet Union and periodically after.
  Foreign versions of American TV programs are re-broadcast around the world, many of them through American broadcasters and their subsidiaries (such as HBO Asia, CNBC Europe and CNN International). Many of these distributors broadcast mainly American programming on their TV channels. In 2006, a survey of 20 countries by Radio Times found seven American shows in the ten most-watched: CSI: Miami, Lost, Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.
  American films are also extremely popular around the world, often dominating cinemas as a result of a high demand of US product exported to consumers to clear away the outlook of World War II. The top-50 highest-grossing films of all time were all made entirely or partially in the United States. Often part of the negotiating in free trade agreements between the U.S. and other nations involves screen quotas. One such case is Mexico, which abolished screen quotas following the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the U.S. South Korea has agreed to reduce its quota under pressure from the U.S. as part of a free trade deal.
  Many American musicians, such as Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, are internationally known and have sold over 500 million albums each. Michael Jackson's album Thriller, at 100 million sales, is the best-selling album of all time.
  Through the study of vocabulary and spelling of English words in books and tweets, American English is more common in communities in the European Union compared to British English. This trend is more apparent in the events following World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union.
caption: McDonald's in Cuba.
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