Discusses the Cook Islands experience in acquiring television and how highlighting push, pull, and temporal factors accounts for the creation and maintenance of dependency relationships. Demonstrates how the dependency relationships cannot be reduced to "natural" market forces but rather a range of strategies which Television New Zealand…

Contributes to scholarship on the transcultural impact of media systems (and draws on media effects, political economy, and cultural studies research) by applying the soil erosion metaphor to transcultural impact of television. Discusses four processes associated with this model: cultural abrasion, cultural deflation, cultural deposition, and…