Packaging culture: The potential and limitations of travel programs on global television

This study interrogates the representational politics of travel programs as examples of global media products. It presents a textualization analysis of the three television travel shows Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Travelers, all aired in the U.S. by the cable outlet Travel Channel. Beyond merely highlighting the ideological assumptions of these texts, this type of analysis situates the texts within their conditions of production. The study focuses on modern and postmodern depictions of travel and tourism, on strategies of representing the Other and on the discourse of these shows as global media texts. The shows' narratives tend to stress individual pleasure within untourist, post‐tourist or multicultural frameworks, but neglect broader political, social and economic problems of contemporary tourism and international relations in general. The analysis demonstrates the inadequacy of commercial nonfiction entertainment as a global television genre to address the difficult issue of cross‐cultural contact or to develop non‐essentialized strategies for representing the Other.