An exploratory study of factors influencing audience's attitudes toward imported television programs in Taiwan

The diffusion of international television programs has been an important area of international commu-nication research. In this article, we use theoretical constructs from country-of-origin and cultural proximity literatures and develop a model to explain audience’s attitudes toward and willingness to watch imported television programs from China. Our study used a questionnaire survey method to collect data from 553 respondents in Taiwan. We examined television programs imported from China, a country that has tried to invade Taiwan to destroy its democracy in the past decades. Regression analyses found that, whereas cultural proximity was an important predictor, animosity turned out to be a more powerful predictor of Taiwanese audience’s attitudes toward television programs from China. The results also demonstrated that if the Taiwanese audience perceived China as holding less animosity and more cultural proximity, they had more positive attitudes and were more willing to watch television programs imported from China. As the importance of international trade has grown in the world economy, so has scholars ’ interest in under-standing the factors that influence consumer acceptance of goods from abroad. In the field of media management, understanding consumer acceptance of media products is becoming a central issue in the face of audience frag-mentation and media globalization. International television program flow, in particular, has attracted keen interest among international commu