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As media and entertainment products flood across porous national borders around Southeast Asia, wary local elites have been able to sustain their legitimacy, despite rumblings to the contrary. Global industry trends like conglomeration, commodification and celebrification, mean few real challenges to the existing political and economic status quo. Whilst modernization theory assumes that the globalizing communication media would spread liberal, open societies, as this thesis will show, this is not the case in Southeast Asia. Despite the fact that the Asian Financial Crisis undermined the developmental state championed by many of the Region’s illiberal governments, it did not give rise to a liberal alternative, but to something more hybrid and complex which this thesis will reveal. The development of the communication media has had important implications for the nature of politics and political process in the region. However, rather than inspiring democratic ideals in an informed and educated public, it is commercial concerns which have come to dominate its agenda since the Asian Financial Crisis. This results in a churn of generic, even pasteurized media offerings, as media owners seek to woo concerned governments, and further their own business interests. The local media is not immune to these general trends, and tends to be locked in its own battle of competing interests, only very occasionally reflecting the political aspirations of its audience and their somewhat muted call for political change, rarely laying the seed. As a result, although there are interesting local responses to the growth of the media and entertainment industry and the changes being wrought by the Internet and other new technologies, the mass media has developed an ambiguous relationship with the political process. More significantly, local elites have proved resilient in the face of the challenge of the globalized media and, acting against the background of the “war on terror”, have been able to accelerate illiberal media options, maintaining their control strategies albeit, at times, around newly formed coalitions of support. In fact, this thesis demonstrates that the traditional elites have regrouped since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and are restoring their control over the media, where possible by ownership or legal means or, alternatively, where that has proved difficult, they have increasingly taken the sophisticated approach of using the techniques espoused by the perception industries and by public relations consultants to ensure they communicate effectively in an increasingly complex media environment.