Changes in Media Industries and Media Consumption Reference: Baran and Davis, Introduction to Mass Communication and Media Literacy 1. Concentration of Ownership and Conglomeration • Ownership of media companies is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. • Through mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and hostile takeovers, a very small number of large conglomerates is coming to own more and more of the world’s media outlets. • In 2011, the number of media corporations with “dominant power in society” are 6: GE, Newscorp, Viacom, Disney, Time Warne, and CBS (American but also global context) Giant Media Companies by the end of 2006 Mother Jones magazine reports that by the end of 2006, there are only 8 giant media companies dominating the US media , from which most people get their news and information: • Disney (market value: $72.8 billion) • AOL-Time Warner (market value: $90.7 billion) • Viacom (market value: $53.9 billion) • General Electric (owner of NBC, market value: $390.6 billion) • News Corporation (market value: $56.7 billion) • Yahoo! (market value: $40.1 billion) • Microsoft (market value: $306.8 billion) • Google (market value: $154.6 billion) What does this mean for the range of information and entertainment available to people of all ideologies? • How does all of this affect concrete media coverage? • If media moguls control media content and media distribution, then they have a lock on the extent and range of diverse views and information, says [Chuck] Lewis, [executive director of the Centre for Public Integrity]. That kind of grip on commercial and political power is potentially dangerous for any democracy. FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said: • “The public has a right to be informed by a diversity of viewpoints so they can make up their own minds. Without a diverse, independent media, citizen access to information crumbles, along with political and social participation. For the sake of democracy, we should encourage the widest possible dissemination of free expression”. • A free press is a condition of a free society. US House of Representatives member Maurice Hinchey said: • “…………..As media outlets continue to be gobbled up by these (media) giants, the marketplace of ideas shrinks. New and independent voices are stifled. And the companies that remain are under little obligation to provide reliable, quality journalism. Stories that matter deeply to the country’s well-being have been replaced by sensationalized murders and celebrity gossip”. Conglomeration • The increase in ownership of media outlets by larger, nonmedia companies. • Example: General Electric owns NBC television and CNBC cable networks, and is also a major defense contractor that did $450 million in business in Iraq in 2003 and had commitments for $3 billion more for the following few years. Additionally, more than one-half of Iraq’s power grid is composed of GE technology, and even before the shooting began in 2003, company CEO Jeffrey Immelt told an interviewer in his own CNBC network that war in Iraq was a business opportunity for his company…….” Media oligopoly • Concentration of media industries into an ever smaller number of companies • The impact of this on the mass communication process is enormous. • Stanley Baran, a mass comm. theory textbook author asks: “What becomes of shared meaning when the people running communication companies are more committed to the financial demands of their corporate offices than they are to their audiences, who are supposedly their partners in the communication process? 2. Globalization • It is primarily large, multinational conglomerates that are doing the lion’s share of media acquisitions. • What is the impact of globalization on the mass communication process? • Will distant, anonymous, foreign corporations, each with vast holdings in a variety of non-media businesses, use their power to shape news and entertainment content to suit their own ends? • In China, Microsoft censored searches and keywords and shut down Web sites on orders from China’s Communist leaders. • Yahoo! Identified one of its customers, dissident Shi Tao, as author of emails the Chinese government found subversive. 3. Audience Fragmentation • When television came, radio and magazines wee forced to find functions. • No longer able to compete on a mass scale, these media targeted smaller audiences that were alike in some important characteristics and therefore more attractive to specific advertisers. • This phenomenon is narrowcasting, niche marketing, or targeting. • Nowadays, the trend is personalized consumption of media. • Audiences can also become producers of media content. 4. Hypercommercialism • Shown in selling more advertising on existing and new media • And in identifying additional ways to combine content and commercials • The rise in the number of commercial minutes in a typical broadcast or cable show is evident to most viewers • The sheer growth in the amount of advertising is one troublesome aspect of hypercommercialism. • But the increased mixing of commercial and noncommercial media content is even more troubling – product placement • What do you think is hypercommercialism’s impact to media content? 5. Erosion of distinctions among media: Convergence • We can read news of different media outlets online. • Aljazeera, BBC, CNN, inquirer.net, sunstar.com.ph, abs-cbn.com, and others – have websites online where you can read news reports, watch videos of TV broadcasted news and episodes of TV dramas • Will this expansion and blurring of traditional media channels confuse audience members, further tilting the balance of power in the mass communication process toward media industries? Or will it give audiences more power – power to choose, power to reject, and power to combine information and entertainment in individual ways?
