Media and Politics (8160512) / 9
QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW
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How do mass media organizations sell their products?
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What motives shape the media?
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Briefly explain the concentration of ownership trend in media.
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How do powerful corporations influence mainstream media?
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What are the forms of media ownership concentration?
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Briefly describe demassification that has occurred in radio, magazines and television.
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What are the new alternative media of advertisers?
The mass media are expensive to set up and operate. The equipment and facilities require major investment . Meeting the payroll (payments of employees) requires a bankroll
(fund). Print media must buy paper by the ton. Broadcasters have gigantic electricity bills to pump their messages through the ether (air, atmosphere).
To meet their expenses, the mass media sell their product in two ways.
Either they derive (get, obtain) their income from selling a product directly to mass audiences, as do the movie, record and book industries, or they derive their income from advertisers who place advertisements for mass audiences that the media provide, as do newspapers, magazines, radio and television.
Advertisers and consumers pay most of the cost for the market media.
In short, the mass media operate in a capitalistic environment and, with few exceptions which survive on government support and private donations, almost all media in market economies are privately owned.
In the U.S., all media are privately owned except the Public Broadcasting Service
(PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) , which survive on government support and private donations.
The mass media is mostly privately owned in European Union countries also. The most important exception is the famous British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
In Turkey , the only publicly owned media are Turkish Radio and Television (TRT ) and the Anatolian News Agency (AA) . The annual budget for all of public media (TRT and
AA combined) is less than 5 percent of the amount advertisers pay every year to support
Turkey’s commercial media.
Privately owned mass media are businesses, profit-centered vast businesses to make money . The products of these profit centered businesses are information and entertainment .
Besides making money, other motives shape the media in the world, of course:
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The desire to fulfill the public's need for information,
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To influence the country's governance,
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To disseminate the country's culture,
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To offer entertainment and
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To provide an outlet for artistic expression.
But to understand the market mass media, the first concept to understand is that the central force driving the media business in the world today is the desire to make money.
The mass media, above all, are profit-centered. They have to turn profits to stay in business.
Economics figures into which messages make it to print or the airwaves. A subject interesting only to small numbers of people is not preferred .
To realize their profit potential , the media that seek large audiences choose to deal with subjects of wide appeal and to present them in ways that attract great numbers of people . A subject interesting only to small numbers of people does not make it into national newspapers or magazines. Television stations, to take another example, drops programs that do not do well in the television ratings.
This is a function of economics for those media that depend on advertising revenue to stay in business. The larger the audience, the more advertisers are willing to pay for time and space to pitch their goods and services.
Even media that seek narrow segments of the population need to reach as many people within their segments as possible to attract advertisers. A jazz radio station that attracts 90 percent of the jazz fans in a city will be more successful with advertisers than a competing jazz station that attracts only 10 percent.
Media that do not depend on advertising also are geared (equipped with) to finding large audiences. For example, a novel that flops (fails) does not go into a second printing.
Only successful movies generate sequels (follow-ups).
Upside and Downside
The drive to attract advertising can affect media messages in threatening ways. For example, the television station that overplays the ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new store usually is motivated more by pleasing an advertiser than by telling news.
The economic dependence of the mass media on advertising income gives considerable power to advertisers who threaten to yank (pull) advertising out of a publication if a certain negative story appears. Such threats occur, although not frequently.
At a subtler level, lack of advertiser support can work against certain messages.
During the 1950s, as racial injustice was emerging as an issue that would rip apart the United
States a decade later, American television avoided (kept away from) documentaries on the subject. No advertisers were interested.
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The search for audience also affects how messages are put together. The effect is relatively benign (kindly), although real, when television preachers avoid mentioning their beliefs so as not to lose listeners of other faiths. Leaving things unsaid can be serious. For years, many high school science textbooks have danced carefully around the subject of evolution rather than become confused with creationists and lose sales.
Perhaps the most significant development of the last two decades in international communication is the increasing concentration of mass media ownership within and across national borders. This process has been facilitated by a world-wide trend toward deregulation and privatization of the mass media. Concentration of mass media ownership has had two significant implications for the ways news (and other cultural products) is assembled and disseminated world-wide:
First, concentration of ownership and privatization of mass media has been accompanied by commercialization of news and other cultural products, a trend that is characterized by aesthetic (artistic, visual), technical, and professional standardization at the global level. And second, alliances between the international “media moguls” such as Rupert
Murdoch and forces of political conservatism have led to increasingly "soft" media content.
These phenomena are part of the process of globalization.
These trends in the political economy of international mass communication have left little space for information that questions the status quo, and even less space for material that forcefully advocates even limited structural change.
A prevailing model of journalistic practice that emphasizes neutrality, "facts," authority, official expertise, and so on, has helped ensure that alternative views and oppositional voices remain largely unheard. The widespread use of the prevailing model, the origins of which can be traced to the rise of a "professional" journalism in Europe and the
United States, has aided the owners of mass media corporations in their world-wide expansion by ignoring or, at best, not fully analyzing important global developments such as the social, political, and cultural implications of the international corporate concentration of mass media firms.
In market economies private media ownership has been contracting rather than expanding, with fewer companies owning more aspects of the media business. This trend is called concentration of ownership . The trend toward concentration involves a process of mergers (the combination of companies), acquisitions (gaining, getting hold of) and buyouts
(takeovers) that consolidates the ownership of the media into fewer and fewer companies.
As the dissemination of news has become instantaneous - thanks to the Internet and digital technology - media companies have begun to merge into global firms. These alarmingly powerful media monopolies, whose span and influence far exceed the United
States, can reach all across the world.
Therefore, understanding the nature of media mergers or conglomerates is crucial for understanding the nature globalization. It is also important because the media continually affect our perceptions and beliefs by determining the news content. We now, more than ever, need to know the truth hidden behind the media curtain.
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Here while larger companies buy smaller companies smaller media companies come together in larger groups, fewer companies own more types of media businesses , and a small number of companies control more aspects of the media business.
The deep pockets of a wealthy corporate parent can see a financially troubled media unit, such as a television station, through a rough (harsh) period, but there is a price. In time, the corporate parent wants a financial return on its investment and pressure builds on the station to generate (make) more and more profit.
This would not be so bad if the people running the television station loved journalism and had a sense of public service, but the process of concentration often doesn't work out that way.
Parent corporations tend to replace media people with career-climbing, bottom-line managers whose motivation is looking good to their supervisors in faraway cities who are under serious pressure to increase profits. Management experts, not media people, end up running the station, and the quality of media content suffers.
A myopic (narrow-minded) profit orientation is not surprising, considering that the executives of parent corporations are responsible to their shareholders to return the most profit possible from their diverse holdings.
When a media owner’s interests also include enterprises as diverse as energy companies, insurance agencies, industrial and tourism investments, as did the business empire of
Aydın
Doğan,
it is easy to understand how the focus is more on the bottom line than on the product.
Market-liberal or deregulatory policies , designed to encourage the free flow of investment, have justified this state of affairs. National governments have either loosened ownership restrictions or turned a blind eye to the expansion of these corporations.
We still need to remain aware of the harmful implications though. For example, in recent years the largest media giants have attained enormous success in affecting the media laws and regulations in their own favor and against the interests of the general public. Their concentrated power allows them to become an even greater factor in miseducating each generation with entertainment paradigms of behavior and of personal values. In other words, the media may not tell us what to think, but they surely tell us what to think about.
The power play that is taking place between competing conglomerates also upholds the prevalence of the profit-driven mentality, which affects the accuracy of objective news reporting.
The priority has become gaining more audiences to increase earnings and dominate the market economy — both domestically and internationally. In this sense, the media monopolies endanger the survival of highly respected, small-size newspapers, forcing them to merge in order to sustain their existence.
Media independence from the state
- the free market
Not surprisingly, since this view of the media's fourth estate function is rooted within the pluralist liberal democracy model , it is commonly accompanied by an assumption that the media, in order to act as fourth estate, must be independent of the state. In other words, the watchdog function can only be fulfilled by a free market organization of the media .
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It is assumed that, if the watchdog is subject to state regulation , then it will become the state's poodle . This argument has been used to legitimate the increasing deregulation of
American and British broadcasting over the last decade or so.
The regulation of broadcasting (even in the USA) was originally tolerated because the relatively limited number of frequencies available meant that franchises (licenses), had necessarily to be limited. Therefore, since some had to be excluded from obtaining a franchise (a restriction which did not apply to anyone wishing to launch a press title), there was a requirement in both countries of some measure of public service broadcasting (more especially in the UK), which to an extent would cater for the interests of those excluded from a franchise.
However, the development of cable and satellite TV has meant that in the USA people can choose from more TV stations than newspapers and in Great Britain from at least as many. The deregulation of broadcasting, from this point of view, therefore becomes a legitimate goal, since, it can be argued, and that will ensure broadcasting's independence of the state.
Defenders of narrowing control of the media also point, accurately enough, to the large numbers of media outlets available to the population: almost 1,700 daily papers, more than
8,000 weeklies, 10,000 radio and television stations, 11,000 magazines, 2,500 book publishers
... and more ... Unfortunately, the large numbers deepen the problem of excessively concentrated control. If the number of outlets is growing and the number of owners declining, then each owner controls even more formidable (alarming) communications power .
Concentration forms
Concentration of ownership takes five different forms: chains, broadcast networks, cross-media ownership, conglomerates and vertical integration.
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Chains - Chains are media giants who own and publish different newspapers.
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Broadcast Networks - A broadcast network is a collection of radio or television stations that offers programs, usually simultaneously throughout the country, during designated program times.
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Cross-Media Ownership Many media companies own more than one type of media property: newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations.
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Conglomerates – A conglomerate is a large corporation formed by merging many companies in various industries.
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Vertical Integration The most noticeable trend among today's media companies is vertical integration - an attempt by one company to control several related aspects of the media business at once, with each part of the company helping the other.
Media ownership collaboration
All of the American broadcast media and most of the print media as well, are owned primarily by wealthy individuals. Direct ties to the biggest of big businesses are almost unbelievably extensive and, these ties cannot help but seriously bias and compromise news coverage.
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Moreover, the media empires are, first and foremost, profit-making corporations that conduct themselves like other corporations when it comes to corrupting American politics.
That is, the parent corporations of many make so-called "campaign contributions" and also act against the public interest in other ways. As big winners in the corruption game, they show no signs of serious interest in political reform. (As large corporations themselves, the mass media want the same preferential treatment, and have the same desire to grow without bounds, as all other corporations.)
Allegations of political bias in the media are common, although there is considerable controversy concerning the nature of this bias: neither liberals nor conservatives are pleased.
Conservatives allege that the media exhibit a liberal bias. On the other hand, liberals allege that the media exhibit a pro-corporate, plutocratic bias. However, we believe such charges rely on a faulty and simplistic analysis of the American political and economic spectrum. The truth is that the apparent liberalism of some of the mass media is primarily cultural, and rarely economic. In effect, and like most other American institutions, the mass media advance the economic interests of the wealthy few at the cost of the interests, and values, of the majority; and the self-indulgent, empire-building interests of the wealthy few are not those of either liberals or cultural conservatives.
At the heart of media pseudoliberalism is a shallow but highly serviceable relativistic ethic. We say "serviceable" because the fundamental corporate ethical premise, "if it's profitable it's good," is fully compatible. In some ways, the personification of this "liberalism" is Howard Stern, who represents nothing in the end but cynical profiteering. The similarly corrupt music industry thinks nothing of merchandising utterly debased music to children.
This form of "liberalism" nicely advances the corporate profit agenda. No matter how low the least common denominator, executives need feel no moral qualms. The media is being entirely consistent when it also manifests pro-corporate, economic "conservatism." Though the names and the products are different, the underlying ethos is not: the corporate culture that brings us, say, Eminem also brings us Enron, offshore tax havens, media corporations that bribe politicians—and the nightly "news."
Against this, some have objected that the media often attack corporations. It's true, certainly, that this or that individual corporation may be subjected to media criticism, sometimes even harsh criticism—but it strikes us as significant that the sort of stringent and fundamental reforms needed to bring about real change are virtually never mentioned, let alone advocated. For example, how often are severe penalties for white collar crime advocated? How often is the revocation of corporate charters mentioned? And public financing of elections, arguably the single most urgently needed reform in America today, has made less headway than it should despite overwhelming public support, in part because the mass media profit enormously from paid political advertisements.
Unfortunately, even public radio and television, which is supposed to provide programming in the public interest, is currently headed by former Voice of America executives. (Voice of America is the official American propaganda network of radio stations overseas, a relic from the Cold War.) Moreover, an ever accelerating commercialism has been evident in public radio and television for some time. While its news coverage is generally far less misleading than that of the corporate media, when NPR is used as a conduit to bring
Americans the message that "globalization is inevitable", any pretense that it truly provides journalism in the public interest stands revealed as a sham.
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To illustrate how pervasive the corporate influence is throughout the major media, the table that follows identifies the interconnections between the six largest or most influential broadcasting companies and other major corporations.
In that table, corporations color coded in red are those that have connections with more than one broadcaster. Corporations coded in green also have connections to the top 28 most interconnected companies. (In addition, a few of the connections through social clubs for the wealthy and/or powerful are listed.) Thus, companies coded in red or green are in a position to exercise significant media influence; and companies coded both red and green, such as Chase Manhattan, are super offenders. We would also single out the former Citicorp
(now merged with Travelers to form Citigroup) as a corporation deeply immeshed in secret
FTAA negotiations, and which also has an exceptionally bad environmental record.
Unsurprisingly, and again consistent with a pro-corporate bias, all of the major broadcast and print media have been either directly involved in secret FTAA negotiations
(which even Congress was kept ignorant of) or else had an interlocking directorate with a company that was, except for Viacom and Fox. As international trade and globalization are among the most important and newsworthy topics today, the failure to adequately inform the
American people of their own role and interest in these matters is a severe rupture of journalistic integrity. Of course, corporations owning media corporations have no business whatsoever making "campaign contributions" (bribes) to presidential candidates. (Note: all analysis of bribes below refers to the first Bush campaign.)
Besides a consolidation of media ownership, the remaining giant companies have joint deals, some very complex. Even Ted Turner , who created CNN , and Rupert Murdoch , who created Fox, and who criticized publicly at each other regularly, was intertwined in deals. One example: Time Warner , which owns CNN , carries Fox news on some of its cable systems.
Murdoch's News Corporation , which owns Fox, carries Warner programming on its satellites.
Ten percent of Time Warner is owned by Tele-Communications Inc ., a giant cable system operator, which has a joint venture with Fox/Liberty Sports , which is owned by News
Corporation.
Got all that? It gets more complicated.
News Corporation has deals with Disney, whose properties include NBC ;
Westinghouse , whose properties include CBS ; and manifold others. All the big players are in television and film production, Internet content, home video, interactive programs, cable, electronic games, and sports teams. Most are also in books, music and records, television stations, newspapers, magazines, telephone and wireless communications. Disney, Time Warner and TCI own theme parks.
Sound like monopolies?
The International Concentration of
Mass Media Ownership
Currently there are five major corporate players in international mass communication.
These giants are News Corp., Disney/Cap Cities, Time Warner, Viacom, and TCI. In addition, two other "mini-giants," General Electric and Westinghouse have global ambitions. Of these seven firms, all but Viacom and TCI have major news components.
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News Corp. is the owner of or significant partner in newspapers, television stations, and satellite broadcasting systems (including STAR TV and Sky TV) around the world.
Disney/Cap Cities owns ABC. Time Warner's recent acquisition of Turner Broadcasting, which created and owns CNN, gives it a major international presence in news gathering and dissemination. General Electric owns NBC and Westinghouse own CBS. All of these megacorporations but one are based in the United States; News Corp. is based in Australia.
There are several other significant players in the international mass media. Among them are Japan's Sony Corporation, France's Havas and Hachette, Germany's Bertelsman AG,
Holland's Philips Corporation, and the emerging Globo of Brazil and Televisa of Mexico.
Nevertheless, News Corp., Disney/Cap Cities, Time Warner, General Electric, and
Westinghouse epitomize the trend toward the international concentration of ownership among mass media firms.
Increased economic and political influence
This new media concentration trend has allowed for the speculation of media conglomerates (multinationals) all over the world. Today we have some nine corporations
(mainly US) dominating the media world: AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann,
Viacom, News Corporation, TCI, General Electric (owner of NBC ), Sony (owner of
Columbia and TriStar Pictures and major recording interests ), and Seagram (owner of
Universal film and music interests).
These economic realities are potent shapers of media content. When there is a concentration of ownership than there is a risk of increased economic and political influence that can be somewhat unaccountable (puzzling), which is of concern.
Powerful corporations have enormous influence on mainstream media. In many countries major multinational corporations own media stations and outlets.
Besides, many media institutes survive on the advertising fees, which can lead to the media outlet to be influenced by various corporate interests .
News coverage and other media content can therefore be adversely affected. For example, stories end up biased or omitted (absent) so as not to offend (upset) their advertisers or owners.
The global commercial-media system is radical in that it will respect no tradition or custom , on balance, if it stands in the way of profits. But ultimately it is politically conservative , because the media giants are significant beneficiaries of the current social structure around the world , and any upheaval (disorder) in property or social relations particularly to the extent that it reduces the power of business- is not in their interest. allies.
Further, media companies can aid politicians they have been perceived as valuable
Self-serving control
More serious than threatening economic and political impact is the potential for selfserving control of content, particularly journalism:
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"Is NBC likely to pursue a major investigative series on its partner Microsoft? Is Fox
News going to go after its partner TCI? Is a junior ABC news producer going to think twice before chewing on the leg of a Disney partner?"
Media independence from their owners
The increasing concentration of media ownership and the merger of media organizations with non-media corporations bring a new question to the agenda: Media independence from their owners.
It could be argued that, with the declining role of national state governments and the increasing power of transnational corporations, the media watchdog should pay more attention to abuses by global capitalist institutions than by the state. And here, of course, is the rub (an unforeseen obstacle).
The supporters of the free, deregulated media market argue determinedly that media institutions must be independent of the state otherwise they will be in some way indebted to it. The argument runs, for example, that such media will think twice before criticizing the government of the day for fear of losing subsidies or of provoking restrictive legislation.
From this argument, though, it surely follows logically that those media which are owned by major corporations must be beholden to those corporations.
But it is not an open and shut case. The question needs to be asked, though, to what extent the free press is at all free. Wen big media is owned by big business, it idoubtless that there is less criticism of big business or related political issues in big government.
Another contemporary economic phenomenon is demassification. The idea that the mass audience is the largest number of people who can be assembled to hear mass messages is changing. Most media today seek narrow audience segments.
The mass media are capable of reaching tremendous numbers of people, but most media today no longer try to reach the largest possible audience. They are demassifying, going after the narrower and narrower segments of the mass audience.
This demassification process, the result of technological breakthroughs and economic pressures, is changing the mass media dramatically.
Radio demassified early, in the 1950s, replacing formats designed to reach the largest possible audiences with -formats aimed at sectors of audience.
Magazines followed in the 1960s and the 1970s , and today most of the 12,000 consumer magazines in the United States cater only to the special interests of carefully targeted groups of readers.
Today, with dozens of television program services available via cable in most U.S. households, television also is going through demassification.
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Effects of Demassification
The effects of demassification are only beginning to emerge. At first, advertisers welcomed demassification because they could target their pitches (playing fields) to groups of their likeliest customers.
Although demassification dramatically changed the mass media - network radio went into a decline, for example - the economic base of the mass media remained advertising.
Local radio stations found new profitability from advertisers anxious to support demassified formats.
Today, however, technology has found ways for advertisers to bypass the mass media to reach mass audiences. The latest trend in demassification has advertisers producing their own media to carry their messages by mail to potential customers who, through computer sorting and other mechanisms, are more precisely targeted than magazines, newspapers, television and radio could ever do.
The new alternative media , as they are called, include:
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Direct mail catalogs and flyers to selected addresses.
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Television commercials at the point of purchase, such as screens in grocery store shopping carts.
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Place-based media, such as magazines designed for distribution only in physicians' waiting rooms.
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Telemarketing, in which salespeople make their pitches by telephone to households determined by statistical profiles to be good potential customers.
If advertisers continue their shift to these and other alternative media, the revenue base of magazines, newspapers, radio and television will decline. Wholly new ways to structure the finances of these media will be necessary, probably with readers, listeners and viewers picking up the bill directly rather than indirectly by buying advertised products, which is the case today.
The globalization of mass communications has also allowed for the growth of media conglomerates.
The growth of media conglomerates has gone hand-in-hand with the evolution of new technologies, neo-liberal ideologies and deregulatory (without rule) policies directed particularly at broadcasting.
According to market-liberal theory, broadcasting has been unchained from its restraints through consumer sovereignty, and multiple forms of ownership. For free marketers, communications are most efficiently produced and distributed through the market.
Globally, this has led to the reformulation of public service broadcasting as deregulation has been increased by the new media technologies.
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The deregulation of mass communications
Deregulation within communications and broadcasting was exported from the United
States to the advanced and developing economies.
Two factors may be perceived as contributing to this movement.
First, a general consensus between politicians, policymakers and the media industry that deregulation would benefit both the national and international economy.
Second, the technological revolution meant that major transformations within the distribution of communications were available for business and domestic use. Moreover, the opening of the marketplace to cable and satellite, enabled hardware manufacturers to invest in research and increase their profitability.
The implications of deregulation
Deregulation, or regulatory reform, has produced its own anomalies, inconsistencies and unforeseen consequences. This is partly due to the fact that deregulatory policies are conditioned by political will, ideological support, national culture and an industry's readiness to adapt.
Deregulation may be characterized as a shift from the defense of the public service broadcasting to the encouragement of a free broadcasting market. This has been justified by the belief that the market will decentralize power and encourage a plurality of providers.
Multiplicity does not necessarily secure diversity.
More fundamentally, the new technologies and governments' laissez-faire policies have opened up the media markets to the conglomerates across Europe (Bertelsmann,
Fininvest) and the world (News International, Time Warner).
First, multinationals have benefited from the reduction of labor rules and, more profoundly, they have gained from the relaxation of ownership rules.
Second, the major expansion in the audio-visual industries has been in the distribution of channels, not original production.
Thus, there has been a multiplicity of transmission services; but as programming expenditure remains high, a decline in diversity.
Significant amounts of capital are required to run major, international broadcast channels. This means that there is no greater access for smaller, local broadcasters as conglomerates are allowed to fix entry costs.
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