Media monopoly

Assessing the current situation

 McChesney’s argument
• The “media/democracy paradox”
– It is a ‘political crisis’
– 1) “the nature of our corporate commercial
media system has dire implications for our
politics and broader culture”
– 2) “the very issue of who controls the media
system and for what purposes is not part of
contemporary political debate”
 Defense of current system
• “communication markets force media firms to
“give the people what they want””
• “commercial media are the innate democratic and
“American” system
• Professionalism in journalism is democratic and
protects the public from nefarious influences on
the news
• New communication technologies are
inherently democratic since they undermine
the existing power of commercial media
• The First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution authorizes that corporations
and advertisers rule U.S. media without
public interference
 U.S. media at dawn of 21st
Century
• “The United States is in the midst of an
almost dizzying transformation of its media
system.”
• Main trends
– Corporate concentration
– Conglomeration
– Hypercommercialism
• “the U.S. media system is an integral part of
the capitalist political economy, and . . . this
relationship has important and troubling
implications for democracy.”
• “The media system exists as it does because
powerful interests have constructed it so
that citizens will not be involved in the key
policy decisions that have shaped it.”
 Concentration
• “Concentrated media markets tend to be
vastly less risky”
• Horizontal integration has been common in
media for a long time
– Low overhead
– Greater bargaining power
 Conglomeration
• “Dominant trend since the 1970s or 1980s,
which has accelerated in the 1990s”
First tier of media organizations

– Time Warner
– Disney
– Viacom
– Seagram
– News Corporation
– Sony
– General Electric
– AT&T
 Second tier
• Newspaper conglomerates
– Gannett
– Knight-Ridder
– New York Times Company
• Cable-based powerhouses
– Comcast
– Cox Enterprises
• Broadcast powers
– CBS
 Conglomeration
• Vertical integration
– Synergy
• Marketing
• Technological
– Deregulation
• Cross-promotion and cross-selling media
properties or brands
• Merchandising
• Branding
 Hypercommercialism
• 1) “trend within the media to ratchet up
commercialism internally and therefore
increasingly to subordinate editorial fare to
commercial values and logic”
– Payola
– Promotion of programs, etc. in newscasts
• 2) “the spread of media conglomerates externally
to new areas of social life.”
– Amusement parks
– Spectator sports
 Hypercommercialization
• “rampant commercialization of U.S. childhood”
– Commercialization of education
• Channel One
• “Farewell to journalism”
– Make journalism a profit center
– Breakdown of separation between advertising and
editorial
– Lowering editorial standards
• Lifestyle, nightly horrors, fluff
 Globalization
• U.S. media firms lead the way
– Buying up other firms in foreign markets
– Expanding their distribution systems through
partnerships
• Globalization of advertising agencies
• Development of content that can be
distributed internationally
• http://aroundthemedia.files.wordpress.com/
2008/07/screen-capture-61.png
Chomsky and Herman
Propaganda Model
 Herman:
• “These factors are linked together, reflecting the
multileveled capability of government and powerful
business entities and collectives (e.g., the Business
Roundtable; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; the vast
number of well-heeled industry lobbies and front groups)
to exert power over the flow of information. We noted that
the five factors involved--ownership, advertising, sourcing,
flak, and anticommunist ideology--work as 'filters' through
which information must pass, and that individually and
often in additive fashion they greatly influence media
choices.” The Propaganda Model: A Retrospective
• “We stressed that the filters work mainly by the
independent action of many individuals and
organizations; and these frequently, but not
always, have a common view of issues and similar
interests. In short, the propaganda model describes
a decentralized and nonconspiratorial market
system of control and processing, although at
times the government or one or more private
actors may take initiatives and mobilize
coordinated elite handling of an issue.”
 Ownership
• “The decline of public broadcasting, the increase in
corporate power and global reach, and the mergers and
centralization of the media, have made bottom-line
considerations more influential both in the United States
and abroad. . . . Newsrooms have been more thoroughly
incorporated into transnational corporate empires, with
budget cuts and even less management enthusiasm for
investigative journalism that would challenge the structure
of power . . . In short, the professional autonomy of
journalists has been reduced.”
Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, 2004
 Advertising
• “The competition for advertisers has
become more intense and the boundaries
between editorial and advertising
departments have weakened further.”
• Some argue that the Internet and the new communication technologies
are breaking the corporate stranglehold on journalism and opening an
unprecedented era of interactive democratic media. There is no
evidence to support this view as regards journalism and mass
communication. In fact, one could argue that the new technologies are
exacerbating the problem. They permit media firms to shrink staff even
as they achieve greater outputs, and they make possible global
distribution systems that reduce the number of media entities.
Although the new technologies have great potential for democratic
communication, there is little reason to expect the Internet to serve
democratic ends if it is left to the market
 Sourcing
• A reduction in the resources devoted to journalism means that those
who subsidize the media by providing sources for copy gain greater
leverage. Moreover, work by people like Alex Carey, John Stauber,
and Sheldon Rampton has helped us see how the public relations
industry has been able to manipulate press coverage of issues on behalf
of corporate America (Carey 1995; Stauber and Rampton 1995). This
industry understands how to utilize journalistic conventions to serve its
own ends. Studies of news sources reveal that a significant proportion
of news originates in public relations releases. There are, by one count,
20,000 more public relations agents working to doctor the news today
than there are journalists writing it (Dowie 1995: 3-4).
FAIR—coverage of the poor
• Nevertheless, the media landscape remains
dominated by centrist and conservative think
tanks. Centrists led the way with 45 percent of
think tank citations, while conservative or right-
leaning think tanks got 40 percent. These tallies
were a 6 percent decrease for the center and a 7
percent drop for the right. Progressives’ increased
share still only amounted to 16 percent of total
citations.
Newshour
Sources, 2005-2006
FAIR, Are You On the
Newshour Guestlist?
• A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS
Evening News and NBC Nightly News in
the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all
U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85
percent were male and, where party
affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were
Republican.
• Conducted for FAIR by the media analysis firm
Media Tenor, the study shows that the big three
nightly news shows rely heavily on society's most
powerful groups when they report the news of the
day. More than one in four sources were
politicians-- George W. Bush alone made up 9
percent of all sources-- versus a mere 3 percent for
all non-governmental advocacy groups, the
sources most likely to present an alternative view
to the government's.
 Flak
• The actions of political groups/ideological
voices that attack media content they find
unacceptable.
– Herman and Chomsky were most concerned
with right-oriented groups
• Accuracy in Media
• Media Research Center
 Liberal media watchdogs
• Media Matters
• Media Channel
• FAIR
 Anticommunist ideology
• “The fifth filter--anticommunist ideology--is
possibly weakened by the collapse of the Soviet
Union and global socialism, but this is easily
offset by the greater ideological force of the belief
in the 'miracle of the market' . . . There is now an
almost religious faith in the market, at least among
the elite, so that regardless of evidence, markets
are assumed to be benevolent and nonmarket
mechanisms are suspect. . . . Journalism has
internalized this ideology.”
 Terrorism
• Is fear of terrorism a new force that has
replaced anti-communism as a means to
control information in the United States?
 Gans’ News Values
• A competing view argues that news values
come mostly from the societal culture and
the professional norms of journalism
– Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News
 Ethnocentrism
• “Like the news of other countries, American
news values its own nation above all”
• “This ethnocentrism comes through most
explicitly in foreign news, which judges
other countries by the extent to which they
live up to or imitate American practices and
values”
• Clearest expression in war news
 Altruistic democracy
• Foreign news explicitly states that
democracy is better than dictatorship
• Domestic news focuses on “corruption,
conflict, protest, and bureaucratic
malfunctioning”
• “the news implies that politics should
follow a course based on the public interest
and public service”
 Responsible capitalism
• “an optimistic faith that in the good society,
businessmen and women will compete with
each other in order to create increased
prosperity for all, but that they will refrain
from unreasonable profits and gross
exploitation of workers or customers”
 Small-town pastoralism
• Preference for small towns over cities and
suburbs
• “Needless to say, the pastoral values
underlying the news are romantic; they
visualize rural and market towns as they
were imagined to have existed in the past”
– ‘Community’
• Two values: desirability of nature and
smallness per se
 Individualism
• ‘rugged individualists’
• “one of the most important enduring news
values is the preservation of the freedom of
the individual against the encroachments of
nation and society”
• “The ideal individual struggles successfully
against adversity and overcomes more
powerful forces.”
 Moderatism
• Discouragement of ‘excess or extremism’
• While often tolerated when exhibited by
individuals, “groups which exhibit what is
seen as extreme behavior are criticized in
the news through pejorative adjectives or a
satirical tone; in many spheres of human
activity, polar opposites are questioned and
moderate solutions are upheld.”
 Disorder
• Gans argues that news often focuses on
disorder
– Social disorder
– Moral disorder