7
Media Ownership, Concentration, and Control
The Evolution of Debate
Introduction
The ownership and control debate in media research concerns very different issues from the classic microeconomics debate about corporate ownership and control (Mastrini and Becerra 2008, Sussman 2008). The thesis originally put forward by Berle and Means (1932) was that over the previous 50 years, the control of firms had come to lie with their executives rather than with their legally defined owners, namely their shareholders. However, their seemingly overwhelming data, from no less than 200 firms, turned out to be considerably flimsier than a first glance suggested, not least because of their failure to engage with the actual ascendancy of power blocs among shareholders, rather than aggregated figures. This particular question has considerable implications for assessing control over media, as we shall see.
One crucial issue in any such controversies is the definition of terms. In an essay published nearly three decades ago, Murdock (1982) strove to establish some clarity on this matter. He separated “economic” from “legal” ownership, that is, the power differential between being a member of an effective power bloc of share owners, as opposed to being one of a mass of petty shareholders. He further distinguished “allocative” from “operational” control, namely control over a corporation’s policy as distinct from control of its day-to-day implementation.
Media sociologists have mostly been interested in operational control, viewed from the perspectives of the sociology of organizations, and the sociology of occupations and professions (e.g., Berkowitz 1997, Part II). They have sometimes had the same straw man implicitly in their sights, namely a traditional leftist stick-figure who denounced the bosses’ media for conspiring to poison the workers’ minds, parroting the bosses’ diktats. It was fairly easy to show how far from subjective professional reality in the newsroom this picture lay, and how important were organizational routines and other social dynamics in the media production process. Studies of readers, listeners, and viewers complicated this picture still further.
Some writers, however, such as journalist Mark Hertsgaard in his study of the US press during the 1981–9 Reagan administration (Hertsgaard 1988), have produced a much more nuanced and systematically evidenced leftist account, far distanced from slogan-Marxism. Another contributor to the debate who sought to fuse Gramsci’s notion of hegemony with media organization routines was sociologist Todd Gitlin in his study of news media and the 1960s US student antiwar movement (Gitlin 2003/1981). Below we will review Herman and Chomsky’s distinctive propaganda model, which to some degree may be grouped under this heading.
In political economy and conventional economics media research, as corporate mergers have grown ever larger and ever more global, debate has focused particularly on the cultural and political implications of concentrated media ownership. It has polarized around three issues:
1 Is there sufficient evidence for there being concentrated media ownership?
2 Does a high concentration of media ownership risk, or even entail, a dangerous constriction of the interplay of perspectives and information on issues directly relevant to citizens of a democratic polity? This may be termed the “democracy-strangulation” hypothesis.
3 Does a high degree of concentrated media ownership risk, or even entail, a serious shrinkage of media product options available at competitive prices to media consumers? This may be termed the “consumer-frustration” hypothesis.
Conventional economics opinion, focusing strictly on price issues and reflecting the Chicago School’s traditional antitrust framework, disputes that there is media ownership concentration, and indeed points to the Internet as a newly liberating force in this regard. The deduction is that there is neither a threat to functioning democracy nor to consumer choice. Political economy opinion sounding the alarm on the danger to democracy, however, sometimes also sounds the alarm on the constriction of consumer choice as well.
Indeed, Entman and Wildman (1992) argued that these concerns were at least potentially compatible. Nonetheless, advocates of one position have quite frequently entered the lists against proponents of the other. Adding zest to the jousting, they have sometimes also attacked each other’s methodology. The tournament has been running for decades now, even longer than an English cricket match, so had the maiden princess’s hand been the prize, her funeral would surely have anticipated its conclusion.
Interest in this issue has recently been steadily growing around the world, as will be noted toward the close of this chapter, though given the current prominence of the USA in media research and also communication policy making, US debates have often taken center stage.1 The debates in the USA and Britain will mostly occupy us here.
There are many shoals and reefs to navigate in this debate. Let us illustrate from four brief examples, before plunging into the evolution of the debate.
1 A fascinating quirk in one US research strand has been how arguments emanating from the political Right have sought to snitch the Left’s clothes, arguing that established news media are a thought monopoly in the clutches of “East Coast liberals” (for sources and a critique, see Alterman 2003). Some high-ranking US military officials and other rightist commentators put this curiously hypergeographical and subsociological designation forward in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, blaming the news media for losing to the Vietnamese. Its ultimate pedigree went back to conservative traditionalist denunciations of East Coast “Rockefeller Republicans,” though more recently it resurfaced as the right-wing populist mantra of News Corp’s “fair and balanced” Fox Cable News. (Some conservative European commentators subsequently adapted it for local use.)
2 A case indicating the extreme and long-term risks of concentrated media ownership comes from Chile during the years of the People’s Unity coalition government (1970–3), led by elected president Salvador Allende. An early study by distinguished French media researcher Armand Mattelart showed how a highly concentrated mainstream press, radio, and television overwhelmingly denounced the socialist coalition, especially after its popular vote increased in the 1972 elections. Aided by a flood of CIA and corporate US money, which also sponsored a new rash of children’s comics and other media, and intervening ceaselessly to inflame hostile public opinion among Chile’s then-large class of small business owners, the media establishment energetically prepared the ground for the US-planned military coup that ushered in aerial bombing of the presidential palace, the killing of the president, and 16 years of military dictatorship, including tortures, assassinations, and thousands of “disappeared” citizens at the hands of the regime (Mattelart 1980/1973).
3 When the 2000 merger between America Online (AOL) and Time Warner was announced, many shuddered at the prospect of this behemoth, bringing print media, movies, television, Internet, and more together. Yet within two years, the company was in dire straits and soon changed its name from AOL TimeWarner back to TimeWarner. The corporate cultures involved were like oil and water. Furthermore, AOL’s 55 percent share of the company and its naming ahead of its partner had reflected the so-called “dotcom bubble” valuation that soon popped and wrecked AOL’s stock, and for a while, TimeWarner’s with it. High drama with little substance, it seemed, and all ultimately corrected by free market processes, the miraculous “invisible hand.”
4 Murdock (1982) also examines ownership as a function of corporate strategies in a market already deeply structured by imperfect competition. He argues vigorously that analyses of corporate performance which restrict themselves to interpreting the mindsets and priorities of top executives are deeply impoverished, absurdly dismissing the very dynamics to which these actors are responding and endeavoring to manage. It is not that their mindsets and priorities should in turn be dismissed, simply that focusing only on them represents a profound myopia. Since the 1970s, moreover, this market has dramatically globalized, thereby intensely complicating the parameters of analysis.
The issues have also become internationalized along a further alignment as a result of the current weight of US policy making on the world stage. Once the Reagan era shift toward deregulation and privatization gathered momentum with the break-up of AT&T, neoliberal forces in many countries proved eager advocates of the US government’s drive within the International Telecommunications Union conferences and the GATT/WTO trade negotiations. Oligopolistic media ownership grew apace, and quite often state telecommunications agencies privatized themselves as commercial monopolies. These telecommunications giants would in turn rapidly become crucial players in the Internet, wireless broadband, and other leading information and communication technologies (ICT) fields.
With these several contradictory cases in mind, let us now proceed to an account of the evolution of prominent contributions to debate, focusing principally on the evolution of debate on this topic within the USA, and to a lesser extent within Britain. The interconnections, or sometimes lack of them, between research and policy making will be an ongoing element in the discussion. This analysis will take up the bulk of this chapter.
Subsequently, there will be a shorter review of evidence and questions based in some other national media systems, thereby hopefully moving away from the assumption that real communication policy issues – and solutions – only surface in the USA and one of its global allies, and offering some comparative insight. Finally, there will be an attempt to sort through multiple empirical levels and foci and the discrete conceptual paradigms that we shall see surfacing as we proceed through the debate’s stages. This will be in order to establish some of the key vectors that demand fresh research on media ownership and control.
The prominent contributions to US and British debate selected for comment here will begin with the 1947 Hutchins Commission Report A Free and Responsible Press (Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947), a foundational statement within the USA concerning media concentration issues. From here we will turn to three researchers from the political Left, namely the late Herbert Schiller, whose research from 1969 onwards on international and US media issues carved out new and controversial dimensions (Schiller 1969, 1973, 1981, 1986, 1989, 1996), and British sociologists Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, whose essay on the political economy of British media had an enduring impact on the field (Murdock and Golding 1973). From there, we shall move to the late Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose book Technologies of Freedom set out an interpretation of newer ICTs that was highly influential in US communication policy formulation concerning media concentration (de Sola Pool 1983). Subsequently, we shall move back to two researchers from the political Left, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, whose book Manufacturing Consent set out a “propaganda” model of media firms that has attracted both multiple translations and routine critiques (Herman and Chomsky 1988). From there, we shall switch to Benjamin Compaine and Douglas Gomery’s 2000 edition of Who Owns The Media? (Compaine and Gomery 2000), a landmark volume by one neoclassical and one institutional economist. Thereafter, we shall examine the work of Scottish media economist Gillian Doyle, working within a neoclassical microeconomics and industrial sector economics paradigm on media concentration issues in Britain and some European countries (Doyle 2002). Finally, we will address the work of Ben Bagdikian, the doyen of serious journalistic research on media concentration in the USA (Bagdikian 2004), and the recent contribution of legal scholar C. Edwin Baker to debate on both the democracy-strangulation and the consumer-frustration issues (Baker 2007).
There have been many more contributions to the debate than these, and inclusion is bound to have some arbitrariness (and irritation for those not included). But as already indicated, this analysis of the evolution of debate seeks to be more politically comprehensive than many accounts succeed in providing (from across the political spectrum), but also seeks to acknowledge the several paradigms and variety of empirical foci and research methods that have characterized the arguments to date.
The Hutchins Commission Report (1947)
The full title of the report is important to note: A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books. While television was only then entering the “mass” communication firmament, and telephones were 50 years away from today’s 3G information packages, the intent was clearly to examine all media, not just print journalism. (Only the recording industry is omitted.) Having said that, however, the leitmotiv addresses news and newspapers, with the film industry primarily cited as an instance of a self-regulatory model, and commercial radio as an object lesson in the abdication of social responsibility.
The report was prepared over the years 1943–6, in other words, while the World War began to turn against the Axis powers, and then while labor’s pent-up postwar demand for better wages exploded in the strike wave of 1945–6, but while the Cold War was in its infancy. In terms of major legal cases affecting US media, its publication date was framed by the antitrust verdicts in the 1945 Associated Press vs. USA and the 1948 Paramount Pictures vs. USA cases, and in the separation of NBC’s Blue and Red networks into NBC and ABC. Within the USA, distrust of media concentration had a longer history than this, as Horwitz (2005, 181–2) correctly argues, but here it coincided with labor’s self-confidence and the widespread sense of starting a new era. The furious and unrelenting opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal policies led by two press magnates of the time, Robert McCormick through his Chicago Tribune, and Randolph Hearst through his media empire, were also much in the minds of those who worked with Hutchins on the report, as its text makes plain at points.
Robert Hutchins penned the report himself, and after summarizing the oligopolistic tendency in US media and their deteriorating performance as viewed by his commission members (Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947, 30–68), he crisply identified the source of the problem: “The major part of the nation’s press is large-scale enterprise, closely interlocked with the system of finance and industry; it will not without effort escape the natural bias of what it is” (1947, 129–30). He continued shortly thereafter, much in the vein of A. J. Liebling’s aphorism that the freedom of the press belongs to someone who owns one: “Concentration of power substitutes one controlling policy for many independent policies, lessens the number of major competitors, and renders less operative the claims of potential issuers [of opinion] who have no press” (1947, 130).
These formulations adumbrated a continuing theme in US debate concerning media ownership concentration: the threat to democracy from a purely commercially driven media system, and the threat to effective market competition. In this version, the former is given more weight than the latter.
The Commission’s principal answer to the threat posed by media oligopoly was self-regulation by the news business, along the lines of the film industry’s Hays Committee at that time, which “set standards of acceptability, not of responsibility; and the standards are minima, not goals of adequate or ideal performance” (Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947, 71).
Indeed, the report repeatedly warned (e.g., p. 80) – on the basis of what imminent risk is unclear – that media trusts were liable to be broken up as had other US corporations in the past, and should therefore move immediately toward a form of self-regulation. Journalists were also urged to professionalize, along the lines of medicine and law. The analytical implications of both these unsolicited forms of advice are voluntaristic, namely that acts of will are plausible within the industries to circumscribe media business practice in the directions urged by the Commission. Over 60 years later, we may legitimately wonder.
The influence of the Hutchins Report is hard to determine. Its “social responsibility” argument resurfaced in the Four Theories of the Press comparative study of national media systems (Siebert et al. 1956) as the updated US modification of the old free-market philosophy of nineteenth-century competitive capitalism. That book was widely read in succeeding decades, and may have influenced the Federal Communications Commission’s retention of limits on broadcast station ownership until the 1981–9 Reagan administration.
Nonetheless, it stands as an early landmark in the ownership concentration debate within the USA. Its methodology consisted, however, of what has become a familiar pattern since. First, the oligopolistic structure of media ownership is established (ch. 3). Then, a series of failures by commercial media to serve the public properly are listed and skewered (ch. 4). These failures mostly fall under two headings: poverty of information, and shallowness and triteness of entertainment. But they are coupled together. One of the standard critiques of this approach is its argument via accumulation of negative cases, on the ground that these have been purposively rather than randomly selected and therefore we have no means of assessing their representativeness.
Herbert Schiller: Worldwide US Media Monopoly? (1969–2000)
Schiller’s contribution to US and international media research was remarkable. Much more deeply appreciated by media scholars outside the USA, especially in the global south, than in his own country, his enlargement of the imaginable paradigms of media research within the USA itself stands as a significant achievement in the development of the field.
In his first book, Mass Communications and American Empire (Schiller 1992/1969), Schiller set out the basic vision that would inform all his later writings: the integration of all forms of communication technology with domestic corporate monopoly and the USA’s global imperial ambition. For media researchers happy with a more benign vision of the USA, this approach generated ire and denunciation among some, and dismissive contempt among others, defining it as “conspiratorial,” crude, and, of course, Marxist (i.e., economic reductionist). Even “elitist” in one critique, that claimed his denunciation of cultural imperialism implied “Third World” audiences for US cultural products had no minds of their own but were gullibly absorbing everything that Uncle Sam sent their way (e.g., Tomlinson 1991).
Schiller’s basic postulates regarding media concentration in the 1969 book read as follows:
A clutch of corporations (common carriers, manufacturers of electrical equipment, and a few network broadcasting companies) interlock and attempt to arbitrate among themselves, not always with complete success, the domestic communications scene … Mass communications are now a pillar of the emergent imperial society … The facilities and hardware of international information control are being grasped by a highly centralized communications complex, resident in the United States and largely unaccountable to its own population. (Schiller 1992/1969, 147–8)
His inclusion in a single framework of communications hardware for both broadcasting and information networks, corporate concentration, the state, the military’s overseas roles and US global strategy, vaulted clean over the conventional walls of US media scholarship at that time, which to this day is often content to luxuriate in its multiple miniscule foxholes.
For Hutchins, the global dimension had lain in the urgent need of the US public for accurate information about events and trends in the rest of the planet, a need he saw as very poorly met by leading media firms in the 1940s which had the resources to do so but did not (Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947: 99, 124, 129). Schiller’s vision by contrast pinpointed concentrated media ownership as enabling distorted, consumerist, and proimperial perspectives to hold sway at home and, increasingly, abroad, while developing ever more sophisticated point-to-point information applications to enable military control of trouble spots around the planet.
In his next book, The Mind Managers (Schiller 1973), written during the last years of the Nixon Administration, Schiller pursued these themes further:
most Americans are basically, though unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice information bind. Variety of opinion on foreign or domestic news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists in the media. This results essentially from the inherent identity of interests, material and ideological, of property-holders (in this case, the private owners of the communications media), and from the monopolistic character of the communications industry in general. (Schiller 1973, 19)
Schiller continues on the next page to argue that even where competition existed among the then three US TV networks, it resulted in mutual imitation rather than true diversity: “there is no significant qualitative difference” (Schiller 1973, 20, emphasis in original).
Schiller’s work in the later 1970s moved increasingly toward the critical analysis of new forms of information technology application (Schiller 1981, 1986, 1996), and away from mass media. In this, he was both following the comprehensive paradigm he had espoused from the start, but also striking out in directions most US media scholars had yet to pursue. He focused on corporate and imperial features of the computer era, probing the impact of concentrated ownership in this rapidly burgeoning sector. Today, of course, it is clear that ownership and control issues cannot possibly be effectively researched without engaging with the entire communication sector, even though, as we shall see, there are some knotty problems in doing so.
In Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (Schiller 1989), Schiller returned to public culture, education, and other realms dominated by concentrated corporate power. In chapter 7, he addressed one of the most common critiques of his work, namely his seemingly elitist dismissal of the public’s capacity to resist corporate media messages and assumptions. The argument is a crucial one: in the end, unless concentrated ownership of media and ICT firms has constraining and/or persuasive effects of a negative kind, why would that ownership pattern matter?
Schiller directed his critique primarily at the then-popular “active audience” school of analysis that had emerged out of work in Cultural Studies. He identified it as a mere resurgence of the “limited-effects” paradigm associated with Katz and Lazarsfeld’s influential 1955 study Personal Influence, in which media effects were argued always to be filtered through primary and secondary group face-to-face communication. He expressed particular irritation with researchers who drew upon Roland Barthes’s emphasis in his later work on the pleasurable dimensions of media entertainment, with the effect – in Schiller’s view – of displacing concern with its politically desensitizing impact.
However, his counterattack, despite legitimately noting how in extreme versions the “active audience” approach simply evacuated all power from media content and transferred it to audiences, still fell short of a full-scale rebuttal. His enduring mastery of witty formulations in disputing those with whom he disagreed was in full evidence, but belonged rather to the cheap shot than to convincing refutation: “The wide acceptance and the strength of the active-audience thesis reside partly in the theory’s capacity to give pleasure to its formulators and believers; much more pleasure, perhaps, than they insist television programs give their viewers” (Schiller 1989, 152).
He went on to list the “very elaborate, expensive, and sophisticated technology – polling and surveying” (153) that media industries deploy to respond, in a fast-changing and conflictual environment, to the public’s various moods and aspirations. But there his argument suddenly halts, as though, having demonstrated that large sums of money are spent on trying to make programming attractive, it follows that (1) the money must be intelligently spent, and (2) if intelligently spent, it automatically lassoes audiences back into the corporate corral.
In final support of his overall contention, Schiller cites: “the shadowy but many-tentacled disinformation industry – actually an integral part of the cultural industries, orchestrated by the political elite and the intelligence agencies since the end of World War II” (Schiller 1989, 154). If audience resistance were truly the norm, then, Schiller triumphantly demanded, where was the opposition to the Cold War anticommunism produced by this industry over two generations?
This was a remarkably weak reduction of multifaceted issues to a single binary: the disinformation industry and the US public. Is it really the case that the persistence of Cold War justifications for US aggression overseas can only be laid at this industry’s door, and not at the remarkable opportunities presented it by such events as the violent suppression of worker unrest in East Germany in 1953, in Poland in 1956 and 1970, in Hungary in 1956, in former Czechoslovakia in 1968, and not least in China’s Great Leap Forward years (1958–61) and the 1966–75 Cultural Revolution? To say nothing of the gulags, psychoprisons, and stifling of media and education freedom in the former USSR? These were never issues Schiller chose to critique, yet they hardly required a sophisticated US propaganda apparatus to make hay with them. On top of this, there are multiple other facets of the Cold War scenario he glided past in this argument, though there is no space to address them here.
Arguably, Schiller’s strength lay in his readiness to yoke together the numerous facets of communication that researchers too frequently insulate from each other, his acute sense of global dimensions of media, his readiness to confront power and exploitation issues at home and abroad, whereas many scholars prefer a quiet and uncontroversial life, and the extent to which he blew fresh air into an overly cozy set of academic paradigms in communication research. But his inability to make his argument stick without successfully engaging with reception issues is a serious weakness.
Murdock and Golding, “For a Political Economy of Mass Communications” (1973)
Not long after Schiller’s first book, Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, two British sociologists at Leicester University’s Centre for Mass Communication Research, published a major article in The Socialist Register, a yearbook of nondoctrinaire Marxist scholarship without party affiliation (Murdock and Golding 1973). The essay was very widely read and reprinted, blazing a new trail as well as setting a standard for ensuing media research within that broad paradigm. Their article not only addressed ownership and concentration issues, but also engaged with a range of market dynamics. The authors cautiously emphasized that their study was “a part of a work in progress … to suggest some directions [for future research]” (Murdock and Golding 1973, 205).
They began by insisting on the necessity of analyzing the media sector as a whole, not just by individual industry, and of linking media research to an understanding of macroeconomic processes, not least the roles of advertising. They also stressed the importance of both “the information and leisure facilities” that media produce (Murdock and Golding 1973, 207), avoiding the frequent segregation of news and entertainment in media research. Finally, their discussion contained careful analysis of a variety of empirical data and sources.
They approached concentrated media ownership historically, moving from early competitive capitalist media in the nineteenth century, through consolidation of ownership, to ownership concentration (or, in Marx’s Capital, from “concentration” to “centralization”). They produced detailed commentary on both horizontal and vertical integration indices in the UK, as well as on reciprocal shareholdings and interlocking directorships. They also took time to produce an overview of British media export patterns, and of foreign ownership of British media (which they argued was at that point often overstated). For those who assume Marxist scholarship consists merely of the repetition of a few credos, reading the essay would be a helpful education.
Their prime targets as consequences of the oligopolistic media ownership structure were both restriction of consumer choice in leisure and entertainment, and the consolidation of what they termed “the consensus” via information control. By “the consensus”, they meant the normal framework of news that (1) ignored, condemned, or politically trivialized strikes and other challenges from below; (2) defined the limits of debate as “those of the existing predominant political spectrum” (Murdock and Golding 1973, 229); (3) emphasized the adequacy of existing channels for grievance negotiation; (4) covered international news mostly within the confines of the former Empire; (5) promulgated the notion of Britain as a healthy meritocracy; and (6) projected as a given that the public’s and media firms’ values and priorities were one and the same (1973, 228–30).
They were, however, careful to insist that “the relationship between the material interests controlling the media and the cultural products they provide is a complex one, not explicable in terms of conspiracy or conscious intent. The part played by the media in cementing the consensus in capitalist society is only occasionally characterized by overt suppression or deliberate distortion” (Murdock and Golding 1973, 228).
But why, they demanded, do the social classes who are far from rich tolerate the sharp inequalities endemic in British society? Media research, they insist, has an important task to perform in uncovering why; but it is the routines of media production and distribution that consistently generate “the consensus,” not a series of diktats or interventions from above: “Most generally news must be entertainment; it is, like all media output, a commodity, and to survive in the market-place must be vociferously inoffensive in the desperate search for large audiences attractive to advertisers” (Murdock and Golding 1973, 230).
Thus their discussion of media ownership concentration combined its depiction with full acknowledgment of the intersecting role of market forces, of professional organization routines, and of the growing internationalization of media business. Their analysis of its impact on consumer choice and democracy’s vigor solely rests, however, upon a selection of empirical cases – a feature of many critical discussions of media oligopoly that has been a frequent target of more optimistic media researchers.
Implicit at times in their argument is an ambivalence regarding the public’s roles in absorbing media products rather than challenging them. We noted above how Schiller emphasized media firms’ “very elaborate, expensive, and sophisticated technology – polling and surveying” in his argument for media power. When Murdock and Golding wrote, similarly, of “the desperate search for large audiences attractive to advertisers,” the implication is that media firms, desperate or not, were being largely successful in doing so. But how so? Only further research into “the role of media in legitimating [the] system” (Murdock and Golding 1973, 228) is held likely to explain. Meanwhile, the “vociferous inoffensiveness” of the British media was likely to carry the day. Neither Schiller, nor Murdock and Golding in this essay, really get beyond the media structure to explaining how that structure interacts with other vectors to develop forms of impact. Murdock’s 1982 essay, already cited, similarly engages more successfully with dismissing clumsy attempts to characterize the processes than with actually dissecting them.
In the end, we are confronted with a continuing contradiction that reflects in its own way the contrasting paradigms of Marxist political economy and neoclassical economics, the former focusing on the relations of production and dismissing exchange processes as epiphenomenal, and the latter insisting that effective consumer demand, and that only, is the motor of production. We shall return to this theme below.
Ithiel de Sola Pool: Technologies of Freedom (1983)
In terms of marking the evolution of this debate, we should note here the initial 1979 edition of Benjamin Compaine’s Who Owns The Media? and its second 1982 edition, as well as the first edition of Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (1983). However, since there is a third edition of the Compaine book (Compaine and Gomery 2000), and there were five further updates of the Bagdikian book, culminating in The New Media Monopoly (Bagdikian 2004), we will address the latest versions below.
In the meantime, however, de Sola Pool’s study sharply changed the very terms of policy debate on concentrated ownership, even though his focus on then-new electronic communication technologies was effectively contemporaneous with Schiller’s. But Schiller never had (nor sought) the access to the machinery of national policy making enjoyed by de Sola Pool from his base in MIT’s elite political science department, which he founded. The support for writing Technologies of Freedom also came from the universities of Cambridge, Keio, and Tokyo, which helped further amplify his voice.
Although the book is crammed with historical, legal, and technological detail, it rests upon one extremely basic proposition which is also easy to grasp. This is that the profusion of communication channels opened up by newer technologies (cable, satellite, phone, and computer networks) meant that restrictions on concentrated press, broadcast, and film ownership were now pointless, in the USA or elsewhere. The restrictions had been put in place to secure a diversity of content and opinion via a reasonable multiplicity of ownership, but that had been on the assumption that market entry to major media was prohibitively costly. Freedom of mediated communication was now in the realm of the present.
De Sola Pool’s book was published after the US cable industry had been protesting for some years against restrictions favored by the broadcasters’ lobby, and three years after CNN had commercially pioneered the linkage of satellite and cable technologies. It also arrived on the stands one year after the Modified Final Judgment was announced, which led to the breakup of the AT&T/Western Electric/Bell Labs complex and ultimately to the 1996 Telecommunications Act that removed many media ownership restrictions (despite being envisaged by its leading congressional sponsors as freeing up communication access for the public). It fell between the second and third Computer Inquiries that dominated US policy in the network realm (Lentz 2008). Across-the-board deregulation was the order of the day in the Reagan Administration’s two terms. In 1986 Robert McChesney published his first essay, “Off-limits: an inquiry into the lack of debate over the ownership, structure, and control of the media in U.S. political life” (McChesney 2008, ch.15), a plaintive reflection of the reigning deregulatory consensus at that time.
Whatever the policy consequences and the opinion that may be held of them, de Sola Pool’s establishment of this wider range of communication technologies as vital components of the picture was a very important push – along with Schiller’s, though they would likely have jointly shuddered at being bracketed together – toward expanding the terms of debate in media studies and on the issues involved in media ownership. Issues of denial of access, of network neutrality, of “copyleft,” and of internet governance have reconfigured the media landscape, and today A. J. Liebling would have to make his point in sharply updated terms.
Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988/2002)
This book is best known for what today has become known as “the” propaganda model of media, but which its authors more modestly termed “a” propaganda model. In particular, their metaphor of the five “filters” that cleanse US media of potentially toxic content regarding US imperial operations has become a well-known, albeit sometimes ferociously derided, position in media research.
The five filters they identify are (1) size, ownership, and profit orientation of the media; (2) advertising as media’s financial base; (3) dominant news sources; (4) “flak”; (5) anticommunism (and antileftism across the board). The “filter” metaphor is interesting, suggesting an almost passive structure, without agency or at least initiative, an established complex of routinized interactions, whose tightly woven mesh blocks out most of the ideological pollutants that would otherwise poison the conservative US public sphere. To that extent, the metaphor shuns any conspiratorialism, although that accusation has been the chief rebuke leveled at the model over the years.
In fact, the model’s critics have sometimes turned it into a straw man, suggesting that Herman and Chomsky deny the very possibility of dissenting views surfacing in corporate media: five watertight seals rather than five filters, in other words. However, this betrays a failure to read their text: their conceptualization is akin to a statistical regression line of least squares, easily able to accommodate a patternless scatter of variances to the main drift of data.
The distinctive aspects of the propaganda model are first, its proposition that all five filters interrelate, and second, its inclusion of ideological vectors (filters 4 and 5), as well as political economic and structural dimensions (filters 1–3).
Indeed, the only “filter” that does not quite fit the image of a routinized system is “flak,” the process whose name is derived from the antiaircraft shells launched against incoming enemy aircraft in World War II, and which denotes the highly organized choruses of denunciation emanating from talk radio, letters to corporate media executives and advertisers, and lawsuits, whenever there is need to “contain deviations from the established line” in mainstream media (Herman and Chomsky 2002/1988, 28). The authors argue that this latter operation has greatly stepped up its intensity since the 1970s. It is, therefore, a form of discipline of media exercised from outside the internal workings of media firms themselves.
Overall, the propaganda model’s chorus of critics may be argued to be expending too much energy. The model is fundamentally focused on the world news available to US citizens through major US media. Consider what it is not: it is not a model claimed to apply to all national media systems, (though Winter 1998 has attempted to apply it to Canada); it is not a model claimed to apply to entertainment media, in hours spent far the largest element in media provision, (though Alford 2009 makes a case for extending it to Hollywood movies); and it is not a model that fits a considerable number of domestic political issues, outside of direct cover-ups of environmental or similar scandals. It is, then, a theory of the middle range, focused on foreign news reporting in the USA over the last 100 years, especially the last 50.
As such, it does not purport to be a global account. Its focus often seems similar to Schiller’s, namely to attempt to explain why the US public is normally so prepared to be told that it needs to go to war, to back colossal military budgets rather than universal health care, and to retain hundreds of military bases all over the planet.2 But while Schiller tended to point in general to secrecy and deliberate obfuscation, Herman and Chomsky endeavor to take the argument to the next step, dissecting the systemic imperatives they consider to be in place to noiselessly exclude challenging information.
However, providing an explanation for the inadequacies of US foreign news reporting is not, and cannot be, a substitute for a theory of media ownership and control across the board. If the propaganda model is to develop further, it will have to interlock plausibly with additional concepts and arguments that carry traction regarding the whole gamut of domestic US politics and news, and entertainment media. In order to retain validity, however, there is no need for it to carry traction regarding other national media systems.
Benjamin Compaine and Douglas Gomery, Who Owns The Media? (2000)
Benjamin Compaine, editor and then coeditor of this twice-updated study, comes at the issues from a substantially different perspective, that of the Chicago School’s long-established antitrust policy specialists. His coeditorship of the third edition with Douglas Gomery, film history professor and institutional economist, was clearly an attempt to offer readers alternating perspectives.
The authors provide a mass of empirical information on the US cultural industries, categorized by technology: newspapers, books, magazines, television, radio, recorded music, cinema, and (for the first time) online information industries.3 The three final chapters (chs 8–9) are devoted to the authors’ respective interpretations of media ownership issues, and a final chapter evaluating competition and concentration. They do not stretch as far as Murdock and Golding’s emphasis on the leisure industry at large, so theme parks, tourism, and videogames all fall outside their purview.
Compaine raises a number of worthwhile methodological issues not explicitly addressed in the earlier discussions reviewed here. He notes that a media firm or its divisions will be defined as “large” variously, depending upon the sphere of operation. For newspapers, it will be aggregate circulation; for magazines, circulation or revenue; for broadcasting, audience size; for cable TV, subscriber households; for books, films, and recorded music, industry revenue share; and for online services, percentage of monthly access and ad revenue (Compaine and Gomery 2000, 484).
Compaine also takes care to distinguish differing forms of ownership. He notes that many firms nominally owned by shareholders are in fact controlled by families or a small clutch of investors, often via the issue of different share categories (Compaine and Gomery 2000, 490). He also notes the considerable importance of institutional investors (e.g., giant pension funds) in the US media structure (2000, 498ff.). His conclusion regarding the implication of institutional investor media involvement, however, is distinctly upbeat: “so much of the media is owned, indirectly perhaps, but in the interest of tens of millions of working people” (494). “Interest,” however, is a term he fails to define. He does expatiate on the motivations of institutional investor owners, proposing that such agencies are concerned with long-term growth prospects of the stocks they buy, not with short-run controversies. Their likely response if averse to a type of media content would be, he insists, to sell off or not invest in the first place, “rather than try to influence the directions of management” (503).
It appears from this that Compaine’s sense of the term “control” restricts it to direct and detailed interventions over a sustained period, a fusion of the allocative and operational between which Murdock (1982) carefully distinguished. This also greatly simplifies the forms that influence may take. Those who know the market most certainly have to be keenly aware of its major and medium players, their trajectories and expectations. Feeding that knowledge into market tactics and strategy is a sine qua non of potential market success. Failure to do so could be catastrophic. Anticipation that an institutional investor might sell off its holding, or might be inclined to purchase significant holdings, is arguably a far more powerful discipline than individual interventions in day-to-day decisions.
What is lurking behind the discussion at this point is the question of the multiple meshes between the various cultural industries and the wider political economy, including the ideological climate at any one juncture. It is an issue we shall return to later, and we will suggest that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony may be the most helpful portal through which to enter upon an analysis of these meshes.
Compaine’s prime analytical tool for measuring media concentration is the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), an index developed in the Chicago School to measure industry concentration in general (Compaine and Gomery 2000, 558ff.). It proceeds by squaring the market share of each player in the industry, an approach which assumes that an expanding level of concentration will have increasingly noticeable exponential effects. A score of 1,800 or above is taken to indicate high concentration. Compaine argues that applying this index produces a more level-headed estimate of the degree of concentration than do dramatic news stories of “titanic” mergers. He further proposes that economic indices of media concentration, however subject to discussion and critique, nonetheless provide firmer estimates than public interest or First Amendment criteria, and can stand as a “reasonable surrogate measure” of those (2000, 558). Indeed, it is at the core of his argument that the degree and danger of concentrated media ownership in the USA has been greatly oversold and, as his coauthor suggests, left-wing critics see the mass media as evincing “an all-encompassing conspiracy by monopolists” (507).
Compaine’s arguments based on the HHI have been vigorously contested by Baker (see below). However, let us focus in conclusion on some of his other observations. He offers a brisk attack on the oft-proclaimed goal of media content diversity, noting that “greater diversity means … more low-brow shows, trash journalism, pandering politics … Diversity cuts all ways” (Compaine and Gomery 2000, 578).
This comment picks up on a theme in the background of the arguments by Schiller and Murdock and Golding, where quite often the critique is leveled that alternative viewpoints rarely surface into mainstream news media, and where more diversity is called for. What that diversity is never really gets defined, but readers may be left with the suspicion that there is a particular viewpoint they feel is missing, namely a prosocial justice, anti-imperial perspective, which this writer shares, but which is only one of many possible perspectives (including the views of radical rightists or religious zealots). The term often goes blissfully undefined, but Compaine’s polemic helps force the issue of definition.
Finally, Compaine voices a common position on media concentration in a globalizing era, namely that concentration should not only be evaluated in domestic terms: “US information providers are facing stiff competition in world markets … Artificially scaled down institutions will not be able to win their share of the world market” (Compaine and Gomery 2000, 577). This formulation suggests a trump card for media merger advocates: US economic survival in a mean and scary world, a vision of the planet often highly plausible to US Congressional legislators, less than a third of whom are said to own passports. The success of this argument would certainly establish the victory of simple economics over concern for robustly democratic politics – but Gomery for one would disagree: “We need … not reduce the criterion of what is valued as simply what is most efficient” (2000, 508).
Gillian Doyle, Media Ownership (2002)
Doyle’s contribution is definitely at the empirical end of the spectrum, focusing especially on evidence from a detailed set of interviews she carried out with broadcasting and press executives in nine major UK media groups (the actual number of interviews is not given in the book). She does not deploy the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index as a measure of media concentration, nor indeed does she discuss it. In the latter part of the book, she moves to consider regulation trends in the UK and Europe, which need not concern us here. Entirely absent from her narrative is the challenging assertiveness of the Hutchins Commission Report or the six editions of Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly.
Nonetheless, she concludes from British and other European evidence that the media “industry is particularly vulnerable to concentrations of monomedia ownership … and to concentrations of cross-media ownership” (Doyle 2002, 175). (She uses the term “monomedia ownership” synonymously with “horizontal integration.”) She diagnoses the corporate objective in these mergers as the opportunity to create economies of both scale and scope, together with what she terms the “critical mass effect,” namely, the opportunity to attract disproportionate shares of advertising revenues, to dominate suppliers, and a number of other advantages. She suggests that the UK experience indicates that vertical integration and diagonal integration (i.e., moving into entirely fresh media sectors) are often pursued for other objectives than pure economic efficiency, and indeed that as of her book’s publication date, UK cross-ownership of broadcast and print media had not demonstrated any clear economic advantages: “benefits tend to be of a corporate nature, primarily favouring the private interests of shareholders in specific media firms or, in some cases, managers of these firms” (176).
Despite Doyle’s caution in offering generalizations, which makes her conclusions sound almost whispered by contrast with some of our other contributors to the debate, her evidence arguably shores up a number of their contentions. While accepting as legitimate media firms’ motivations to improve their market performance, Doyle stands aloof from any automatic assumption that an unregulated market increases the welfare of media users. At the same time, there is a strain of hopefulness in her analysis – some of our contributors might say naïveté – that tends to contradict her main argument: “Although diverse ownership … will not necessarily guarantee diversity of media output, the existence of a diversity of media owners should contribute positively to pluralism … their rivalry will promote a culture of dissent which is healthy for democracy” and “society’s interest in achieving the most efficient possible usage of resources … is, or ought to be, the main concern for public policy” (28, 176, my emphases). The first case is a testable but dubious hypothesis, as Baker argues (see below). As to the second, one would indeed love it to be so. But Doyle’s analysis provides no carefully crafted reasons for accepting either proposition.
Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (1983–2004)
Bagdikian’s long concern with the shrinkage of independent journalistic voices in the USA, first as a journalist and later as dean of the Journalism School at the University of California, Berkeley, achieved a certain monumentalization in this work, culminating in The New Media Monopoly in 2004. For many who have never even read the book, his depiction in edition after edition of the gathering slide into monopoly concentration of media ownership in the USA – from 50 major owners in 1984 to five in 2004, by his reckoning – became pretty well taken for granted, and the stuff of Media Studies 101 on many campuses. It is impossible to know, but it is quite plausible that the level of US public concern over media concentration that surfaced most notably at the time of the 2003 Prometheus decision of the Third Court of Appeals, and in the string of large media reform conferences subsequently organized by Free Press (Klinenberg 2007, 221–44, 270–95), was cumulatively fed by reading Bagdikian’s successive editions, hearing about his analysis in courses, and by that progressively aggravated statistic.
Bagdikian was careful to dispel the conspiracist charge: “The narrow choices the dominant firms offer the country are not the result of a conspiracy. Dominant media members do not sit around a table parceling out market shares, prices, and products … [They] don’t need to. They share too many of the same methods and goals” (Bagdikian 2004, 7).
On the other hand, his rhetoric sometimes got away with him, as when he characterized the business press as simply corporate propaganda (2004, 159–61), a judgment which despite their broad agreement on media issues would have vitiated Herbert Schiller’s research methodology more or less entirely, relying as it did on reading the media trade and business press against the grain.
Bagdikian’s approach to analyzing media concentration, as befitted a professional journalist, was to plough through evidence from a variety of sources. He does not once mention the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, nor does he take up Doyle’s microeconomics and industry sector economics approach. Rather, he culls from a lifetime’s experience of following Wall Street trends and practices of the on-the-ground realities of, for example, boards of directors. This is a key issue for Bagdikian, who cites a 2003 Columbia Journalism Review study that found News Corp., Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner had 45 interlocking directors (Bagdikian 2004, 9). It would have been impossible in Bagdikian’s frame to subscribe to Compaine’s assumption that institutional investors represent the concerns of tens of millions of hard-working Americans, and equally implausible for him to echo Doyle’s more hopeful visions noted above.
In Bagdikian’s experience as journalist-observer, the critique of Berle and Means voiced above was unfounded:
It is not unusual for strong executives to select the directors who are supposed to monitor them … directors … are themselves top executives of other large firms … Some are … from the largest banks … who can facilitate credit and money for benefit of both their borrowing firm and their lending bank … Though the Big Five are multinational … family members of each firm’s president sit on the board. Or the directors are friends who are also corporate executives … It became clear during the boom, bust, and thievery by high officers during the 1990s and early twenty-first century that boards of directors of some of the largest corporations in the United States had little knowledge of or influence over their top executives. (Bagdikian 2004, 51, 53)
Bagdikian also moves away from strictly intracorporate analysis and directly relates the growing concentration of power in media to the steady rightward shift of the US political spectrum since the Reagan presidency of 1981–9 (2004, 11–17). For him the heroes are the two Roosevelts, who in his view both stood up to conglomerates, but whose legacy has been junked over the past 30 years. Even if his characterization of this shift is conceded, however, it is still the case that to pin prime responsibility on media is to beg a very large number of sociological, cultural, economic, and political questions.
In the clash of rhetorics – for muted social science discourse is also a rhetoric – it may sometimes be hard for readers to feel they are getting closer to the facts of the matter. It can even be refreshing to switch from one such rhetoric to the other, from the sauna to the ice-cold shower and back again, for we are dealing with crucial and also immensely intricate processes and institutions, and the busy play of argument is the only way we are likely to make progress.
Much of Bagdikian’s argument consists of sobering, sometimes unnerving, cases. It is a method often attacked by his critics, who argue that selective cases to support a particular position cannot constitute a representative sample of the ordinary flow of media output, and that only a form of random sampling of content can capture the effects, benign or malign, of concentrated media ownership. We would need to add though that the formulation of content categories is far from a random or bloodless procedure, so that this technical solution to the issue is unfortunately still caught up in the miseries of the flesh in an imperfect world. At the same time, there is no reason in principle why both forms of evidence and inquiry should not proceed apace so long as they are prepared to interact constructively.
C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (2007)
This is the third in a series of texts published by legal scholar Edwin Baker on the First Amendment, media, the market, and related issues. His argument is very thorough and detailed, and only its most salient features can be addressed here. Baker directly engages with Compaine’s arguments (Baker 2007, 54–87) and with other positivist sources such as Journalism Quarterly4 (23–6), that claim the extent and impact of media ownership concentration are routinely overhyped. For Baker the essence of the matter is the caliber of democracy we want, not consumer sovereignty: “any minor gains to media consumers would not diminish, would not affect, the central and arguably overriding reasons to oppose concentration: a more democratic distribution of communicative power within the public sphere and safeguards to the democratic system” (2007, 52–3).
Baker’s critique of the HHI, or more specifically Compaine’s use of it, targets Compaine’s methodological decision to apply the measure to the media industry as a whole rather than its component parts: “Any reflection shows that the media business as a whole is an incoherent characterization” (Baker 2007, 60). This is an interesting step in an ongoing argument, given Murdock and Golding’s early insistence that focus on the total media picture is crucial. As we have seen along the way, some who write on this subject address a single segment of the cultural industries, very often news to the exclusion of entertainment. We shall have reason to come back to this issue below.
Baker argues that Compaine’s own categories of media activity – content, delivery, and format – already signal that the types of economic activity involved in one category are not and cannot be equivalent to the types involved in one of the others. “Competition in one,” Baker underscores, “does not show that another is competitive” (Baker 2007, 60). The long dominance of the US distribution companies in film, broadcasting, and videogames, as contrasted with the content creators and exhibitors, is a case in point. Baker cites, too, local monopoly issues, where the same firm operates a small town’s only newspaper and only TV station – this scenario would barely register on Compaine’s industry-wide application of the HHI. Furthermore, the Chicago School’s antitrust framework on which Compaine draws so heavily, with its obsession concerning the power to set uncompetitive prices, would not register a situation in which one distribution firm had close to monopoly control over that circuit, or where there were multiple distribution companies but only one content creation company. (The latter case is rather implausible in the USA at the present time, but nonetheless illuminates the wooden character of Compaine’s HHI methodology.)
Compaine’s work, like de Sola Pool’s, has not remained enclosed in academia. The Federal Communications Commission’s construction of a media Diversity Index (DI) was founded upon his arguments and analyses. Yet, Baker argues (2007, 81–6), the empirical problems in applying the HHI and the DI are so evident that the most plausible explanation for the FCC’s choice is cynical, namely that an FCC with three presidentially appointed and ideologically committed conservative commissioners out of five simply wanted the legitimacy of positivist social science “findings” to underpin their prior commitment to lifting the barriers to further media concentration.
Baker’s discussion of the Internet is a marked advance over Compaine’s and Bagdikian’s, but of course he had the advantage of some extra crucial years in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s to observe the Internet as its formats and applications began to jell. He particularly takes aim at the rosy scenario that issues of pluralism and democracy, choice, and media concentration, are fast becoming moot as the plethora of opportunities opens up via the Internet. Certain key points of his follow.
1 The Internet principally distributes but does not automatically create as well, even though many individuals and civil society groups create content for distribution on it, albeit overshadowed by the huge media concerns that use it intensively for their commercial products and purposes. The blogosphere has attracted very widespread attention in this regard, but Baker is able to show how figures to date show the blogosphere audience to be even more concentrated than the newspaper audience (Baker 2007, 107–9). Put differently, the US public appears to be receiving ever more of its news information from ever fewer sources.
2 Lower advertising revenues in online journalism are already reducing employment levels for journalists and thereby leading to diminished news content creation. A few news services (Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc.) will become all the more dominant. Many US commercial news services have extremely inflated profit-margin expectations, often around 25 percent or higher, as contrasted with many other industrial sectors where the figure is usually below 10 percent, a factor which will interact negatively with the others mentioned.
3 While the Internet has dramatically altered barriers of geography, time, and cost to rapid access to information and to networking with others, “these distributive gains are limited. They hardly eliminate extreme audience concentration of audience attention on information provided by a few corporate entities … the Internet does not eliminate the force of the democratic distributive objection to media ownership concentration” (Baker 2007, 122).
International Dimensions and a Provisional Conclusion
To date we have focused on the evolution of debate and research in the USA and Britain. There is no space to engage in the same detail regarding developments in other nations, but inevitably they raise questions concerning our understanding of the issues.
Perhaps the most signal instance is that of Silvio Berlusconi, owner of Mediaset (Italy’s dominant commercial TV operator, with three national channels), and in his three stints to date as elected premier, ultimately in control of the three public TV channels as well, not to mention the rest of his extensive media holdings. Given his global reputation for corruption and reactionary political views, it has been all too tempting for many inside and outside Italy to define his repeated stints in power as the product of media monopoly, even as heralding a new “mediacracy” model for jaded democracies. Yet there is a plausible argument (Shin and Agnew 2008) that his and his cohorts’ successful reading and manipulation of regional discontents and economic insecurities were at least equally responsible, along with their enthusiastic borrowing of US attack-style political campaigning. Not to mention, as in so many other cases, the pathetic disarray of his opposition.
One might equally cite the long reign of Televisa in Mexico, which until the mid-1990s had been overwhelmingly the dominant TV channel, and which was often known as the Culture Ministry of the PRI governing party, in power from 1920 until the year 2000 (Fernández and Paxman 2000). The governing party had a number of other media control cards it played as well as its intimate relation with Televisa (Benavides 2000). Yet the slowly developing disruption of the old political carapace, reflected not only in the election of the first non-PRI president in 2000, but also in the rising influence of the leftist PRD party, arguably had much to do with the growth of what Hughes (2006) terms “civic journalism” in Mexico’s newsrooms over a considerable period of years.
The Russian Federation, after an initial period of chaotic media freedom in the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse, experienced a severe reversion (Downing 1996, ch. 6), especially beginning with the Putin years. There has been a quite extraordinary degree of centralized control over television, one which gives the governing elite virtually the same effective power on any issue that matters to it as had the old Soviet control system (Koltsova 2009). Assassinations of journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya – sadly neither the first nor the last – also served as an object lesson for cautious behavior. The press was under less scrutiny from the top, though that did not mean it was more responsible. Nonetheless, there were tentative signs at the time of writing that journalists working in magazines and online were flexing some independent muscles (Federman 2010).
There is every reason to think that some careful comparative studies of the Italian, Mexican, and Russian cases, reviewing their evolving trends over the past 10–20 years, would shed useful light on the media concentration issue. An excellent study of media concentration in nine Latin American countries has become available (Mastrini and Becerra 2006).
Studies are certainly emerging, from a variety of perspectives, evidently, in a number of locations, focused on individual countries (e.g., Iglesias González 2004, Sousa and Costa e Silva 2009, Fung 2007, Rolland 2008, House of Lords 2008), or more broadly on the European Union (e.g., Just 2009), where issues of media concentration policy have been intensively reviewed for a couple of decades now (e.g., Palzer and Hilger 2001). In Australia, Botswana, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Kenya, Poland, to name only a scattering, public debate over concentrated media ownership is active – not surprisingly, especially in Canada, where levels of media concentration have been very high for well over a decade at the time of writing.
The most salient feature of the evolution of the debate to date has been the considerable mixture of foci, concepts, and methodologies brought to bear on media ownership and its implications. Indeed, it has partly been a dialogue of the deaf for, as we have seen, only some of the participants have engaged with others, and when they have done so, it has sometimes been as much a joust as an ideal speech situation.
As just noted, with the exception of Mastrini and Becerra (2008), most sources have focused on a single country, so that the benefits of rigorous comparative analysis are yet to be seen. Some studies focus on a single industry, or even a single aspect of a single technology such as the daily press. Some focus on news across the board. Some entirely exclude entertainment media. Some insist that cultural industries, variously defined, must be viewed as an interrelated complex grounded in the political economy at large, including globally; but there are also arguments about appropriate methods in empirical analysis of media concentration on this model. Only in recent years have the changes opened up by Internet applications come to be included in analysis.
Some studies embrace the global dimensions of media concentration in certain countries (notably the USA), others prefer to skate safely past. Some engage with the state, though it is perceived variously as a more or less neutral arbitrator, a multisite of political struggle, or some version of “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie” (Marx). Some conceptualizations work from a purely or mostly consumer welfare model, others from the yardstick of which information and entertainment needs must be met to feed a vigorously democratic polity. Questions of impact on the public or audiences are very variously addressed, or sometimes not at all. These contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds are in law, journalism, neoclassical economics, institutional economics, political economy, sociology, and political science. Contributors are grouped fairly much across the political spectrum, from energetically neoliberal through different forms of political centrism through to the far left. There is advantage in these multiple perspectives, but if the debate is to take real shape as a direct series of exchanges, then models for more systematic future debate may be found in two recent articles by Winseck and Sparks.
Winseck (2008) engages with comparative data from the USA, Canada, and Mexico, and also data on the largest global media firms, and with both news and entertainment issues. His fundamental argument is (1) while channel diversity is clearly expanding, content source diversity is shrinking; (2) profit-level requirements by media firm owners are constantly rising, reducing budgets for creative projects and investigative journalism; and (3) litigation over digital property rights is rapidly enclosing access to new media opportunities. Winseck’s overview bypasses a number of the restricted focus and single national media system problems of some existing research. It is a fraction the length of Compaine and Gomery’s detailed study, but it sets out a series of helpful parameters on which much more detailed research can be built.
Sparks (2007) offers an ice-cold shower to those who assert without further ado that major media firms are globalizing and to that degree are well on the way to becoming planetarily dominant. He very rigorously analyzes available data, contrasts them with data concerning transnational corporate giants in other economic sectors, and urges strong skepticism in the face of sweeping claims about international media monoliths.
These two authors offer the kind of tough-minded critical approach that is now needed more than ever. As it happens, their identification is with the political Left – and yet it is also possible that they might disagree with some premises of each other’s argument. But while a standard critique from neoliberal academics is that only carefully selected scare stories are the stuff of critical research on media ownership and concentration, these two contributions are only indicative of many others from those quarters that clearly give the lie to that caricature.
The leitmotif of this debate’s evolution, even more than the consumer choice issue, has been the cultural and political implications of commercial, and especially oligopolistic, media ownership. Earlier I hinted that some of the issues might, at least for those who do not dismiss out of hand fears of an ever-shrinking democracy and the narrowing of debate, be usefully addressed through a Gramscian prism. Admittedly, Gramsci’s contribution to a narrowly defined political economy analysis was rather meager, and his rosy vision of the future role of communist parties in national development was framed in enforced isolation from the terrifying turn taken in Stalin’s USSR in December 1928. Nonetheless, there are elements in his key concept of egemonia (generally translated “hegemony”) which suggest a stronger resolution of an issue that has surfaced throughout this discussion.
A persistent issue in this debate has been the problematic linkage between media content and media control. Too often this has been framed in terms of specific immediate issues, very often of war or US forays overseas, and the task has been defined as explaining why large sections of the US public not only tolerate these but at times and for a period, passionately support them. Enter, for example, Herman and Chomsky’s five filters.
It is widely understood that Gramsci used his concept of egemonia to denote the taken-for-granted cultural frameworks that leave generally unchallenged the ruling circles’ authority to lead – allocative and operational control, to reprise terms used above. While members of the general public may and do retain skeptical perspectives regarding the system, only in crises do they cast aside their habitual acceptance of its inevitability, and egemonia fractures, for a shorter or longer period of time.
However, in practice, the temporal construction of egemonia has been loosely conceptualized, or not at all. Properly understood, however, egemonia denotes emergent and long-term processes. Capitalism, even in its modern, let alone its contemporary forms, emerged as dominant over two centuries, and the clusters of national and other cultural accretions that have grown up symbiotically with it – some elements rising to prominence, others sinking to the margins – have a similarly long and checkered history. Thus explaining how publics consent to and even enthusiastically endorse, at least for considerable periods, the policies and strategies of their governing circles, certainly requires explanations that account for media roles in the process. But those media are – to state the banal – elements within a larger inherited political economy and national cultures (plural). While the corporate dimension of this reality has been front and center of this chapter and this collection, it is the partly intentional but substantially intuitive meshing of long-standing cultural themes and tropes with the specifics of the immediate war, the immediate challenge, the immediate controversy, the immediate crisis, which arguably allow corporate media the traction they often enjoy.
Dieter Prokop once proposed the notion of “integrated spontaneity” to characterize the degree to which in cultural industries workers and agents develop new and flexible responses to fresh situations, but within preset frameworks. Their spontaneity is very real – but so are the given channels within which they express it (Prokop 1974).
By pulling these perspectives together, we may avoid a common logjam, created by trying to explain immediate realities only through other immediate realities. If the focus is strictly on current wars in South East Asia, or in Central America, or in the “Middle East,” or if the focus is on the empirical social networks, business, and leisure, of corporate media owners, then yes, these are all indubitably part of the picture. Nonetheless, the egemonia process, deeply rooted but constantly refreshed and adapting cultural frameworks over the long term, simultaneously provides the media mise-en-scène and exonerates media analysts from dutifully trying to pinpoint all the current information supposedly needed to validate the control–content linkage claim.
Elsewhere, for instance, I have argued that the familiar trope of encirclement in popular US art, the Hollywood Western, and many war movies, not only has its roots in English colonialist ideology transferred to North America and in wars against Native Americans, but also is a key element in explaining the US public’s ongoing readiness to tolerate, even endorse, foreign wars (Downing 2007). The issues of contemporary media control, culture, and power need to be set within this larger historical epic of power and control, not confined to the straitjacket of the contemporary.
Notes
1 See Robert McChesney’s and Benjamin Compaine’s articles on the Open Democracy website at http://www.opendemocracy.net (accessed September 29, 2010): McChesney, “Policing the thinkable,” 10/24/2001; Compaine, “The myths of encroaching media ownership,” 11/8/2001; McChesney, “Media corporations versus democracy: a response to Benjamin Compaine,” 11/14/2001; Compaine, “The workable real versus the absolutist ideal,” 11/22/2001; McChesney, “It’s a wrap? Why media matters to democracy,” 5/8/2002; Compaine, “A world without absolutes,” 5/8/2002.
2 An unacknowledged weakness among some of Herman and Chomsky’s critics, especially among media scholars, is that their rudimentary level of detailed information concerning global realities vitiates their capacity to grasp the nature of the problems in US foreign policy reporting that Herman and Chomsky attempt to unravel.
3 The velocity of change in this latter sphere is shown by the fact that neither Google nor cell phones figure in this discussion.
4 Now the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
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