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172 Communication Theory & Research
As for the press, so for other media. The diversification and internationalization
of companies like Murdoch’s News International, Sony of Japan, Bertelsmann in
Germany, and so on, create a network of control over what one ad man once
called the ‘syndication of experience’.
The major alternative to this corporate monolith has traditionally been the public
service broadcasters. The model of the BBC, claiming to provide education, enter-
tainment and information as a public service at high professional standards in the
public interest, has informed the statutory basis and occupational ideologies of
most national broadcasting systems, both across Europe and further afield.
Indeed commercial systems, like the ITV network in this country, have them-
selves readily assumed the mantle of public service broadcasting as enthusiasti-
cally, and sometimes more so, than quasi-public bodies such as the BBC.
The emergence of new technologies providing for a major diversification
of delivery systems, via cable and satellite especially, together with the rapidly ris-
ing cost of maintaining national public broadcasting systems without substantial
advertising support, have conspired to threaten the very fabric of the public
service broadcasting systems in many European countries. Where buttressed by
governments already ideologically inclined to commercialization and privatization,
as in the UK, the move away from the public service model has been rapid. [...]
It is clear then, that, at the very least, the public space represented by a national
broadcasting system dedicated to providing extensive, prominent and diverse
cultural resources for an informed citizenry is uncertain to survive current
scrutiny.
But if the media are moving into a new market-driven era in which informa-
tion is available, but at a price, what of the social processes which lay behind this
shift? Sociologists have watched and described, with varying language and
conclusions, two twin processes over the last couple of decades – greater inequality
and growing centralization.
The widening gap between those with the disposable income enabling them
to enjoy the new playthings of ‘the information society’, and those left uncom-
fortably juggling the consuming realities of survival in hard times, is the most
fundamental social change in recent years. Between 1979 and 1989 the poorest
tenth of the population saw a drop in their real living standards of 6 percent
compared to a rise of 46 percent for the top tenth. The poorest third of society are
becoming increasingly detached from the precarious rise in living standards
enjoyed by those above them. By the end of the 1980s over 11 million people
(1 in 5 of the population) were living on or below the poverty line, a rise of roughly
50 percent in a decade (Oppenheim, 1993: 29).
This mundane arithmetic of domestic economy places huge barriers between
large sections of the community and the turnstiles through which the information
paradise is gained. For those with the spending power to enjoy the communica-
tions bounty, the future beckons enticingly. For others, such goods and services
remain luxuries displaced by the pressing needs of food, clothing and shelter.
But the second social change we have explored is what, in a number of writ-
ings, I have called the ‘centripetal society’ – a society in which all things spin
increasingly towards the centre. After all, that simple couplet of ‘free market and
strong state’ has been our conceptual lodestone for some little while. [...]