Page 56 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

RETHINKING THE MEDIA AS A PUBLIC SPHERE 45

broadcasting has functioned not as an open forum of public debate but as
an agency privileging dominant discourses and sustaining dominant
power groups in Britain. This perspective will doubtless be more fully
developed, in due course, in relation to broadcasting history.
There are perhaps two general observations to be derived from this
review. The first is that alternative liberal and radical conceptions of the
role of media are present, to a lesser or greater extent, in histories of the
British media. History thus puts flesh on the skeletal outlines that were
sketched earlier.
Second, Habermas’s analysis—though stimulating and thought-
provoking—is deeply flawed. It is based on contrasting a golden era
that never existed with an equally misleading representation of present
times as a dystopia. The contrast does not survive empirical historical
scrutiny.

THE THIRD ROUTE

The two main approaches to organizing the media—the free-market
liberal and collectivist-statist strategies—each have drawbacks. Yet they
can be combined in ways that minimize their defects and capitalize on
their strengths.
One central deficiency of the market approach is that it produces an
unrepresentative media system. The high level of capitalization in most
sectors of the modern media restricts market entry to powerful capitalist
interests. It also shields them from competition save from other
capitalist entrepreneurs and large corporations. In Britain, for example,
the establishment costs of a new national daily are at least £20 million;
for a local cable TV station around £40 million; for a substantial
commercial TV regional franchise up to £50 million; and for a satellite
TV service over £500 million. Only in marginal sectors of the media—
low-circulation magazines, local free sheets and local community radio
stations—are entry costs still relatively modest.
The second, related problem is that most media markets are distorted
due to the large economies of scale that are an especially pronounced
feature of the communications industries. A small number of ‘majors’
have long dominated the film and music production industries. 44
Newspaper chains overshadow the press in most liberal democracies. 45
Only in television has state action in some countries restricted the
development of private monopoly power, but even in this sector things
are changing fast. Government privatization policies and the commercial