Page 57 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

46 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

exploitation of the new TV industries are promoting the development of
dominant TV companies. 46
The character of media oligopoly has also changed. Dominant
producer companies in different sectors of the media have merged to
produce multi-media conglomerates. These have expanded on a global
scale, and in many cases have become linked through cross-ownership
47
to core sectors of finance and industrial capital. Their growth poses a
problem for two reasons. It has increased the power of an
unrepresentative capitalist elite, symbolized by Murdoch and
Berlusconi, to control the distribution of information and ideas on an
unprecedented scale. Second, their rise has been accompanied by an
erosion of the competitive processes which in a limited but still
important way made them publicly accountable.
The third major defect of the market system is that it tends to lead to
a narrowing in the ideological and cultural diversity of the media. This
is not merely the by-product of market distortions— restricted market
entry and global concentration of ownership— but is built into the
‘normal’ processes of media markets. Intense competition between a
limited number of producers encourages common denominator
provision for the mass market. This is particularly true of TV due to the
peculiarities of the medium. Television can achieve higher sales in
terms of larger ratings at minimum extra cost, which reinforces the
economic advantages of targeting the middle market. Some TV
companies are also funded entirely by advertising, which is less
sensitive to intensities of consumer preference than direct consumer
payments. This also encourages the production of bland programmes
with a universal appeal to an undifferentiated, mass audience. 48
In short, the free-market approach has three central flaws. It excludes
broad social interests from participating in the control of the main
media. It leads to concentration of media ownership. And it promotes
cultural uniformity, particularly in TV output. These shortcomings
should be viewed in terms of what a democratic society should require
of its media. At the very least, an adequate media system should enable
the full range of political and economic interests to be represented in the
public domain, and find expression in popular fiction. A market-based
media system, in modern conditions, is incapable of delivering this.
The advantage of the collectivist approach is that it can enable interests
with limited financial resource—which are excluded in a market-driven
system—to have a share in the control of the media. It can also prevent
control of the media from falling into the hands of an unrepresentative,