Page 185 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Local Political Communication

societies of the twenty-first century should not easily give up on this spe-
cific means of political communication: “The need for locally oriented
media to confront oligopolistic and transnational cultural industries will
become more urgent in the coming years. Non-commercial and locally
oriented media as social and cultural tools – and not as mass media in
local disguise – can play an important role in strengthening local iden-
tity and self-respect. In the dialectic nexus of internationalization and
localization, local media with a community orientation along with a
trans-local perspective supported with international program exchange
networks can contribute to both local self-awareness and international
understanding” (Prehn 1992, 266).

LOCAL MEDIA IN THE 1990S
Local media publics in Western democracies have undergone substan-
tial changes in the 1990s, primarily induced by economic restructuring
and forces of social change that hit cities and regions. We witnessed
the attraction of transnational corporations into the local media sec-
tor, leading to concentration processes not just in large metropolitan
markets but also far beyond them. Second, not just vertical but also
horizontal concentration processes took place in which the traditional
division of labor between different kinds of electronic and print media
increasingly gave way to more cost-effective forms of cooperation among
these media. At the same time, the local media spectrum widened, with
new Internet-based media being introduced into the local public and
movement actors producing alternative community media sources. In
the absence of comparative analyses, the developments that are outlined
in this chapter are based on available case studies and remain somewhat
sketchy.

Media Concentration
Economic concentration processes are most noticeable on the print
media market. The trend toward single-market newspapers is increasing
in all Western democracies. In the Netherlands, most cities today have
only one daily newspaper (Denters 2000, 83). In Great Britain, com-
petition among urban evening dailies ended as early as 1964 with the
monopolization of the last competitive market in Manchester (Franklin

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