Page 100 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Chapter 4

Concentration, conglomeration,
commercialisation

Introduction
If advocates of free markets are correct, where commercial media predominate
we should discover a diversity of media firms catering to the widest range of
interests, demand should drive supply, and competition amongst suppliers should
benefit consumers with falling prices, greater innovation and increasing quality.
Instead, in many instances, a growing multiplicity of outlets coexists with
monopolisation in services and lack of diversity in sources. Instead of power over
supply being in the hands of sovereign consumers it is concentrated within media
conglomerates and advertisers. Critical scholars contest the suitability of relying on
market forces alone to provide media services, but they also examine how far patterns
of concentrated media ownership, and firms’ efforts to minimise competition,
depart from free-market nostrums.
Media ownership and control are probably the most readily identified concerns
of critical political economy. Yet this is a heavily contested and congested area of
enquiry. At its broadest are efforts to understand the changing nature of media
businesses. For critical scholars this analytical task is linked to considerations of
consequences: how do different ways of organising media influence what kinds of
content are provided and how services are used? How do organisational
arrangements affect communication services and environments? Such questions are
relevant both for a ‘mass media’ paradigm of content supply and a contemporary
paradigm of communication services and resources.
Investigating media ownership was routinely disparaged by mainstream media
scholars and culturalists in the 1990s, regarded as a tired, predictable and ana-
chronistic topic. Attitudes have since shifted somewhat when understanding the
business of contemporary communications became unavoidable for serious
enquiry, and as global media corporations continued to grow years after their
predicted extinction in a new Internet era. Yet, there is nothing rigid or static
about media business strategies and growth, about the complex shifts in market
power as media industries adapt to change, or about the patterns of concentration,
convergence and deconvergence that arise. Nor are the issues of ownership any
less salient in today’s multimedia-rich media systems. A starting point is to
explore and explain the coexistence of restrictions along media supply chains