Page 106 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Concentration and commercialisation 85

market and regulatory conditions. As one report puts it (Council of Europe
2004: 10):

Media firms move into other countries when their home market is saturated,
to attain critical mass, to pool resources and to share risks. In several cases
firms have turned to other countries because the competition authorities
refused to let them go ahead with a national merger for fear that it would
create a dominant position or a monopoly.

The largest US firms expanded operations significantly from the 1980s out of a
well-developed market. In Europe, regional and international expansion had
occurred as firms rebuilt after 1945 but the main phase of internationalisation
began later, in the 1990s.

Global media companies

Following a sustained phase of merger activity since 1986, a handful of major
global multimedia companies now dominate media production. These firms
have responded to the dynamics and imperatives of capitalist accumulation and
economic, institutional and market conditions, forcing them to become larger,
integrated and increasingly global. Bagdikian, in his preface to the 1997 edition
of The Media Monopoly, noted:

Only fifteen years ago, it was possible to cite specific corporations dominant
in one communications medium, with only a minority of those corporations
similarly dominant in a second medium.
(1997: xxv)

Herman and McChesney (1997: 104) describe a global media market dominated by
‘ten or so vertically integrated media conglomerates’. By 2002 the top tier com-
prised nine companies: General Electric (owner of NBC), AT&T/Liberty Media,
Disney, Time Warner (then ‘AOL Time Warner’), Sony, News Corporation,
Viacom, Vivendi, Bertelsmann. Between them, these firms owned ‘[m]ajor US
film studios; US television networks; 80–85 per cent of the global music market;
the majority of satellite broadcasting world-wide; all or part of a majority of
cable broadcasting systems; a significant percentage of book publishing and
commercial magazine publishing; commercial cable TV; European terrestrial
television’ (McChesney 2002: 151). The list of ‘top tier’ global media giants has
been reduced in recent accounts to seven (Castells 2009; Hesmondhalgh 2013:
193). The list changes too as lines of demarcation blur between media content-
producing firms and other digital giants dominant in communication services but
with little content production. Where the traditional telecommunications and IT
firms on the one hand and hardware firms (Samsung) on the other tended to be
treated separately from media and cultural (content) industries, converged firms