Page 118 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Concentration and commercialisation 97

Warner Music still accounted for 48 per cent of global music revenue in 2009
(IBISWorld 2010, cited in Arsenault 2012: 108).

PART 2: CRITICAL ISSUES AND DEBATES

There are complex patterns of convergence and deconvergence, integration and
fragmentation, yet concentration of media ownership remains a strong feature
and a pervasive critical issue, but why? For one prominent CPE scholar the
critique of concentration is misplaced, along with presumptions of control.
The CPE tradition, argues Garnham (2011: 41) tells a ‘drearily familiar’ story: ‘The
capitalist mass media are increasingly concentrated on a global scale under the
control of corporations and media moguls leading to a decline in cultural
diversity, the suppression of progressive political views, and the destruction of
local cultures’. Garnham traces the concerns about corporate media control to
presumptions in the 1960s that this contributed to a dominant, pro-capitalist
ideology. He highlights various problems. There was a lack of evidence that
capitalism required a dominant ideology or that dominant elites shared one. The
notion of control ‘in the sense of being able to produce planned outcomes
through the employment of subordinate economic agents was very tenuous’
(Garnham 2011: 45). The media concentration thesis failed to recognise that:

as capitalist economies have grown, the associated lowering of the costs of
material goods linked to the release of higher proportions of household
expenditure for the satisfaction of immaterial wants, including cultural pro-
ducts and services, and the expansion of the commercial cultural sector to
meet resulting demand, has clearly widened cultural diversity on both a
national and international scale even if it continues to be unevenly spread.
(Garnham 2011: 45)

Garnham thus rejects the critique of concentration he contributed to advancing
and, claiming Marx’s thesis of the dialectical nature of capitalist development,
contents himself that capitalism ‘produces the very culturally enriched and educated
workers and citizens necessary for its own supercession’ (Garnham 2011: 46). In his
earlier work Garnham was less sanguine. Media markets tend towards con-
centration because economies of scale and scope favour large organisations;
‘their economic survival under market conditions depends upon the exploitation
of monopolies’ (Garnham 2000: 58). Given this, regulation is needed in order to
control or break up monopolies and prevent firms dominating market power
and, for liberal and radical perspectives, halt media power abuses.
The trends outlined above help to explain tendencies towards corporate
growth, concentration and the accumulation of market power that underlies
critical arguments about media power. Yet the core political economic critique
of media concentration has been challenged on numerous matters of fact and