Page 119 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

98 Critical investigations in political economy

value, evidence and evaluation (Compaine and Gomery 2000). Are media markets
(becoming more) concentrated? Does it matter? Is there greater corporate media
ownership? Does it matter who owns the media? Does media concentration and
integration restrict or enhance media content diversity? Do the activities of
transnational corporations enhance or threaten cultural diversity and creative
autonomy?

Concentration: evidence and analysis
There are standardised measures for market concentration, such as the HHI
index used in US anti-trust law. This measures concentration by squaring each firm’s
percentage market share and then adding up the squares. However, judgements
about the relevant market used for such calculations are rarely straightforward.
The economist Benjamin Compaine challenged Bagdikian’s account of increasing
media concentration to argue that the media industry as a whole was very
unconcentrated (with a HHI index of 268, where only scores of 1,000 or greater
indicate concentrated markets). Compaine (2001) acknowledges growing con-
centration in some sectors (newspapers) but argues that across the media as a
whole there has been an expansion of outlets. Noam (2009) examines the US
information sector, defined broadly to include over a hundred industries.
His analysis confirms increased concentration in the media sector following the
Telecommunications Act 1996. The revenue share of the largest five companies
increased from 13 per cent in 1984 to 29 per cent in 2004. Yet, Noam, like
Compaine, argues that the sector remains unconcentrated by the standard
measures of the US Antritrust regulations, with the exception of the Internet,
which Noam found to be highly concentrated. However, Baker (2007: 54–87)
identifies three main problems with the Chicago School antitrust approach
adopted by Compaine. First, the media as a whole are not the relevant market.
Delivery and content businesses should not be collapsed together since market
share in one says nothing about market power in the other. Different media
products are often not substitutable from the perspective of audiences or advertisers,
so issues of geographic supply and availability, subject matter and style are all
relevant in identifying what the relevant market to consider should be. Second,
economic criteria are not suitable surrogates for socio-political critieria, such as
political pluralism and democracy. Third, even more thoughtful approaches that
incorporate ‘socio-political’ criteria into antitrust analysis, such as the FCC’s
much criticised Diversity Index, focus on commodities without adequately
addressing ‘the noncommodified values actually at stake, namely the quality of
media serving participatory democracy’ (59). For Baker (2007: 16–17) ‘The
widest possible dispersal of media power reduces the risk of the abuse of com-
municative power in choosing or controlling the government’; ‘Any form of
participatory democracy needs media that provide serious presentation, and
then professional scrutiny, of alternative offerings’ (17). Baker (2007) criticises the
manner by which concentration in markets is calculated by Compaine and