Page 120 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Concentration and commercialisation 99

others, while Kunz (2007) provides a detailed account of growing concentration
in the US film and television industries.
Concentration is one indicator of the ability of firms to exercise market power.
However, it is the manner in which market power, and media power, can be
exercised that matters, not merely the number operating in and across media
markets. A commonly found pattern, consistent with the capitalist development
of cultural industries is for the ‘profit seeking sector’ to be dominated by large
conglomerates, alongside which are clustered small and medium enterprise
(SME) creative industries, a two-tiered market structure in which there is a limited
oligopoly of firms controlling between 75 and 90 per cent of revenue/market
share together with a number of smaller firms on the other tier fighting for a
small percentage of the remaining market share (Albarran 2004). Such market
analysis cannot account for the cultural vitality and diversity within these markets,
nor indeed offer any detailed account of content itself.
Analysts continue to disagree over the appropriate measures to identify con-
centration (Iosifides 1997; Baker 2007; Ofcom 2012), with media convergence
making assessments of media plurality ever more challenging. How market size
and share relate to influence needs investigation across the various ways in which
firms’ behaviour influences market actors, suppliers and traders, regulators,
politicians, publics and consumers. Market dominance generally entails the
ability to influence favourable terms and influence the behaviour of other busi-
nesses and the options for consumers, unless regulations intervene or significant
market changes occur.

Concentration and control

Media concentration is perceived as a problem because it limits, or threatens to
limit, the plurality of sources of information and opinion. Radical scholars go
further in arguing that market pressures favour a right-wing tending media,
limiting access to voices from the left. The arguments then shift to a variety of
considerations: whether ownership influences editorial content and diversity,
whether concentration may have beneficial effects in enabling firms to remain
profitable or to invest cost-savings to improve quality, and arguments that such
concentration matters less as alternative sources of supply increase and con-
sumption patterns change. Radical functionalists have traditionally argued that
media reinforce elite power because they are owned by the wealthy and powerful.
Leftist concern about interventionist owners is misplaced, it is countered,
because control resides with executives and senior managers. They operate to
serve the business objectives of the company but do not act in politically moti-
vated or partisan ways as media owners like the UK ‘press barons’ Lords
Northcliffe and Beaverbrook did in the 1920s (Curran and Seaton 2010). The
potential for owners to influence content has diminished significantly, it is
claimed, due to the rise of modern corporations in which ownership is widely
dispersed with control exercised mainly by expert managers, and with media