Page 121 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

100 Critical investigations in political economy

workers relatively free to act within the limits of accepted business practice
(Demers and Merskin 2000; Tunstall 1996).
Later accounts of post-Fordism (Aglietta 1979; Piore and Sabel 1984) com-
plemented the ‘managerial revolution’ thesis highlighting the rise of decentralised
networking within and between firms and increasing use of flexible, contract
labour. In an influential essay Murdock (1982) challenged the thesis of the
managerial revolution to argue that while managers exercised operational control,
media owners shaped the strategic organisation of resources, exercising ‘allocative’
control. How precisely ‘control’ operates across different kinds of organisations
remains contested and underexamined, with some calling for the presumptions of
owner and corporate control to be abandoned (McNair 2006; Garnham 2011).
Large media firms, it is argued, are owned by a mass of investors to whom managing
executives are ultimately accountable; control has passed from single owners to
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networks of shareholders. Power, accordingly, is dispersed widely. Noam (2009)
found the media industries to be owned mainly by institutional investors, rising as a
promotion from 40 per cent in 1984 to 57 per cent in 2008. The largest investors
had stakes in a multitude of firms, yet investors rarely emulate the forms of editorial
interference associated with interventionist owners and media ‘barons’.
Ownership matters because owners influence firms’ behaviour. So argues
Baker (2007: 90–91), rejecting a ‘market determination’ thesis that the behaviour
of enterprises is dictated by competitive market structures. On the contrary,
‘monopolistic competition allows the owner to chose between profit maximization,
ideology, product quality, and greater – even if unprofitable – circulation’ (Baker
2007: 96). There are important objections to relying on anecdotal, impres-
sionistic accounts of owner control, or in generalising from the behaviour of
‘media moguls’. Critiques of media ownership need to be carefully delineated.
Yet the CPE tradition has continued to amass evidence and develop a theoretically
rich analysis of problems of corporate media ownership. Several authors following
Murdock (1982) have revealed the persistence of forms of centralised control,
with many of the leading media conglomerates remaining owner controlled:
Rupert Murdoch and family at News Corporation, Sumner Redstone at
Viacom, and Berlusconi, formerly Italy’s longest serving Prime Minister, with
a 38 per cent stake in Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial broadcaster, as well as
publishing and other interests. In Canada eleven of the top twelve media firms
are owner controlled and this pattern predominates in Latin America, Australia
and elsewhere (Winseck 2008: 44; Mastrini and Becerra 2012).
The extent to which dispersal of ownership through institutional investors safe-
guards media also requires careful examination. Bettig and Hall (2012) show how
tobacco firmsusedtheir positionsasinvestors andboard members, as well as adver-
tisers, to influence how smoking was represented in the US media during the deva-
stating promotions of the twentieth century, and before the same process was pursued
in markets such as Eastern Europe and Asia. Even if such instrumental interventions
on editorial remain rare, major investors usually exercise ‘allocative’ control through
their representation on management boards, influencing firms’ strategic decisions.