Page 126 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Concentration and commercialisation 105

Turow 1997, 2011). Commercial markets fail to register the full range of people’s
preferences, which include non-market values and preferences (Baker 2002).
More fundamentally, commercial markets are considered an insufficient basis for
all media provision because the principles of market provision are inherently in
tension with principles of democratic participation, equality and universality
(Murdock 1992b). Here critical concerns move beyond competition or
concentration per se to address problems of commercialism.
In the US increasing corporate control has been associated with a shift to
hypercommercialism (McChesney 1999). Private media have always been
required to balance their civic or cultural purposes with the exigencies of economic
viability. Hypercommercialism refers to a shift whereby the drive to profits is
paramount, reshaping the priorities and operations of organisations. Such
hypercommercialism, critics argue, has undermined the relative ‘autonomy’ of
US journalists, weakening professional standards and eroding the divisions
between serious and entertainment news, and between editorial and advertising.
News, editorial quality and reporting are being undermined through cost cutting.
In entertainment media, hypercommercialism has involved increasing advertiser
integration and the production of programme genres like reality TV that are
cheap to produce and attract large aggregate audiences to secure advertising
finance (Croteau and Hoynes 2006; De Bens 2007).
We can understand the complex outcomes further by returning to consider
economic dynamics. For instance, Van Cuilenberg (2007) identifies five trends
reshaping media markets in Europe:

1 digitalisation, leading in particular to convergence between audiovisual and
telecommunications industries
2 exponential growth in media and information supply
3 diversification in media products, content, platforms and outlets
4 stagnation in media consumption (for media types except the Internet), and
5 increasing segmentation in audiences.

Two of the five trends especially favour competition in content (diversification in
supply and audience segmentation; involving the production of products for niche
markets and special interest consumer groups, and increased sales opportunities).
Accordingly, we might expect media diversity to increase with the growth of
communication channels, with technology promoting access to a greater range
of ideas. However, the other three trends – digitalisation, growing supply and
stagnating demand –‘stimulate media competition on price rather than on
content’ (42). Numerous empirical studies confirm that increasing media com-
petition does not automatically lead to greater content diversity. For European
scholars, particular attention has been given to the changes in broadcasting
whereby commercial channels and operators were encouraged to expand in
formerly highly regulated systems dominated by public service broadcasters. By
2008 there were 2,024 private TV channels broadcasting national or regional