Page 127 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

106 Critical investigations in political economy

services in the European Union, compared to 301 public ones. In her study of
Belgian television De Bens (2007) shows that increased channel competition led
to greater convergence rather than diversity in programme output, as do van der
Wurff and van Cuilenberg (2001) in the Netherlands.
Schudson (2005: 175) asserts that ‘it is not clear that [European] public and
private broadcasters differ systematically in the ways they present political news
and current affairs’. Certainly, public service media’s future in an increasingly
commercialised environment is uncertain and trends towards convergence
in news and other programming can be found, but significant differences remain
discernible. News and current affairs output is generally much higher on public than
private channels (Hardy 2008). Private channels show a much higher proportion of
non-national fiction (predominantly US) compared to public ones: in 2007, 76.7
per cent compared to 39.7 per cent (European Audiovisual Observatory 2009). Yet,
Schudson is right that rigid distinctions between ‘market’ and ‘state’ organisation, or
‘commercial’ and ‘private’, mask important differences within each category. In
Britain, a publicly funded BBC remains comparatively well resourced, maintaining
the largest share of viewing by households, but the principal satellite broadcaster,
BSkyB, was allowed to develop in a largely unregulated form, increasing com-
petitive pressures across the system. ITV, a commercially funded broadcaster
established with public service obligations, was auctioned, then permitted to
consolidate; two companies dominated what had previously been a regionally
owned service, then merged in 2004 to form ITV plc. Permitted ‘lighter touch’
regulation since 1990, ITV lobbied, with success, for its PSB obligations to be
reduced as it managed declining advertising revenues and audiences, and the
diminishing value of its analogue spectrum. These changes contributed to dis-
cernible shifts in programming, with reductions in local news, children’s and arts
programmes. ITV reduced its current affairs output by half in the decade to
1998, shifting what remained to predominantly domestic over foreign coverage,
so that by 2005 its international factual programming was the lowest of all UK
terrestrial broadcasters (Seymour and Barnett 2006; Curran et al. 2009).

Conclusion
Ownership matters for content, but neither media content nor behaviour can be
derived from an account of corporate and market structures alone. Instead, how
ownership matters requires careful analysis that includes micro studies of pro-
duction and work, texts, and people’s engagements with texts. Political economy
has been condemned for ‘reading off’ consequences for cultural production from
important, but rudimentary, categories like ‘public’ and ‘private’ ownership. But,
as the best work demonstrates, while media diversity remains an underlying
concern, researchers explore the complex, shifting patterns of marketisation and
their consequences (Thomas and Nain 2004).
Here, we need an analysis sensitive not only to the range but also the contra-
dictions of cultural production. One such is the commodification of anti-capitalism,