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Large corporations and the control of the
communications industries

GRAHAM MURDOCK

INTRODUCTION
The communications industries produce peculiar commodities. At one level they
are goods and services like any others: cans of fruit, automobiles or insurance.
But they are also something more. By providing accounts of the contemporary
world and images of the ‘good life’, they play a pivotal role in shaping social
consciousness, and it is this ‘special relationship’ between economic and cultural
power that has made the issue of their control a continuing focus of academic
and political concern. Ever since the jointstock company or corporation emerged
as the dominant form of mass media enterprise in the latter part of the last
century, questions about the nature of and limits to corporate power have
occupied a key place in debates about the control of modern communications.
This paper sets out to review the major strands in this debate and to evaluate the
contending positions in the light of recent research. Although most of my
examples and illustrations will be drawn from contemporary work on Britain, the
general arguments are applicable to all advanced capitalist economies.

CORPORATE CONTROL IN THE CONGLOMERATE ERA

The potential reach and power of the leading media corporations is greater now
than at any time in the past, due to two interlinked movements in the structure of
the communications industries—concentration and conglomeration.
As I have shown elsewhere (Murdock and Golding, 1977) production in the
major British mass media markets is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a
few large companies. In central sectors such as daily and Sunday newspapers,
paperback books, records, and commercial television programming, two-thirds
or more of the total audience are reading, hearing or looking at material produced
by the top five firms in that sector. Other markets, notably cinema exhibition and
women’s and children’s magazines are even more concentrated, with the lion’s
share of sales going to the top two companies in each. Even areas such as local
weekly newspapers where production has traditionally been highly dispersed are
now showing a significant increase in concentration. In 1947 for example, the