Page 125 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 115
leading five publishers of national newspapers accounted for only 8 per cent of
the weekly market. By 1976, their share had risen to 25 per cent (Curran, 1979, p.
64). As well as illustrating the growth of concentration within particular media
sectors, this example also points to the other major source of the large
corporations’ increasing control over the communications industries—
conglomeration.
Conglomeration is a product of the merger movement which has been
accelerating since the mid 1950s. In the ten years between 1957 and 1968 for
example, over a third (38 per cent) of all the companies quoted on the London
Stock Exchange disappeared through mergers and acquisitions (Hannah, 1974).
Since then the pace has quickened still further. In 1967–8 for example, there
were 1709 mergers among manufacturing and commercial companies. By 1972–
3 the figure had risen to 2415 (Ministry of Prices, 1978, p. 16). As well as
reinforcing the dominance of the leading firms in most major sectors, this ‘take-
over boom’ (as it is popularly known) has produced a distinctly new kind of
corporation—the conglomerate—with significant stakes in a range of different
markets, which may or may not be related to one another.
S.Pearson and Son provides a good example of one of the two main types of
conglomerates. Although the firm was already highly diversified by the end of the
Second World War with sizeable interests in ceramics, oil, banking and local
newspapers, in common with most conglomerates it has acquired its major stakes
in communications since the mid 1950s. In 1957, the Group bought The
Financial Times from the Eyre family and took a substantial minority holding in
Lord Illiffe’s press company (BPM Holdings) which is currently the country’s
fifth largest publishers of provincial evening papers. Throughout the 1950s and
1960s they also made a series of smaller acquisitions to strengthen their stake in
the weekly and bi-weekly market, and by 1974 they had a total of 96 titles (treble
the number they had in 1941) making them far and away the most important
force in the sector. In the late 1960s the company branched out into book
publishing with the acquisition of Longman in 1968 and the merger with the
country’s leading paperback house, Penguin Books, in 1970. More recently, they
have diversified into the general area of leisure provision with the purchase of
Madame Tussauds, and the London Planetarium in 1977 and Warwick Castle the
following year. Pearson is an example of a general conglomerate whose interests
in communications (although significant for the relevant media sectors) are
secondary to its interests in other areas of industry and commerce. General
conglomerates have recently been most active in Britain in the field of
newspaper publishing with Trafalgar House’s acquisition of the Beaverbrook
Group, and Lonrho’s purchase of The Observer and takeover of Scottish and
Universal Investments with its important Scottish press interests.
Communications conglomerates on the other hand, operate mainly or solely
within the media and leisure industries, using the profits from their original
operating base to buy into other sectors. In Britain the profits from commercial
television have provided a particularly important source of finance for this kind