Page 149 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 139
argument points to the ways in which media material celebrates the openness and
fairness of the present system and denigrates oppositional ideas and movements.
More sophisticated versions focus on the less direct inhibitions to the
development of critical consciousness. They stress the way the popular media
misrepresent structural inequalities and evoke the communalities of consumerism,
community and nationality; the way they fragment and disconnect the major
areas of social experience by counterposing production against consumption,
work against leisure; the way they displace power from the economic to the
political sphere, from property ownership to administration; and the way that
structural inequalities are transformed into personal differences. And a certain
amount of supporting evidence for these arguments can be found in a number of
recent content studies, including those conducted by researchers who reject
Marxist models of the media.
Having outlined these general trends in popular media output however,
instrumentalists are faced with the problem of explaining them and it is at this point
that they turn to the evidence on interlocks between media corporations and
other key sectors of capital. The aim here is to produce a sociometric map of
capitalism on the assumption that shared patterns of economic and social life
produce a coincidence of basic interests and result in ‘a cluster of common
ideological positions and perspectives’ (Miliband, 1977, p. 69).
Once again, recent research lends considerable support to this general
argument. As I have shown elsewhere (Murdock, 1979 and 1980), the ownership
pattern noted earlier for commercial television—of conglomeration coupled with
growing shareholding links with other leading corporations—is increasingly
characteristic of the press and the other major media sectors. Moreover, these
direct ownership connections with leading capitalist interests are considerably
extended by interlocking directorships. In 1978, for example, nine out of the top
ten British communications concerns had directorial links with at least one of
Britain’s top 250 industrial corporations, and six had links with a company in the
top twenty. In addition, seven out of the ten had boardroom connections with
leading insurance companies, five had links with major merchant banks, and six
shared directors with other significant banks and discount houses. These business
links are further consolidated by communalities in social life. In 1978, for example,
all fifteen of the top media corporations had board members who belonged to
one or more of the élite London clubs. Moreover, the clubs most frequently
favoured by directors of media corporations—Whites, Pratts, the Beefsteak, the
Garrick, Carlton and Brooks’s—were also among the most popular with the
directors of leading financial institutions, and to a lesser extent, business
corporations (see Whitley, 1973 and Wakeford et al., 1974). As well as offering
further points of contact between the major media concerns and other leading
corporations, club memberships provide channels for informal exchange
between the leading media enterprises themselves. The older-established firms
are particularly well connected through the club network. In 1978, for example,
S. Pearson and Son was linked by club membership to twelve of the other top