Page 167 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 157
Marketing Research Territory groupings, or Arbitron’s Area of Dominant
Influence markets—provide potential advertisers with minutely detailed
information needed to determine the most efficient way of achieving the desired
coverage in specific market areas. In the ‘TV marketplace’ the advertiser ‘buys’
his viewers at anything between $2¼ per thousand ‘unassorted’ to $10½ a
thousand if they can be refined down to particular categories like young women,
teenagers and so on, who can be more valuable in that form to sellers of specific
products. The sums involved are vast: the average 30-second prime-time network
television announcement costs about $60,000 (the highest cost to date, for
commercials during the first television broadcast of the film Gone With the
Wind, was $130,000); even low-rated spots average about $45,000. In 1977,
commercial television had total revenues of $5.9 billion and profits of $1.4
billion (Broadcast Yearbook, 1979).
The collective financial and social pressures under which American
broadcasting operates affect programme policy and production in profound
ways. Epstein (1975) has documented in considerable detail how, in the struggle
to attain a competitive rating for its failing news programme, ABC completely
changed not just the format, style and pace of the broadcast but the political
perspective which it encapsulated, in order to meet the ‘Middle America’
predilections of its affiliated station managers. While the price of advertising
time during the news broadcast did rise dramatically (by more than 100 per cent)
this, concludes Epstein, was achieved only at the cost of a fundamental change in
the journalistic product.

The political dimension of constraint
Probably the most crucial of all the relationships which bind any media
organization to its society is that between the organization and the government.
In essence this relationship is characterized by the links of both media and
government to the electorate, whose support is necessary to both sets of
institution. In Britain, it is particularly important in mediating the commercial
imperative which dominates the US media system. Thus, whether one chooses to
describe the British broadcast media as ‘industrial and commercial
organizations’ (Golding, 1974)—stressing the predominantly market situation in
which they compete—or as ‘two state-owned networks’ (Beadle, 1963)—
emphasizing the failure of the pressure for decentralization of control—the
broadcasting system remains essentially unitary in character.
From time to time all broadcasting organizations undergo review by the state
in order to obtain re-licensing or re-chartering. These periods of scrutiny have
profound effects on all internal decision making over programmes, since the
organizations tend to construct their programme schedules in ways designed to
gain the political support of various sections of the community. Since the BBC was
established fifty years ago, it has been subjected to at least twelve major reviews
which have affected its internal interests. Smith (1973) describes the history of