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Who owns the media?

The Politics of the Media

Regulating media ownership

In this lecture, we will look at how governments have regulated the ownership of mass media, examining a number of different rationale for media ownership regulation

Session 7

Lecture

Media Ownership, Media Power

Ownership and power

Much of the discussion of media ownership is rooted in the notion that to have control of the media is to have the ability to influence public opinion, and as a result public policy.

Orson Welles again!

Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

Silvio Berlusconi

The Modern Mogul

https://www.diis.dk/node/540

Berlusconi served as Prime Minister of Italy between 1994-95, 2001-06 and 2008-11

The Age of Scarcity (Ellis, 2002)

Scarcity

John Ellis describes the media history of the early- and mid-20th Century as "The Age of Scarcity". Technological constraints limited the number of radio and TV channels that were available for use.

Broadcast Spectrum

Only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum is suitable for broadcasting, which forced governments to make choices about who could own the media

Broadcast Spectrum

A public monopoly

The British Broadcasting Company

Public ownership

  • Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company
  • Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company
  • Radio Communication Company
  • The British Thomson-Houston Company
  • The General Electric Company
  • Western Electric Company

1922

1927

Licensing private companies

Licensing

Under this model, ownership of the broadcast spectrum remains public, but it's use is licensed to private companies.

  • Private companies are allowed to make use of a public resource, for profit
  • In exchange, they are expected to act in the public interest

Ownership regulations

A system of licensing private companies often served to crowd out smaller media companies, who were less able to demonstrate that they served the public interest.

However, this system also helped the successful license holders to grow, working together to create unified networks.

New networks

NBC and ABC

Chain Broadcasting

In 1940, the FCC ruled that the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) had too great a share of the market, through its two national networks, NBC Red and NBC Blue.

NBC challenged the FCC decision, but lost in the Supreme Court. They were forced to sell NBC Blue, which became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).

Media concentration

Concentration

Regulations governing media ownership during the network era increasingly focused on the question of ownership concentration.

How can you prevent one person (or one company) from owning too much media?

Media Pluralism

Media Pluralism

Pluralism describes a worldview which prizes a diversity of voices and opinions. Karppinen (2013) argues that the pluralism is particularly prized by three groups of thinkers:

  • Liberal pluralists, who see pluralism as inherently valuable because it is rooted in individualism and self-determination
  • Advocates of Deliberative Democracy, who see pluralism as essential to maintaining a functioning public sphere, which is a core component of a healthy democracy
  • Radical pluralists, a more marginal perspective that prizes dissent as a key normative value

Public sphere vs. 'Marketplace of Ideas'

Greater emphasis on balance, questions of power, ensuring all groups are represented

Aims to maximise the number of different voices that participate

Positive freedom

Negative freedom

Pluralism in the network age

Network Pluralism

When commercial television was introduced in the UK, in 1955, strict limits were placed on the ownership of the individual licenses.

Not only did the license for each region have to go to a different company, there were also different companies responsible for weekday and weekend programs within each region.

Public service pluralism

Public sphere model

The traditional British system of television ownership regulation had a strong public service element

  • Licenses weren't sold to the highest bidder - they were awarded on the basis of quality
  • Licenses were highly conditional, and included a contractual commitment to PSB values
  • Strict limits were placed on the number of licenses you could hold
  • Licenses were restricted to UK companies

Pluralism in a digital world

Many of the debates around media ownership in the UK had taken place during the age of broadcast "duopoly", where there existed only three TV channels - BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV.

From the 1980s onwards, however, we saw an explosion in the number of media outlets

The Murdoch Empire

Global media ownership

Rupert Murdoch, and Australian media magnate, had bought The News of the World in 1968 and The Sun in 1969 and bought a major stake in London Weekend Television in 1970.

Murdoch pioneered a model of ownership that was both cross-media (newspapers and television) and international in nature. By the early 1980s he had major holdings in Australia, the UK and the USA.

Satellite TV

From the early 1980s onwards, it became possible to broadcast television programmes by satellite.

The shift from land-based transmitters to satellites undermined the power of national governments to control the ownership of the media.

From the late 1980s onwards, we see a shift towards more globalised models of media ownership, including Murdoch's Sky TV network.

Network of UK terrestrial TV transmitters

European broadcast satellite map

Digital proliferation

Proliferation

Digitization allows us to broadcast a much higher number of television channels using the same amount of broadcast spectrum.

This development takes place, in the late 1990s, just as the internet emerges as a new media technology.

This raises the question: do we need to worry about pluralism any more?

A regulatory shift

Digital pluralism

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s we see Conservative and Labour Governments pass successive Broadcasting Acts (in 1990, 1996 and 2003) that relax the rules on cross media-ownership. The 2003 act introduced major changes, including

  • The removal of the cap on total TV audience share
  • The elimination of the rule preventing a single company from owning more than one national radio station
  • Reduction in localism quotas
  • A greater emphasis on ensuring market competition

Current ITV network map

Global trend

This pattern of deregulation leading to greater concentration of cross-media ownership can be seen happening world-wide

Global trends

Online pluralism?

Part of the arguments in favour of relaxing media ownership rules is that we now have (online) media that are naturally pluralistic, because of their abundance.

But while the internet is made up of billions of individual websites, we increasingly access the internet through an ever-smaller number of large companies.

Can we trust these companies to guarantee future media pluralism?

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