Many of the pieces in this debate provided case studies in some aspect of local media ownership, while three (Hoynes, Hesmondhalgh, and Elstein) took on the broad question of ownership, content, and governance. All the pieces advanced the debate.
What struck me most was how many of the commentaries seemed to express general sympathy for McChesney. Yet ultimately they made far more points that supported my basic thesis that radical change of media structures are not a high priority. In much of the democratic world the media is far less concentrated than critic Ben Bagdikian would have us believe, despite the high visibility mergers. One problem with the McChesney argument was captured by Silvio Waisbord: Even when property is highly concentrated, the media is not a vast anti-democratic wasteland. There are spaces for conflict and change.
In this closing piece I will reinforce three central points for which I believe this debate has provided some support.
First, concentration of media ownership is less than what it seems to be after taking into account larger economies, a global context, and the increase in the types of media, e.g., the Internet, DBS.
Second, reliance on the marketplace is the best of any alternatives that have been advanced.
Finally, globalization has its rewards for culture and democracy.
Competition in media ownership
David Elstein, like Waisbord, understands that The global media game is far more complex than a simple David and Goliath story. Implicit here is that media concentration is something of a myth. At the very least the degree of concentration is ambiguous. I have provided empirical evidence in my previous articles and my book, Who Owns the Media? At best there are more players reaching more people than at any time in human history.
In striving for simplicity (or in furthering unspoken political agendas), writers time and again fall into the knee-jerk acceptance of the Word as handed down by Bagdikian in Media Monopoly. It is much more taxing and complex to wade through what I immodestly hold is a far more exhaustive and nuanced analysis of media ownership in my own book, Who Owns the Media? (Indeed, I find a certain irony that articles on media ownership in the mainstream media are far more likely to cite Media Monopoly than my book. One would expect, if media owners are self-serving, that they would find more ammunition in my approach when dealing with the subject. Such a content analysis actually supports my contention that corporate owners take a hands-off attitude toward their journalists, allowing them to indulge in their own biases.)
Televisions impact is what garners much of the attention of media analysts. Yet there can be no doubt that in the video sphere, for almost everyone, there has been a substantial, by several orders of magnitude, increase in content, variety and ownership. From two state owned channels in many European countries or three and a half channels in the US there are now often hundreds of video options via terrestrial, cable and satellite transmission, not to mention the off line variety of video cassettes and DVDs.
Book and magazine publishing continues to be robust. Consolidation is balanced by relatively low start-up costs. Radio broadcasting has consolidated in the US but from a level that kept the industry artificially fragmented by regulatory limits. Given the nine thousand or so radio stations in the US, even amassing three or four hundred stations under one owner is hardly concentration. Nor is it much of a threat to civic discourse should a rock station and Country & Western format station consolidate in a market under a single owner.
Indeed, competition, while often desirable, is not an end in itself. William Hoynes is correct when he reminds us, Studies of the music and newspaper industries have shown that competitive media are often no more diverse than media in oligopolistic markets. Even relatively competitive media industries may often produce content that does little to serve a democratic citizenry.
On the other hand, consolidation, while often viewed as a negative, may have considerable social benefits. It took the deep pockets and the resources to cross finance losses from profitable operations for News Corp to create and sustain FOX, a long-desired fourth broadcast network in the US. The proposed merger of Hughes DirecTV and Echostars Dish Network, while it might reduce competition for the three per cent of US households that do not have the option of subscribing to cable, will bolster competition to the ninety-seven per cent of the households that heretofore had the local cable as their only option for a full-service (including local TV stations) broadband video service.
Competition and concentration are relative points on a dynamic continuum.
The marketplace model vs. anything else
I have been labeled in this debate as a free marketer. While that may have come across in contrast to McChesneys extremist views, my promotion of the marketplace is also relative.
David Hesmondhalgh reduced the marketplace to simply seeing it as servants of audiences via the profit system. I would hold that this does and should apply to the bulk of the media structure. Most of the media provides entertainment, information, escape, inspiration, education. The incentive to serve these needs is that some audience, sometimes only a very small audience, will compensate the creator, producer and distributor of that content for their time, materials and effort, with a small amount left over to cover costs for those products or services which fail to find an audience. At the end of the day or year the reward for this effort is sometimes, though not always, a small (compared to total funds collected) profit.
However, even so-called public service media are servants of audiences even if not for profit. A public service broadcaster, for example, needs to make decisions of what audience to serve and which it will not serve, as neither budgets nor airtime are ever unlimited. This can be called editorial judgment. But that is another name for someones estimate of what some audience should or should not have access to.
Whereas a website may be practical to promote the interests of a scattered audience for, say, manuscripts created by left-handed Sanskrit writers, it is unlikely that the BBC will devote three months of effort and an hour of programming on a subject that might find an audience of eighteen. So while profit in the accounting sense may not be the correct term, profit in the context that there is an expectation that the time and expense of creating the content will be less than the aggregate value to some audience. So audience and benefit are ultimately what is behind content.
But there is a greater rationale in my support of a marketplace template for the media. It is that any other overall structure seems to have greater flaws. Worst is any government regulation that applies only to the media. Governments that giveth can also taketh even democratic ones. Until 1981, TV licenses in the US had to be renewed every three years. The intent, of course, was to assure that local broadcasters adhered to their obligations for public service and local programming and other regulatory guidelines. At renewal time any individual or group could challenge the incumbent and there would be competitive hearings.
In reality challengers rarely won. But in 1972, as The Washington Post continued to unearth embarrassing information about the Watergate burglary, Richard Nixons White House put the heat on two television stations that the Post owned in Florida. Please check for me when any of the Washington Post television station licenses come up for renewal, one senior official wrote to another. Two licenses were eventually challenged by well-financed groups made up of some friends of the President. The Post felt the heat. In these cases they got their license renewals, but it cost them millions in legal and associated fees. And it may have sent a message to other station owners who might have been less willing to absorb the expense.
Along these lines, Barbara Gatzen wrote about the strong links between the party [the ruling LDP in Japan] and the Ministry which controls media licenses. NHK, one of the worlds most autonomous public broadcasting networks, she wrote, depends on the Diet to provide its budget. The LDP has used unofficial means of limiting NHKs journalistic freedom.
For this reason, government regulations that apply to media institutions are best limited to those which generally apply equally to all enterprises, such as labor laws, antitrust (based on guidelines of economic concentration), or taxation. Once laws, regulation (or worse, money) single out the media, the slope to raised eyebrow control actual or perceived can be insidious.
Publicly funded media are subject to their own potential for abuse. And as creatures of government, the effects may be more damaging than in the private sector. Public service media cannot replace the marketplace structure. Should it exist it must be as one piece of the competitive landscape. This is not the forum for a discussion of other forms of media ownership or control, such as press councils. All, including private enterprise, have their pluses and minuses. All-market and all-state media are not the only options, concluded Ildiko Kaposi in her contribution.
It is my conclusion, nevertheless, from decades of study of both the academic literature and real world behavior, that a general structure based in marketplace forces, supplemented in the niches by regulation and alternative players (such as government or foundation funded entities) work best for diversity, for serving the public and for democratic content.
Think global, drink local
A colleague was at a bar in Californias Silicon Valley where the wait staff wore shirts with the slogan on the back Think Global, Drink Local. The bars sloganeering is on to something. My guess is that the shirts were made in China, brokered by an agent in Hong Kong, but silk screened to order in California. It symbolized an efficient merger of global and local. Some things (custom silk screening, sitting in a café drinking a beer) are best done or need to be done locally. Other processes benefit all if done globally.
The upside of globalized media ownership may be both financial and substantive. Referring to Latin America, Silvio Waisbord recognized that globalized corporations were replacing not some golden age of diversified ownership and unbound media democracy but family-owned, partisan media. The families were motivated by personal convictions and political ambitions. The global corporations embark on anti-corruption journalism based on marketing calculations and the professional aspirations of reporters.
As a result, while some news organizations curry favor with the powerful, others produce challenging reporting. Waisbord recognizes that the choices are not good and evil, but better than or worse than. His observation about Latin America holds globally: There is no solid evidence that the latest round of mergers has substantially changed content. For those dissatisfied with what we have now, such an outcome may not be good enough. But for those who quake at the mention of media merger, it suggests that who owns the media matters less than they might like to believe.
Globalization does not necessarily mean homogenization, neither politically nor culturally. Beer is popular worldwide. But Guinness Stout could never replace Budweiser as a top selling beer in the US because it is not attuned to the American palate. News Corps newspapers in the UK look and read differently from those in the US. Euro Disney and Disney Tokyo both feature the Mouse, but each have blended into the local cultural scheme and are different still from Disney World. MTV in Brazil has a recognizable format shared with MTV elsewhere, but it plays its own mix of music and videos, as determined by local producers. Whether locally owned or globally owned, most media like politics are inherently local (to a city, country or region). The two can and do co-exist.
I found it somewhat ironic that in the midst of articles which seemed to hold that national voices should be preferred over global ones, Aidan White noted that journalists in Quebec were angered by the imposition of a corporate voice almost half a continent distant . This implies that unless management was in the same town as the journalists it could not serve (who, the journalists?) well. So even national ownership is suspect?
But beyond the possibility that global owners may be no more or less good/bad than national or local owners, there is something to be said for a global media perspective. The Internet provides two thousand five hundred radio stations at a click, hundreds of newspapers in an instant. In the two hundred channel cable age, in the sixty thousand book titles/per year age (US), in short, in an era of increased fractionalization of media outlets, there may be something to be said for some unifying elements.
If a small number of global media companies can cross-fertilize the best of what audiences want and need, this may be useful as an opposing force to entropy. A magazine concept that works well for a Bertelsmann subsidiary in Germany may be introduced to the US. The possibility of TV households worldwide having access to CNN International can provide some sense of global sharing amidst the still vibrant local media. And it is not all one way, i.e., US to everyone else. CNN in the US has patched in live coverage from the UKs ITN. We have been able to get some taste of what the Arab viewers in the Middle East are seeing when we get satellite feeds from Al-Jazeera.
Ive never seen a pancake so thin it didnt have two sides
I hypothesize that the reason that McChesney is probably more fun to read than my own article, even for me, is that True Believers in any absolute can spin out the best yarns. As a student I was a big fan of a writer of biting protest songs named Tom Lehrer. He sang wonderfully sarcastic songs, such as an early pro-environment ditty called Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. But then he disappeared from sight. Some years ago a columnist tracked him down and asked him why he stopped writing. His reply was that in his youth he saw issues in black and white. As he got older he recognized more shades of gray. He concluded with something like: Its hard to write biting satire when you have to say On the one hand, but on the other hand.
And so it is with media ownership. There is nothing Pollyanna-ish with holding that in democracies, overall, the marketplace approach serves its diverse constituencies rather well culturally and politically. Not everywhere equally. But most people, most of the time. With minimal public overhead. As David Elstein says, we should beware of glib pronouncements on the relentless forward march of the media moguls.
There are major problems facing the world today. Media ownership should be well down on the list. Lets move on to openDemocracys next debate.
