The fundamental disagreement I have with the analysis presented by Benjamin Compaine is that he assigns a wondrous role to the marketplace to deliver the range of media products that people want, and dismisses as 'cultural elitists' those who are concerned about the impact the corporate media can have on news journalism.
The mass of evidence suggests that the remorseless push for profits has had a devastating impact on the range and quality of journalism in the USA. In the Columbia Journalism Review Neil Hickey describes the development of a diminished and deracinated type of journalism - life-style stories, trivia, scandal, celebrity gossip, sensational crime, sex in high places and tabloidism at the expense of serious news in a cynical effort to maximize audience. In depth news and foreign coverage has been systematically cut, and media organisations have abandoned the mandate to balance 'what people want' with 'what they need to know'. How much worse will it be as media companies face economic recession?
In the UK 2001, one of the main news providers, Independent Television News (ITN), is to 'downgrade' politics in its news bulletins and put showbusiness and human interest stories at the core. Steve Anderson, controller of news at ITN announces unashamedly: ' Showbusiness matters, if a good Madonna story comes along we will do it. Too much attention has been paid to the trivia of Westminster.'
Of course there are differences between the media systems in the USA and the UK . In the USA attention is focussed on the Federal Communications Commission and its Chairman, Michael Powell. On 13 September, 2001, the FCC voted unanimously to review long-standing rules that limit the number of customers one cable television company can control, and prohibit ownership of a newspaper and television station in the same city. The FCC chairmans view is that the rules are antiquated because technologies such as satellite, cable and the Internet give Americans a multitude of choices to receive entertainment and information.
Unlike the USA where PBS has a tiny audience share and is increasingly marginal the UK retains a strong commitment to the concept of public service broadcasting embodied in the BBC. But the issue of media ownership and the activities of global media groups go right to the heart of whether public service broadcasting will survive beyond the next decade in the UK. One of the arguments pursued relentlessly by commercial media groups is a variant of Powells: that media ownership rules are obsolete when there are so many channels and platforms to receive hundreds of channels. It follows that there is no justification for public service broadcasting when there is such plenitude.
Irvin Stelzer, an adviser to Rupert Murdoch and director of regulatory policy studies at the Hudson Institute in America, argued recently that only where commercial services fail to deliver certain types of programmes is there a role for public service broadcasting. Well he would wouldnt he? But similar arguments have been made recently in the UK by Michael Jackson the outgoing chief executive of channel 4 and former BBC executive. In his evidence to the Commons committee on Culture media and Sport in February 2001 Jackson argued that the BBC should confine itself to dealing with market failure. It remains to be seen if his yet to be chosen successor will follow suit, but delineating the public service remit as merely moping up the media provision not catered for by the market would inevitably relegate such a broadcaster to the margins - just like public broadcasting in the USA. Such a policy solution in the UK would make eminent commercial sense, leading to the expansion of commercial media as the BBC contracts, but bodes ill for quality news journalism.
Traditionally the core principle of media policy globally has been that no single political party or private owner should be allowed a dominant position and thereby threaten media diversity. In practice, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Rupert Murdoch in the UK have both demonstrably breached this principle. In the United Kingdom we await a consultation document on media ownership that will form the platform for a new Broadcasting Act in 2003. The Act, unless drastically amended in its final form, will in my view have a similar impact on media ownership in the UK to the 1996 Telecommunications Act in the USA limits on cross-media ownership will be weakened and a spate of media mergers begin. These will not be on the same scale as those in the USA UK media groups are in a different league to Viacom, Disney and AOL Time Warner but there will be an impact.
As we await the Labour government's consultation exercise on cross-media ownership, the Financial Times of 19 November, comments, 'The UK government aims to abolish media ownership laws designed to rein in Rupert Murdoch, introducing instead a regulatory framework 'which has nobody particular in mind'.' It continues 'the government intends to use the consultation process to come up with a combination of specific media ownership laws and regulatory powers to prevent the build-up of excessive influence.' The notion of excessive influence is of course vague, but surely a situation where the owner of a global media group has easy access to a government's leader, is able to promote his views through his newspapers to nearly 40% of the English population, and owns the dominant digital satellite platform BSkyB might be considered to be just that.
Certainly from a UK perspective the case for maintaining limits on media ownership is clear. An excessive concentration of media power distorts and damages the democratic process, by impoverishing the news journalism on which informed choice is based, and leads to an unhealthy reliance by politicians on media moguls for their support. That has been the central feature of Rupert Murdoch relationship with successive Conservative and Labour governments since 1979. It's high time the relationship ended.
