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We’re facing a crisis at the heart of our media system – in other words with the dominant players across our media environment – on many different levels: of funding, of ethics, of representation and of legitimacy. The crisis is related, in particular, to the increasingly unequal distribution of resources in our media landscape. This is a landscape characterised by the domination of attention, audiences and agendas by a relatively small number of very powerful companies – both online and offline – all of whom have close associations with the highest levels of our political system. I don’t for a moment think that these organisations work together as some kind of cohesive unit – indeed I have written extensively on the contradictions of media power and the fact that audiences and media organisations are not always in tune with each other and that what we call ‘the media’ refers to a variety of different cultures, routines and institutions – but nevertheless I do think that they share some systemic features that I want to outline.
