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INFORMATION
VS ENTERTEINMENT
source: Mark Cooper, “Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age”, Consumer Federation of America Center for the Internet & Society, Stanford Law School, 2003.
[ cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/
cooper/archives/mediabooke.pdf]
www.creativevoices.us
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The narrow economic view of media leads directly to a failure to recognise the distinction between entertainment and information and between variety and diversity… - information is not just a commodity in which one source of information from one type of media can substitute for another. Profit maximisation in increasingly centralised, commercial media conglomerates promotes standardised, lowest-common denominator products that systematically exclude minority audiences, eschew controversy, and avoid culturally uplifting but less commercially attractive content;
- institutional diversity – different types of media with different cultural and journalistic traditions and different business models – plays a special role in promoting civic discourse. Unique perspectives provided by different institutions are highly valued as sources of information;
- community media, which provides much greater access for and is much more responsive to average citizens, should be developed. Non-commercial outlets and public broadcasting need the resources and independence to provide an alternative channel of high quality, objective content;
- while the Internet has opened possibilities for new avenues of civic discourse, it has not yet even begun to dislodge the commercial mass media from their overwhelmingly dominant role. There is also a strong trend of commercialisation and centralisation of control over the Internet that may restrict its ultimate impact on civic discourse.
- in this view of the world, the commercial purposes of the broadcasters overwhelm the role of the media in civic discourse. People cannot possibly watch television to become informed. They can only watch it to be entertained.
Concentration of ownership may foster entertainment variety, but it undermines diversity of information and journalistic enterprise. The staggering case of the United States…- the population has grown in size and diversity. Mobility, globalisation of the economy, internationalisation of communications, and social fragmentation place greater demands on the communications network to enable citizens to be informed about increasingly complex issues, to express their opinions more effectively in civic discourse and to remain connected to their communities. While the demand side of the media market has become much more complex, the supply side has become much more powerful. The new technologies of commercial mass media are extremely capital intensive and therefore restrict who has access to them;
- in the United Stated, mergers in the 1980s produced media conglomerates able to exercise unprecedented control over information and entertainment. This process was accelerated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which relaxed limits on how many radio or TV stations a single company can own and eliminated barriers to cross-ownership of different media enterprises. Despite claims that this deregulatory approach would bring down prices, lower entry barriers, and increase diversity, the 1996 law has resulted in less competition, with fewer companies controlling the sources of information, its content, and its cost;
- public opinion surveys over the past several years demonstrate that the public’s view of media concentration and digital communication networks stands in sharp contrast to the narrow view being pushed by the industry (and by regulatory bodies). The Lou Dobbs Moneyline show on CNN, for example, ran an online poll asking whether “too few corporations own too many media outlets?” 98% said yes. By a wide margin (70% vs. 30%), survey respondents believe that media companies are becoming too large. This concern reflects their belief that mergers between media companies do not lead to better content and services (58% vs. 41%). They believe that mergers result in higher, not lower, prices (50% vs. 12%) and worse, not better, quality (36% vs. 14%);
- data report a growing trend in concentration of United States media sectors. In just five years (1995-2001), the share of the top 4 companies nearly doubled, while the share of the top 8 firms grew by 26 basis points. In other words, the top 4 companies controlled almost 50 % of total communication industry revenues, while the top 8 companies controlled 66 % of total communication revenues;
- at the end of 2003, 5 giant media conglomerates (Viacom/CBS/UPN/MTV/etc., GE/NBC/MSNBC/CNBC/Bravo/etc., Disney/ABC/ESPN/etc., News Corp./FOX/FX/Fox News/etc., and AOL/Time Warner/WB/CNN/TNT/TBS/etc.) own broadcast and cable outlets that control approximately a 75 % share of prime-time viewing, roughly the same share of TV households in prime time as the three broadcast networks did 40 years ago, pre-cable;
- of the 91 major cable television networks each available in more than 16 million homes, fully 80 % (73 networks) are owned or co-owned by just 6 media conglomerates – the same five giant media conglomerates plus Liberty Media;
- the same five giant media conglomerates plus Vivendi/Universal (which NBC, one of those five giants, may soon take over) now also produce the vast majority of programming for television. Of the 40 new series airing on the four major broadcast networks in the 2002 season, 77.5 % are owned in whole or part by the same four networks, up from 56.3% the prior season - an increase of over 37 % in just one year - and up from just 12.5% in 1990;
- in May 2004, big media got bigger. The US$5.4 billion deal pairs NBC 's television network, cable channels - such as Telemundo, Bravo, MSNBC, and CNBC - and 14 stations with Universal's movie studio, five theme parks, the Sci Fi and USA Network cable channels and television production studios, makers of "Law & Order" and its spinoffs. At the press briefing, a flashing video with voiceover called the new NBC Universal 'a 24-hour cross-promotional machine’;
- sectors, which would once have been regarded as outside the media and arts world, have been brought in as component parts of the large media empires. One example is professional sport, which is increasingly a vital content provider for TV. Major US sports teams are owned by, for example, Disney, NBC (General Electric), AOL Time Warner and Murdoch’s News Corporation (the latter also tried to acquire one of the global brand leaders in football [soccer], the UK team Manchester United). Entertainment parks are a feature of several global media groups, following the trend begun by Disney.
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