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GLOBAL VS LOCAL
source: cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/
cooper/archives/mediabooke.pdf
www.krysstal.com/democracy
_media.html
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Concentration of national and local markets into national chains reinforces the tendencies of media owners to ignore local needs…- the primary referent for identity and community has traditionally been and remains significantly local. The link between localism and de-concentration of the media seems obvious. Changes in electronic media distribution technologies have not significantly altered this fundamental relationship;
- an unsophisticated view of media outlets pays no attention to the size of the organisations that produce news and information or their geographic orientation, in the process losing all perspective on citizens’ ability to gain access to the media. As corporate scale dwarfs individual resources, citizens are cut off from the means of communication;
- in the US, the efforts of the large newspaper corporations to monopolise regions and their respective voices has lead to an entirely profit-driven business model that has in turn de-prioritised product quality and debilitated most news operations’ ability to fully serve a free press, according to Mark Cooper’s analysis; (1)
- according to the already mentioned Moneyline show’s survey on CNN, cross-media mergers are a source of concern among US citizens: respondents felt there would be less, not more, diversity of editorial points of view (43 % vs. 18%) and that diversity of points of view in covering local news would decrease, not increase (39 % vs. 21%);
Left unrestrained, the marketplace will produce fewer watchdog activities conducted by less rigorous institutions… - news is often given out by government sources. Statements, statistics and new policies are introduced in controlled press conferences.
- 90 % of the world's news comes from just 3 agencies: Associated Press (USA), Reuters (UK) and Agence France Presse (France);
- Associated Press (AP) and Reuters make large profits selling financial and corporate information. The ‘free market’ view of the world is thus very profitable. Alternate views can lose the companies money so are rarely aired. AP devotes most of its coverage to the USA since the majority of its clients are there;
- Africa accounts for less than 5 % of all news coverage, most of it news of disasters. Countries that attempt to run economic systems for their own people outside the mainstream are given virtually zero coverage;
- in television, news is supplied by four main agencies: Reuters and the BBC (from the UK) and World Television Network (WTN) and CNN (from the USA). Reuters supplies over 400 broadcasters in 85 countries and reaches an audience of 500 million people. WTN supplies news to 3,000 million people. Independent Arabic television stations (like Al-Jazeera) have recently appeared.
US sources of news: 2002 (percent of respondents) | Medium local
source last
week | National source
last week | Get most
news | Expect to
use more | | TV | 85 | 83 | 56 | 27 | | Newspaper | 63 | 50 | 23 | 6 | | Radio | 35 | 30 | 10 | 7 | | Internet | 19 | 21 | 6 | 9 |
Source: Nielsen, Consumer Survey on Media Usage (Federal Communications Commission, Media Ownership Working Group, September 2002).
(1) 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]
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