The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest

TLDR: The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest by Croteau and Hoynes as mentioned in this paper is a good starting point for a discussion of the relationship between media and the public interest.

Abstract: The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. David Croteau and William Hoynes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2001.302 pp. $25.95 pbk. In The Business of Media, sociology professors David Croteau and William Hoynes pose a simple but well-supported formula to explain how media companies have expanded their business interests and social influence the past two decades: technology + politics = deregulation. Media deregulation, further fueled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, permitted-even encouraged-the wave of mergers and buyouts in the late 1990s. The authors trace how new technology has not only made the media more pervasive, simply in terms of the amount of media content, but also has allowed media companies to capitalize on new ways of presenting and packaging media products. However, in pursuing its business interests, the authors assert, the media industry is falling woefully short of meeting the social and political needs of citizens in a democracy. The media sell content to the public, but the more cherished media market is advertisers, who buy access to media audiences. This more lucrative market requires media to cater to advertisers in ways that impact content and direct attention to corporate interests. The authors assert this structure challenges the belief that the unregulated market model responds adequately to public needs. Readers are asked to consider media more broadly and use a public sphere model as a basis for comparison. Juxtaposed, the market model conceives media as private companies that define public interest by what is popular, treating audiences as consumers, and measuring success by profit margins; regulation interferes with market forces, and accountability is to owners and shareholders. The public sphere model envisions media as democratic resources, promoting active citizenship with diverse content, even if not popular; regulation is useful for protecting public interest, and accountability is to the public and government, who measure success by the extent to which media serve public interest. The authors chronicle the growth of media companies, showing how growth has been encouraged by national media policies rooted in market logic. They write the Telecommunications Act of 1996, promoted as emphasizing more business competition, actually helped consolidate the power of media conglomerates and greatly diminished the prospects of the Internet remaining a free, diverse, democratic medium. Operating largely unregulated, media companies have become integrated horizontally (owning many types of media products: broadcast, film, newspapers, books, and Internet) and vertically (owning means to produce, distribute, promote, and sell their products). The authors contend that the handful of fully integrated global media conglomerates are hard to regulate through antitrust laws because the late-twentiethcentury wave of mergers teamed companies that had not been direct competitors. The result has been the growth of integrated companies that own all the production and distribution pieces in the media pie. …