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Despite the concerns expressed by some critics, there has been little public debate overall about the tightening oligopoly structure of international media. Experts have identified two forces behind this vast hegemonic silence: citizens’ reluctance to criticize free markets because they equate them with democracy, and the often unclear distinction between how much choice and control consumers have in the marketplace.
Equating Free Markets with Democracy
Throughout the Cold War period in the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans refused to criticize capitalism, which they saw as synonymous with democracy. Any complaints about capitalism were viewed as an attack on the free marketplace. And attacks on free markets in turn sounded like criticism of free speech. That is in part because business owners saw their right to operate in a free marketplace as an extension of their right to buy commercial speech in the form of advertising. This line of thinking, which originated in corporate efforts to equate capitalism with democracy, still casts a shadow over American culture today, making it difficult for many people to openly question the advertising-supported economic structure of the mass media.
Debating Consumer Choice versus Consumer Control
In discussing free markets, economists distinguish between consumer control over marketplace goods and freedom of consumer choice: “The former requires that consumers participate in deciding what is to be offered; the latter is satisfied if [consumers are] free to select among the options chosen for them by producers.”6 Most Americans and the citizens of other economically developed nations clearly have choice: options among a range of media products. Yet the choices sometimes obscure the fact that consumers have limited control: power in deciding what kinds of media get created and circulated. Consumers thus have little ability to shape the messages conveyed through media products about what is important and how the world should work. Instead, they can only react to those messages.
Yet independent and alternative producers, artists, writers, and publishers have provided a ray of hope. When their work becomes even marginally popular, big media companies often capitalize on these innovations by acquiring it—which enables these works to get out to the public. Moreover, business leaders “at the top” depend on independent ideas “from below” to generate new product lines. Fortunately, a number of transnational corporations encourage the development of promising local artists.