The Impact of Media Ownership

Richard Campbell, Author and Journalism Professor

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Richard Campbell
Traditionally, there's been a complaint f — often from the left about one of the problems with big media is they actually uh.. intentionally sort of diminish and don't cover uh.. key stories. I think there's certainly some truth to this. I mean, big media have never reported on the finances of big media, for instance. Now that's both a function of uh.. of, you know, not- not drawing too

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much attention to how you're making all your money. But it's also a function of the way the new — the way you learn as a reporter or an editor, not to do stories about yourself.

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Noam Chomsky
I mean, the, you know, the media are, after all, here major corporations. Uh.. they're — they have a market like other — they have a product and a market. The product is you and me: the uh.. readers, watchers. Uh.. the market is advertisers, that is, other businesses. Uh.. they have very close links with government, uh.. because, in fact, there's a tight interaction between the government and the corporate system, which is a very small concentrated

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system. So what you get is a c — and uh.. there's a general intellectual culture which kind of borrows from all of this and they feed from it. Uh.. the result is there're just many things that you just don't talk about.

Jonathan Adelstein, FCC Commissioner

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Jonathan Adelstein
Well, in recent decades in America, we've seen an unprecedented wave of media consolidation where media companies are swallowing up local outlets, be they TV, radio, newspapers, and coming up with these vast chains. And the idea was they would have these synergies, and they'd be able to deliver better news as a result of being a larger, more robust news organization. What we found instead is that local news resources are being stripped out. We're finding increasing homogenization, sen- sensationalism when they try to appeal to a broader

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audience, and chasing the bottom line ahead of all else. Instead of having local owners, who are committed to the local community and live there, we're finding that these national media conglomerates, and multi-national companies, are really beholding to uh.. the shareholders on Wall Street, and aren't always watching out for what's happening in the local community. It's the FCC's job to make sure that outlets remain responsive to local communities, but we've really let our uh.. foot off of the scales here, and allowed commercialism to reign ahead of all else, and consolidation to proceed and run amuck.

David Gale, VP of New Media, MTV

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David Gale
I think the problem is for the big media companies more than it is about trying to protect the consumer. Because the big media companies, which have basically financed entertainment and sort of all this media culture for many years are really threatened. And when they're threatened, what happens? Like how do you, you know, do you want them to go away? Do you want them to be that dispersed? You know, I- I don't know what the answer to that is, but it's not an easy one. I think you really have to be careful when you say, you're using this old model of uhm.. of- of unfair competition in a new- in a new era.

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Richard Campbell
The other part of this complaint is that, you know, it's a traditional kind of Marxist complaint, which is uh.. you know, we- we — we're- we're- the media just covers really silly things, like Britney Spears, and you know, the next celebrity uh.. you know, who's involved in some kind of conspiracy or some kind of- of uh.. family uhm.. mess-up that gets heavily covered, particularly by local cable news. Uhm.. again, I think there's some partial truth to

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this. Uhm.. but on a larger problem, these folks are trying to make money in a very, very fragmented market world. So if they know that they can attract 200 or 300 thousand people to a cable channel by running Britney Spears stories every month, that's going to make — that's going to draw a bigger audience than if they're sort of critiquing big- big media.

Producers Peter Berkow & Michael Hoopingarner

A Bedford/St. Martin's Production