Domination Fantasies

Does Rupert Murdoch control the media? Does anyone?

Ben Compaine from the January 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Few Americans are aware that in the 1980s VCRs were bought in Western Europe at a far more rapid clip than in the U.S. The reason was that almost all of these societies at the time had the choice of only a handful of "public service" television stations, owned or controlled by the government. The VCR gave the audience the freedom to go to the new rental stores and spend some of their TV time watching entertainment they wanted, not what some elites thought would be good for them. In the U.S. we not only had more choice with the commercial networks, but with the added options provided by cable. VCRs eventually became pervasive, but with less urgency than elsewhere.

A.J. Liebling, the outspoken press critic of half a century ago, had a pragmatic insight into why the ownership structure of the media -- primarily newspapers then -- was a positive influence on content. In his 1947 book The Wayward Pressman he wrote, "The profit system, while it insures the predominant conservative coloration of our press, also guarantees that there will always be a certain amount of dissidence. The American press has never been monolithic, like that of an authoritarian state. One reason is that there is always money to be made in journalism by standing up for the underdog....[The underdog's] wife buys girdles and baking powder and Literary Guild selections, and the advertiser has to reach her."

At the time Liebling wrote this, the Hearst newspaper chain controlled more local circulation than any newspaper company does today. But his insights are actually more relevant today than in 1947. Profit, not ideology, means that whether one wants to focus on the 10 largest conglomerates or the 50 largest players or whatever other number, the content of the media is determined not by what the chief executive officer wants, but by what thousands of editors, producers, publishers, and local operating managers determine is right for the audience they are trying to reach.

This is one reason why big business and business executives are regularly made the villains (see The China Syndrome, Broadcast News, and Erin Brockovich, among many) in film and television features produced by major media companies. In many instances, the profit motive means localism prevails over centralization. It is not likely to matter much (and indeed experience shows it does not) whether a local TV station is owned by a company headquartered in another city. The decisions for much news and information need to be made locally if the owner wants to attract its share of the audience. In short, both locally and nationally owned media outlets are driven by the profit motive.

In fact, the notion that local owners of newspapers or TV and radio stations are inherently "better" -- usually taken to mean more "objective" -- than a large corporation has no standing in the real world. Some of the most biased newspapers in 20th-century history -- McCormick's Chicago Tribune, Annenberg's Philadelphia Inquirer, Loeb's Manchester Union-Leader -- were the creations of local ownership. Local owners are more likely than remote corporate owners to have ties to the local political and business establishment. Local owners may not have the economic resources to withstand a boycott by real estate or banking or similar interests should they risk some criticism of the local industry. Large chains, on the other hand, are far less affected economically by a short-term downturn in any one community. And it is less likely that the publisher is a prep school buddy of the mayor.

On the other extreme from local ownership, Clear Channel Communications has become the poster child for all that has gone wrong with media regulation. The Web magazine Salon headlines it as "Dirty Tricks and Crappy Programming." The chain owns nearly 1,200 radio stations nationally and is the dominant owner in many local markets. I am not about to defend Clear Channel's acquisitions or its policies, but the other side of the pancake has received little attention.

First, some context. Clear Channel's 1,200 stations exist in a universe of more than 10,500 commercial radio stations in the U.S. (compared to less than 8,000 in 1980). On a national basis, it owns less than 12 percent of all commercial stations. Its growth, as well as that of smaller chains, has been dramatic. But, again, there is context: Until 1985, a single owner could own a maximum of just 14 stations. By 1992 this limit had been raised to 36. Still, regulation kept size artificially low. Only in 1996, when the Telecommunications Act became law, were national limits eliminated, other than existing antitrust laws.

Salon's Eric Boehlert writes that after the "domination" by Clear Channel and second-place Infinity Broadcasting, "The result, many longtime radio industry observers feel, has been the degradation of commercial radio as a creative, independent medium." Yet anyone who remembers the radio of the 1950s and the '60s can recall a bland mix of Top 40 stations, sports, talk, and pop. There were, as now, a handful of jazz and classical stations. The late 1960s and '70s saw the unleashing of the FM band and its superior fidelity. There was a brief Golden Age of freeform stations that mixed psychedelic rock with more outre forms of music. But such "innovation" had fizzled out long before Clear Channel.

The Top 40 list in Philadelphia was rarely much different than the playlist in Denver. Precious little radio programming has truly been local other than the sports scores, traffic, weather, and perhaps some early Sunday morning interview. No matter who owns the local stations, it's unlikely that Clear Channel's Boston stations will be giving the Miami traffic report.

Like television, the radio business is changing rapidly. Here, it is satellite and the Internet that are driving progress. Satellite radio services, such as XM and Sirius, are providing new options, with dozens of commercial-free "stations" for those who are willing to pay $120 annually. And the Internet is a very robust option for anyone unsatisfied with what they get on the AM and FM dials. Services such as RealOne Radio and Live365 offer thousands of radio options. Some are transmissions of over-the-air stations from around the world. In a 2001 study I co-authored, we found more than 2,500 stations listed at RealOneRadio.com. The most listened-to stations were those that were Web-based only.

Services such as Live365 provide the capability for anyone to put themselves "on the air" over the Internet for as little as $10 a month. And The Boston Globe recently reported that 100,000 listeners a day are using this nascent service. The consumer research firm Arbitron says that in August 2003, 50 million Americans viewed a video or listened to an audio stream on the Internet. "The idea that Rupert Murdoch's Fox media empire or Arthur Sulzberger's at The New York Times can overwhelm the voice of the people seems a little more absurd with each new broadband Internet subscription," concluded Globe technology columnist Hiawatha Bray.

Public Considerations

Publicly owned companies are frequently criticized for being too driven by quarterly earnings needs. It is a fair criticism. So it is again ironic that the poster child for the evils of media conglomerates, News Corp., is probably the least driven by short-term profits and quarterly earnings. Though the company is publicly owned, working control and ownership have been retained by its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, and his family. The company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into its groundbreaking efforts in creating the Fox Network, then a viable second all-news cable network, then creating direct broadcast satellite service covering parts of the Third World as well as developed countries that did not have the advantage of a multi-channel cable infrastructure. While in no way endorsing his apparent political ideology, one might even point to his bankrolling of the conservative Weekly Standard as another contribution Murdoch has made to the marketplace of ideas and cultural offerings.

Advocates for small, local, nonprofit media companies routinely ignore or discount the benefits of profit-driven public ownership. The stocks of these companies are widely held -- by teachers' pension funds, by mutual funds, by individuals, and by 401(k) plans. The boards of these companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders. Most of them, most of the time, take that seriously. Restricting their coverage, their range of films or magazine titles or news shows, is not what the big companies are about. They simultaneously seek to reach the mass market when they can and niche markets when they spot them. Given the vast diversity of interests in a nation the size of the United States, there is potential profit in reaching the right wing as well as the left wing, in programming for Spanish speakers as well as English, in publishing books for escapism and for self-help, in investigative reporting that is critical of government as well as editorials that are supportive. And if the big guys don't provide it, some small publisher or producer will.

Having said that, it remains likely that, as in many fields, a relatively small number of companies will capture a large chunk of market share. This needs to be understood properly. If large segments of the public choose to watch, read, or listen to content from a relatively small number of media companies, that should not distract policy makers from the key word there: choose. At a time when such a fragmented audience is dividing itself among niche cable channels, tens of thousands of book titles published annually, and hyper-individualized Web surfing, it may even be socially positive that there are some mass audience shows, movies, and books that, like the Harry Potter series, give us something common to talk about. It may indeed be that at any given moment 80 percent of the audience is viewing or reading or listening to something from the 10 largest media players. But that does not mean it is the same 80 percent all the time, or that it is cause for concern.

Walter Lippmann once wrote, "The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." I have never heard a convincing argument that any individual in the United States in 2003 cannot easily and inexpensively have access to a huge variety of news, information, opinion, culture, and entertainment, whether from 10, 50, or 3,000 sources. If that is what passes for media concentration, we should consider ourselves pretty lucky.

Comments

Pingback| 11.10.09 @ 2:28AM

Video: Interview with Rupert Murdock | Political Byline links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…him; it cannot be denied that he is making an impression in the media right now and is quite successful at it. This video comes via Reason Magazine’s Blog called Reason Hit and Run ; Reason did an article in 2004 bashing Murock’s strangle hold on the media industry. Now whether that stranglehold is real or imagined is for others to judge. I have to honestly wonder aloud; is Reason magazine’s…