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International Journal of Cultural Policy
ISSN: 1028-6632 (Print) 1477-2833 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcul20
Metrics, models and the meaning of media
ownership
Des Freedman
To cite this article: Des Freedman (2014) Metrics, models and the meaning of media ownership,
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20:2, 170-185, DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2012.752821
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2012.752821
Published online: 24 Dec 2012.
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Metrics, models and the meaning of media ownership
Des Freedman*
Reader in Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, New
Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK
Concentrated media ownership has become an increasingly salient issue in the
context of global demands for social justice and democracy. This article calls
for cultural policy analysts to highlight issues of media ownership and maps out
three approaches to ownership that are designed to provide a more holistic
account of the problems and potential solutions. Attention is first paid to ‘metrics’
and the gathering of quantitative data; next, to the generation of normative
models of media ownership; and then, to an ideological perspective on ownership
that locates it in relation to systems of thought and action that privilege
particular ways of thinking about and ordering the world. By arguing for a
renewed focus on ownership that is based on the integration of all three perspectives
into a more holistic methodology, the article aims to provide scholars with
a conceptual and a strategic framework for understanding and intervening in
ongoing debates about the dynamics of contemporary cultural industries.
Keywords: media ownership; media concentration; media power; media metrics
The importance of media ownership
The issue of media ownership has increasingly shifted from the business to the
front page. Students in Mexico have taken to the streets protesting against the partisan
agendas of the two main TV channels as part of a wider democratic reform
movement, audiences in the UK have been treated to a daily soap opera of testimony
in the Leveson Inquiry about the collusive relationships between News Corp.,
senior British politicians and top levels of the Metropolitan Police, while there has
been a fierce debate in Australia about the need for tougher media ownership laws
to secure a more plural media environment.1
Such debates are often premised on
the widely held belief that democracy is throttled if the number of media outlets
and distinctive voices is restricted – if, in other words, media power is concentrated
and if it is able effectively to evade public oversight and regulatory control.
In this argument, media concentration is anti-democratic: because it restricts cultural
diversity (Kawashima 2011), because it undermines the ability of citizens to
acquire and exchange the information and ideas necessary to take informed decisions
about public life (Baker 2007) and also, because it further commodifies the
cultural industries themselves, transforming them from vehicles of symbolic interaction
to engines of capital accumulation that foster the exploitation of creative labour
(Hesmondhalgh 2012). Consider the response in 2009 of Rupert Murdoch, chairman
*Email: d.freedman@gold.ac.uk
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2014
Vol. 20, No. 2, 170–185, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2012.752821
Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis
and chief executive of News Corporation, to calls for a bail out of news organisations
as they struggled to cope with the combined impact of a huge drop in advertising
revenue and the structural challenge posed by the Internet. Welcoming the
collapse of companies that fail to adapt to the new digital age, Murdoch argued that
‘they should fail, just as a restaurant that offers meals no one wants to eat or a carmaker
who makes cars no one wants to buy should fail’ (Murdoch 2009). This is
the same vision of media – as commodities that measure their success simply using
market criteria – as that espoused by Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
chairman Mark Fowler in the early 1980s when he described television as ‘just
another appliance. It’s a toaster with pictures’ (quoted in Horwitz 1989, p. 245).
Media ownership, according to this logic, follows essentially the same dynamics as
general corporate ownership; regulators and governments should not, therefore,
make any special arrangements to protect the vitality of the media sector.
However, while ownership has often been neglected in cultural policy research
(Garnham 2005, Napoli 2006), it has long featured in the annals of media scholarship.
Some of the founding scholars of communications and cultural studies identified
diversified ownership as central to the ability of media to pursue an
independent, imaginative and critical role in public life. Back in 1948, Lazarsfeld
and Merton noted the importance of locating mass media within the specific social
and economic structures in which they operated and argued that ‘the social effects
of the media will vary as the system of ownership and control varies’ (Lazarsfeld
and Merton 2004 [1948], p. 236). More significantly, they insisted that ‘since the
mass media are supported by great business concerns geared into the current social
and economic system, the media contribute to the maintenance of this system’
(2004, p. 236).
In his 1962 book Communications, Raymond Williams highlighted the emergence
of new forms of media ownership in the UK that were contributing to a
growing commercialisation of audiences and content. He argued that the ‘methods
and attitudes of capitalist business have established themselves near the centre of
communications’ (Williams 1968 [1962], p. 31), even in a media economy that contained
a significant not-for-profit, public service core. ‘From this it becomes one of
the purposes of communication to sell’ a particular paper or programme. All the
basic purposes of communications – the sharing of human experience – can become
subordinated this drive to sell (1968, p. 32).
This article pursues Williams’ interest in the relationship between ownership
patterns and the media’s ability to facilitate democratic conversations by arguing
that cultural policy analysts should focus on ownership as a strategic priority. Issues
concerning the control of financial resources, industry concentration and market
structure have too often been hegemonised, both inside the academy and the media
policy environment, by lawyers, economists and business analysts who have privileged
empirical data, often based on a narrow concern with efficiency and competition,
at the expense of developing a more contextualised approach.
The article maps out three approaches to the analysis of media ownership that, if
taken together, provide a more holistic account of the problems, and potential
solutions, that will be relevant to readers far beyond the USA and UK from where the
overwhelming majority of examples are drawn. I first discuss the attention given to
‘metrics’ and the gathering of quantitative data that has preoccupied many media policy-makers;
next, I focus on the generation of normative models and, in particular,
pluralist models of media ownership; and finally, I highlight a further perspective
International Journal of Cultural Policy 171
which conceives of media ownership in terms of systems of thought and action that
privilege particular ways of thinking about and ordering the world. The article is
meant to be far more than a literature review but, rather, an attempt to reorient our
work on media ownership to meet the challenges of a highly concentrated environment.
By arguing for a renewed focus on ownership that privileges its empirical,
normative and ideological dimensions, the article aims to help scholars intervene more
effectively in both policy debates and strategic action as media ownership becomes an
increasingly significant proxy for media power in the digital age.
Analysing ownership as data
The first approach to the analysis of media ownership is to focus on it as a source
of quantitative data that, when assessed empirically and presented methodically,
produces the evidential basis for further types of action (i.e. ownership rules or regulatory
interventions). Data in relation to broadcast ownership may include a breakdown
of different types of ownership structure, figures concerning revenue and
profit, the share of the market in terms of turnover or audience, levels of concentration,
details of income streams and market predictions. Many studies have provided
this information in an attempt to map out key features of specific broadcast environments;
for example, Compaine and Gomery (2000) and Noam (2009) with reference
to the US media ownership, Kelly et al. (2004), Open Society Institute (2005) and
Sanchez-Taberno and Denton (1993) in relation to European ownership and Open
Society Foundations (2012) in relation to over 30 countries across the globe. Meanwhile,
Creech (2007), Napoli (2001) and Stolte and Craufurd Smith (2010) have all
produced encyclopaedic works which detail all the various interventions into broadcast
speech and ownership.
Given the often polarised debates on media ownership, quantitative data may be
seen to provide a reassuring source of certainty and retains an ability to be mathematically
precise in the midst of what some argue are instinctual claims and unsupported
assertions. Noam, for example, insists that ‘what the world needs on the
subject of media concentration is more facts, not more opinions’ (2009, p. 34) while
Compaine talks of his own ‘data-mongering, stick-to-the-facts approach’ (Compaine
and Gomery 2000, p. 21). Concentration can be pinpointed not through a vague
sense that one company seems to be dominant but through the systematic use of
economic analysis, most often using the Herfindahl–Hirschmann Index (HHI) which
assesses market competition in a particular sector and quantifies the results. An
HHI score of 1800 or above describes a sector with high levels of concentration
while a score of 1000 or below suggests a relatively unconcentrated sector. The
FCC, in its desire to relax ownership rules in 2003, employed this approach when
establishing a ‘Diversity Index’ that measured the degree of concentration in a typical
market, ‘Anytown USA’, which was found, most conveniently, to have a score
of exactly 738, well below warning levels (Freedman 2008, p. 100).
Noam, in his 500 page survey of the ownership of contemporary US communications
industries, presents data in order to negotiate between what he sees as two
opposing, and flawed, hypotheses: first, the ‘destined to diversity’ scenario in which
digital technologies are ushering in a communications cornucopia and second, the
‘doomed to concentration’ scenario (2009, p. 34) in which the media environment
will inevitably be reduced to a small handful of all powerful fiefdoms. Instead, he
172 D. Freedman
argues that what we find is a media structure governed by three trends – growth in
economies of scale, the lowering of entry barriers and digital convergence – that
will see it split into large ‘integrator’ firms who dominate conception and distribution
and a whole slew of specialist companies which cluster around them (2009, p.
39). Noam concludes, after presenting a truly enormous amount of data, that while
broadcast concentration – and more specifically multichannel concentration – is
increasing, it is still well below levels ‘that would normally raise antitrust action if
encountered in other industries’ (p. 423). Compaine, whose book is of a similar size
and scope, is even more optimistic. His analysis of the data leads him to conclude
that the emerging media marketplace ‘may be noted more for information overload
and fragmentation than for concentration and scarcity’ (2000, p. 578).
It is not just pro-market scholars who turn to data to make their arguments.
Figures like Herman and Chomsky (1988), Bagdikian (1990 [1983]), and Herman
and McChesney (1997) all provide statistical evidence to support claims of
increased media concentration and commercialism. Indeed, Robert McChesney, one
of the founders of the Free Press media reform group, has repeatedly called for
economists and legal scholars to furnish the reform movement with evidence that
can be presented to policy-makers to substantiate the allegations of a link, for
example, between increased concentration and reduced diversity. In his book, Communication
Revolution, he writes that ‘the movement grasped how important it was
to have first-rate credible media research’ and noted that there was a pressing need
‘for traditional quantitative communication scholars, for economists, and for legal
scholars. And these scholars needed to work with us so that they didn’t get swallowed
up by baseless presuppositions’ (2007, p. 172). Economists like Gentzkow
and Shapiro (2006), Waldfogel (2007), and Chang (2011) have certainly taken up
this challenge.
Quantitative data, therefore, is very much in fashion in the analysis of media
ownership and in the discussions that guide policy-makers and regulators in
responding to any problems that may arise from concentrated ownership or market
failure. It is the ‘gold standard by which policy judgments are made’ (Philip and
Karaganis 2007, p. 56) and is at the heart of the ‘evidence-based approach’ of the
FCC and the British communications regulator Ofcom, both of which rely heavily
on consumer research, market data, investment reports and econometric analyses.
Indeed, Ofcom’s annual Communications Market reports (Ofcom 2012) are probably
the most valuable source of data for any analyst of the British media while the
FCC’s eleven reports produced for its 2010 ownership review, all of which are
data-driven, provide a rich seam of material for those looking to evaluate the significance
of ownership for media diversity (FCC 2011).
There are two problems, however, with this fetishisation of what has come to be
known as ‘media metrics’, described by pro-liberalisation campaigners as ‘objective
measures in contrast to subjective barometers’ (Thierer and Eslkelsen 2008, p. 9).
First, there is the fact that such data is far more likely to be demanded of or supplied
by commercial organisations. According to Philip and Karaganis (2007) in
their persuasive call for a ‘federal data agenda for communications policymaking’,
policy-makers generally tend to draw their data from a narrow range of elite
sources. ‘Today, communication policymakers rely heavily on the datasets developed
by commercial data providers for their clients and the investment community,
and, therefore, neglect their own substantial data collection capabilities and
responsibilities’ (2007, p. 56).
International Journal of Cultural Policy 173
Second, while a data-driven approach is designed theoretically to insulate media
policy-making and regulatory domains from partisanship and bias, there is little to
suggest that a call to ‘objectivity’ will necessarily undermine the use of selective
facts and subjective judgments. Countervailing ideas can just as easily be marginalized,
ignored or buried, as happened when FCC officials refused to distribute a
piece of research that demonstrated a link between increased consolidation and
decreased amount of local news (Associated Press 2006). Indeed, the Diversity
Index employed by the FCC in 2003 to measure degrees of concentration in local
markets was eventually discredited by the Appeals Court for relying too heavily on
quantitative methods and for not paying enough attention to issues of content and
the impact of different types of speech. It seems that not everything in the media
environment can be easily quantified and that, perhaps more significantly, quantitative
data needs to be more adequately contextualised.
Analysing ownership normatively
An additional approach to tackling questions of ownership is to be found in the pursuit
not of empirical data but of normative models, ‘ideal types’ of ownership structure
or regulatory behaviour. This is often a response to the failure, identified
above, of empirical data to make sense of the communications environment. ‘Media
concentration policy’, argues Natascha Just, ‘is not a mechanistic endavor and thus
cannot be captured by the positivist presupposition that inform most empirical
attempts’ (2009, p. 113); instead, she calls for a ‘return to the normative principle
as a primary guiding element of communications policy making’ (2009, p. 114).
Such principles are often expressed in terms of arrangements that best facilitate, for
example, the efficient allocation of cultural goods or the exercise of democratic citizenship
where the media are seen collectively as a ‘watchdog’ whose prime role is
to ‘monitor the full range of state activity, and fearlessly expose abuses of official
authority’ (Curran 2002, p. 217). A pluralist perspective on ownership holds that
media should articulate the widest possible range of views in order to allow citizens
to seek out and act on all viable information as they participate in public life. In
both cases, rules may be necessary to break up unaccountable and unacceptable
concentrations of power that distort or undermine the ability of media to achieve
these noble objectives.
The legal scholar Ed Baker hints at this kind of ownership model when he provides
three main reasons for opposing concentration. First, he insists that we will
arrive at more democratic arrangements for communicative power (Baker 2007)
with a dispersed distribution structure that allows for a breadth of voices and representations
in order that no one voice is excluded. Second, he argues that the ‘widest
possible dispersion of media power reduces the risk of the abuse of communicative
power’ (2007, p. 16) and notes how the Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi, has
amassed significant economic and political power through his domination of the
Italian media. Finally, he claims that a more egalitarian media structure is likely to
improve quality and reduce the risk of market failure as it will check the urge of
concentrated organisations to put profit and shareholder value above all else. There
are, he concludes, ‘fundamental democratic and significant structural economic reasons’
(2007, p. 53) for introducing rules that will disperse media ownership and
consolidate the democratic benefits of a pluralistic media system.
174 D. Freedman
Indeed, some of most lucid accounts of the relationship between a competitive
media system and a robust democracy are to be found in official justifications for
precisely these ownership rules. Consider this statement by the then Conservative
government when reviewing British media ownership rules back in 1995:
A free and diverse media are an indispensable part of the democratic process. They
provide the multiplicity of voices and opinions that informs the public, influences
opinion, and engenders political debate. They promote the culture of dissent which
any healthy democracy must have. In so doing, they contribute to the cultural fabric
of the nation and help define our sense of identity and purpose. If one voice becomes
too powerful, this process is placed in jeopardy and democracy is damaged. Special
media ownership rules, which exist in all major media markets, are needed therefore
to provide the safeguards necessary to main diversity and plurality. (Department for
National Heritage 1995, p. 3)
Even the FCC in its attempt in 2003 to relax broadcast ownership restrictions nevertheless
insisted on the normative importance of retaining measures to promote
viewpoint diversity in the interests of democracy. Despite the huge implications of
the advent of the Internet and new sources of plurality, ‘we therefore continue to
believe that broadcast ownership limits are necessary to preserve and promote viewpoint
diversity. A large number of independent owners will tend to generate a wider
array of viewpoints in the media than would a comparatively smaller number of
owners’ (2003, p. 11). These views are shared by many scholars writing on the significance
of media ownership rules; for example, Barron (2000), Doyle (2002) and
Overbeck (2007).
A related way in which scholars have approached ownership and regulation has
been to identify the normative bases of traditional public policy approaches to these
questions. Philip Napoli, for example, talks of the ‘enduring normative principles’
(2001, p. 21) that underlie communications policy-making: concepts such as localism,
diversity, universal service, competition and the public interest. McQuail
(1992, pp. 68–77) discusses freedom, equality and social order as mobilising principles
for attempts to regulate media systems while Tom Gibbons highlights values
such as free speech, independence and accountability (1998, pp. 35–54). We could
add to these lists, a whole host of other normative commitments – to pluralism, citizenship,
welfare and social justice as well as to efficiency, productivity and profitability
– and assess the ways in which different ownership structures and
arrangements impact on these commitments.
Other scholars are keen to enshrine these kinds of normative principles in actual
designs for democratic media practices. Georgina Born, for example, develops a
‘normative architecture’ (2006, p. 116) in which a range of communicative conversations
may be fostered by the peculiar possibilities of a public service, non-profit
broadcaster. The ability to stimulate these different dialogues is related not just to
questions of ownership but to the characteristics of particular platforms (whether
terrestrial television or the Internet) in establishing ‘dialogical flows between
sociocultural majority and minorities, or dominant and subordinate groups’
(2006, p. 116).
James Curran has devised a ‘working model’ (2002, p. 240) of a democratic
media system that is stratified by different forms of ownership. At the core of his
system is a public service broadcaster responsible, above all, to its viewers and listeners
(like, Curran argues, public service channels in Germany and Scandinavia
International Journal of Cultural Policy 175
with their broadcasting councils and democratic representation). This core is surrounded
by four ‘peripheral’ media sectors – civic, professional, social market and
private spaces – which, taken together, will guarantee not only the communicative
rights of minorities but ‘act as a restraint on the over-entrenchment of minority concerns
to the exclusion of majority pleasures’ (2002, p. 241). While this is a distinctively
European-looking project, William Hoynes has sketched out a vision for
public broadcasting in the USA which requires rethinking the ‘core mission of public
broadcasting in the digital age’ (2007, p. 375; see also Center for Social Media
2009). He suggests that public broadcasting adopt a remit that clearly distinguishes
itself from commercial broadcasting and instead, focuses on local programming as
well as independent news and current affairs.
A focus on the normative models is valuable in allowing us to imagine ‘competitive’
or ‘democratic’ ownership structures and regulatory practices (or to criticise
structures and practices that are not) from the point of view of firmly held values
and perspectives. There is little doubt, for example, that the media reform legislation
passed in Argentina in 2009 – which, in its commitment to ‘diversify the airwaves
by reserving one-third of licenses each for non-profit organizations, state
broadcasters and private companies’ (Valente 2009), is strikingly similar to Curran’s
model outlined above – was partly informed by a vision of what a democratic
media system should look like. There is, however, always a danger that by choosing
not to focus on empirical data, some normative accounts lack verifiability, or
more precisely, relevance to particular political and economic contexts. Of course,
there is no reason why normative accounts should be counterposed to empirically
based studies and, indeed, many of the texts quoted above combine normative
reflections with at least some detail about specific media environments. Georgina
Born best expresses this approach in her anthropological analysis of a changing
BBC (Born 2004), and later concludes that scholars:
need to break down the boundaries between normative theories and the design of democratic
institutions, including media systems suited to democratic pluralism. From a
policy perspective, we need to take political philosophies seriously – to realize that
they offer tangible bases on which to construct institutional arrangements; but also to
acknowledge that our existing institutions embody political philosophies that themselves
deserve scrutiny and updating. (2006, p. 119)
Taking ‘political philosophies seriously’, according to Born, requires us not simply
to imagine and design new models of ownership but to assess existing structures in
terms of the specific values upon which they were brought into being. The shape of
any media system is far from natural or accidental, but is the result of a series of
attempts to regulate social behaviour that have identifiable ideological foundations.
Analysing ownership as an ideological process
This leads us on to a further, and complementary, way of studying ownership and
regulation: neither as the mere embodiment of quantitative data nor as the pursuit
of theoretically sophisticated normative positions, but as systems of thought and
action that are related to specific ways of ordering the world. From this perspective,
attitudes towards conglomeration or competition, for example, are revealing for the
wider ideological positions that they point to (for example, about the market as an
enabler of productive symbolic activity); the advocacy of particular regulatory
176 D. Freedman
mechanisms and objectives is far from a simple technical or administrative matter,
but connected to values and priorities and that are by no means natural or inevitable.
This is an approach adopted by a whole number of critical communication
scholars who identify structures of media ownership as central devices for securing
consent to ‘market-driven politics’ (Leys 2001). For Bagdikian, whose book The
Media Monopoly (1990 [1983]) was one of the first to combine data on media concentration
with a sociological analysis of media influence, ownership is a mechanism
for managing the exclusion of certain voices from political power. Media
ownership, he argues, is connected to the ability ‘to treat some subjects briefly and
obscurely but others repetitively and in depth’ (1990, p. 16), a seemingly ‘normal
and necessary’ journalistic practice that skews public opinion in the interest of powerful
corporations (1990, p. 16).
For Streeter (1996), media ownership policies (and the patterns of ownership
they facilitate) help to naturalise capitalist property relations and systems of thought.
Ownership policy is an ideological means of resolving differences and enforcing
order in the communications environment and beyond: ‘underlying all the (very
real) disagreements and debates is a relatively constant structure of expectations that
limit discussion, not by coercion, but by way of the subtle but profound power of
interpretation’ (1996, p. 117). For example, when Rupert Murdoch announced to
the Federal Trade Commission that ‘the government needs to clear the path for
companies to invest and innovate – by reducing unnecessary regulation and eliminating
obstacles to growth and investment’ (Murdoch 2009), we should treat this
both as a claim that needs substantiating as well as an expression of a particular
neo-liberal world view. We need, therefore, to tie issues of agency and interests to
our analysis of structure and procedure.
One way of doing this is to interrogate elite attitudes towards ownership and to
focus on those documents and processes where arguments about ownership are
most forcefully mobilised: in corporations’ annual reports, parliamentary transcripts,
submissions to consultations and reviews, contributions to regulator or industry panels,
evidence to inquiries and so on.
The most common argument is technological: that in a brave new world of digital
developments and consumer choice, there is little need to worry about oligopoly
or a lack of diversity. The dizzying speed of technological innovation and market
adaptation make redundant most attempts to control artificially the structure of markets
or the preferences of consumers. This is especially true for television where
spectrum scarcity, the phenomenon that provided the historic justification for
regulating broadcasting, has been largely abolished in the digital age of virtually
limitless bandwidth. ‘Given the overwhelming wealth of both broadcast and
non-broadcast media options available to consumers today’, argued some of the
largest entertainment companies in the USA during the highly controversial review
of ownership rules during 2002–2003, ‘the factual underpinnings of the spectrum
scarcity rationale of broadcast regulation … no longer are valid (if they ever were)’
(Joint Commenters 2003, p. v).
Referring to the communication ‘abundance’ specifically facilitated by the Internet,
former FCC chair Michael Powell (2003) argued that
the most striking difference between the world today and the world pre-remote [control]
is that Americans now have access to a bottomless well of information called the
Internet … The time has come to honestly and fairly examine the facts of the modern
International Journal of Cultural Policy 177
marketplace and build rules that reflect the digital world we live in today, not the
bygone era of black-and-white television.
Adam Thierer, an influential Washington think tank analyst and firm supporter of
ownership liberalisation, echoes this approach when arguing that we are currently
living in a ‘golden age’ of media.
There has never been a time in our nation’s history when the citizens had access to
more media outlets, more news and information, or more entertainment. Abundance,
not scarcity, is the defining fact of our current media age … the question of who owns
what, or how much they own is utterly irrelevant. (Thierer 2005, p. 161)
Essentially, the argument is that the Internet has stolen audiences, attention and
advertising away from ‘old’ media and that, therefore, the ‘rules of the game’ have
changed forever. Ken Ferree, former head of the FCC’s Media Bureau, declared to
a 2009 ownership hearing that ‘there can be no denying that radio and television
broadcast is a much less significant part of the media universe than they once were’
(Ferree 2009) leading him to ask one simple question: ‘are these ownership rules
even relevant in today’s media marketplace?’ (Ferree 2009).
Liberalisation, conceived here as both desirable and inevitable, is also justified
on economic grounds: that the profitability of media businesses would be enhanced
through the relaxation of ownership rules. Consider the argument made by the UK
culture minister Jeremy Hunt, an outspoken advocate of deregulatory ownership
policies, in lobbying prime minister David Cameron to support News Corp’s
attempt to take full control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB. Dismissing criticisms
that this would give News Corp effective dominance of British broadcasting and
limit media plurality, Hunt insisted that it would be ‘totally wrong for the
Government to get involved in a competition issue’ and that ‘if we block it, our
media sector will suffer for years’ (quoted in Tapsfield and Marsden 2012).
Reviews of media ownership rules are populated by claims that by continuing
with existing prohibitions on ownership, ‘legacy’ media businesses in particular will
be at a disadvantage in the new digital environment. This argument was made with
particular vigour by CBS in the 2006 ownership review, warning that without the
ability to manoeuvre freely in the marketplace, ‘we put at risk the rich American
tradition of free, over-the-air broadcasting, including its universal availability, commitment
to public service and localism, and its high quality entertainment, sports
and news programming’ (CBS 2006, p. 3). Many other US broadcast interests, particularly
those representing smaller station owners, have made the same point: that
liberalisation is increasingly necessary to maintain ‘economic viability in a market
dominated by consolidated multichannel providers and other competitors’ (National
Association of Broadcasters 2006, p. iv). The director of Heart Television put it this
way: ‘By consolidating ownership, operational and technological resources, local
television stations can achieve new economic efficiencies and will be able to compete
more effectively in the digital era’ (Barrett 2009, p. 4). The British communications
regulator also agreed that consolidation would allow companies to realise
economies of scale and scope to recruit the best managers and provide them with
better access to overseas capital (Ofcom 2006, p. 7).
This links to a further justification for ownership liberalisation: a belief that
existing regulation is likely to constrain the innate creativity unleashed by market
178 D. Freedman
forces. This reflects a neo-liberal conception that the state should have only a limited
role in directing productive activity, that innovation is best realised when left to
its own devices and that restrictions on media ownership are, ultimately, a violation
of speech rights. ‘My notion of the First Amendment’, wrote Shaun Sheehan, chief
lobbyist for the giant Tribune media corporation, in a private letter to William
Safire, the New York Times columnist and supporter of ownership rules,
is that the framers feared excesses of government and that the press would be the
countervailing force, the unfettered watchdog. Without scale and with the White
House gunning for its broadcast licences, could the Washington Post have pursued
Watergate? The New York Times, the Pentagon Papers? The more we get back to
‘Congress shall make no laws’ the better we will be. (Sheehan 2003)
Ownership rules, according to this rhetoric, conflict with basic First Amendment
rights to freedom of expression and should be minimised in order to protect the
speech rights of corporations. Market forces, according to this perspective, are not
only not inimical to pluralist goals of source and viewpoint diversity, but are
increasingly the main guarantors of such aspirations.
Identifying the interests and objectives behind key arguments posed by proliberalisation
voices is essential in knowing where to start in challenging these
perspectives. Opponents can point to the strong strand of technological determinism
that exaggerates the impact of new technologies in a particularly one-sided way, as
requiring liberalisation. Arguments that the Internet has done away with the need
for ownership rules aimed at ensuring media pluralism and diversity are as much
ideologically driven as they are the result of technological necessity. ‘The sceptical
observer’, according to Jean Seaton (1998, p. 123), may ‘conclude that the
frequently heard claim that technology “requires” this or that policy, is just a way
of masking a vested interest in the handy disguise of modernity’. Those interested
in ownership questions can point to conceptual debates about the democratic significance
of the media and use empirical data to reject the argument that the market, as
a matter of course, gives voice to divergent groups and perspectives (see Di Cola
2006 for research that points to a link between ownership consolidation and
‘homogenized programming’ or Hindman 2011 which challenges the claim that the
Internet has significantly expanded local news diversity).
A further response to pro-liberalisation arguments concerns their underlying
assumptions about ownership rules themselves: that they constitute a ‘barrier’ to
growth, a ‘shackle’ on investment, a ‘violation’ of free speech, and a ‘restraint’ of
free trade. The equation of ownership rules with overwhelmingly negative and
restrictive characteristics is designed to shift the focus away from their original
intention: to promote a wider range of voices and perspectives than would be provided
by market forces alone. In fact, it is more than likely that in a digital environment,
there will still be the need for special controls to promote pluralism and
diversity. Given the amount of Internet traffic dominated by Google, YouTube and
Facebook as well as by longer established media companies, a broadband internet
future is certain to produce new types of monopoly and new forms of exclusion that
can only be tackled with purposeful and positive intervention into media markets.
We also need to assess the ideological implications of ownership even when it
does not feature as an explicit topic in policy discourse as was the case in the
UK Government’s ongoing Communications Review, designed to inform future
International Journal of Cultural Policy 179
communications legislation. The open letter that launched the review (Hunt 2011)
makes reference neither to the potential threat to plurality posed by the then controversial
bid by News Corporation to take full control of the British satellite operator
BSkyB (a bid that eventually collapsed in July 2012 following the phone hacking
revelations), nor indeed to any proposals to secure plurality in an increasingly volatile
environment. Instead, the emphasis is firmly on growth, innovation and deregulation
at the expense of other socially and politically desirable objectives: while ‘pluralism’
is mentioned once, ‘growth’ is referred to 21 times; while the ‘public interest’ merits a
single mention, ‘competition’ or ‘competitive’ is referenced eight times.
The letter assumes that deregulation is the sole, or even preferred, route to ensuring
growth and innovation when the picture is far more complex. For example, the
government wishes to see the UK content thrive in export markets but the reason
why British television (like other UK cultural industries) has strong international
appeal is that it is largely the product of a highly regulated, not deregulated, environment.
It is especially revealing that the government’s commitment to secure the
future of the communications sector as a series of industries that are both engines of
growth and mechanisms for delivering content in the public interest was predicated
in advance on a desire further to shed rules that have helped to create strong organisations.
Why is a deregulatory approach ‘the aim’ (Hunt 2011, p. 2) of the review as
opposed to being one possible outcome? Why is ‘economic growth’ separated out
from the role that the media plays more generally in equipping citizens with the
information, knowledge and experiences they need fully to participate in contemporary
life? Such absences and silences are highly revealing (Freedman 2010).
Indeed, the recent decision by the UK Competition Commission (CC) not to
pursue a case against BSkyB in its consideration of anti-competitive behaviour in
the pay TV sector (Competition Commission 2012) is a perfect example of an ideological
preference (that of market forces acting as regulating agents in their own
right) circumscribing the way the ‘problem’ is defined. The issue here is not that its
analysis relied too heavily on metrics but that the CC’s use of the data was predicated
on a belief in the self-correcting ability of the market that then places limits
on its own capacity to secure unfettered competition. For example, despite noting
‘the very high and stable level of concentration, the low level of switching between
suppliers, the difficulty of large-scale entry/expansion as a traditional pay-TV retailer
and the absence of countervailing buyer power in pay TV’, the CC found that
this ‘did not of itself lead to the conclusion that there was an AEC [adverse effect
on competition]’ (2012, p. 8).
A normative commitment to the equitable distribution of cultural resources,
however, would have identified some significant problems in the pay-TV market
where BSkyB has ‘enclosed’ highly valued content behind paywalls. This is not the
case simply for movies and sports, the subjects of two recent Competition Commission
investigations into Sky’s market power, but also in relation to original drama
and entertainment. For example, Sky has signed a deal with HBO worth around
£150 m over five years to have exclusive access to both first-run and archive HBO
programmes. As a result, Mad Men has recently moved from BBC2, a channel
which has a 7% audience share, to Sky Atlantic, a channel with a 0.3% share. Even
more significantly, Sky has promised to spend £600 m in the original UK material
by 2014 to go on channels like Sky One, with a 0.7% share and the two Sky Arts
channels, each of which in May 2012 had an average weekly viewing of one
minute, with Sky Arts 1 registering a 0.1 share and Sky Arts 2 registering nothing
180 D. Freedman
at all. Perhaps, any new investment into original programming should be welcomed
but it becomes a public policy issue if this output is locked into gated communities
aimed thus far at a minority of people who happen to get the channels because, by
and large, they are sports or film fans. Public money (i.e. licence fee revenue)
aimed at mass audiences is being replaced by private money aimed at lucrative subscription
audiences with the consequence that content markets are not likely to
operate in an open and competitive fashion, despite the CC’s conclusion that Sky’s
market power is not having an adverse effect on competition. In this case, it was
not the data that were faulty but rather the CC’s underlying assumptions about the
innate capacity of market forces to secure open competition and pluralism.
Conclusion
Is it desirable to argue, as this article has done, to prioritise media ownership as a
key concern for critical cultural policy analysts? David Hesmondhalgh, a firm critic
of existing marketised social relations, nevertheless doubts whether ownership is a
sufficiently robust and expansive frame with which to make sense of content in
complex media environments. Media producers, he has argued (Hesmondhalgh
2001), often enjoy sufficient autonomy allowing them not to follow meekly or consistently
the dictates of owners and executives and that even following a ratings-led
perspective is likely to enable the production of challenging and alternative forms
of content just as it is also likely to lead to the emergence of trivial and sensationalised
material. He warns that an emphasis on ownership alone may foster an instrumentalist
approach that marginalises more complex questions concerning the
management of ‘risk and uncertainty within the media business’ Hesmondhalgh
(2001). Furthermore, the emphasis on news and current affairs in many debates on
ownership misses out on the role of other formats and genres and diminishes the
importance of popular culture. Finally, the fact that there is ‘no necessary link
between oligopoly and reduced diversity’ Hesmondhalgh (2001) – witness the
explosion of niche musics presided over by both large and small corporations –
suggests to Hesmondhalgh that ‘there are other factors, besides ownership, at work
in explaining media output’ Hesmondhalgh (2001). Indeed, the problems associated
with both settling on an acceptable measure of market concentration and then
identifying the consequences of concentration on diversity and choice are such that
a focus on ownership has left radical critics ‘vulnerable to attack from the right and
the political centre’ (2007, p. 173).
Hesmondhalgh makes some very valuable points about the contradictions of
media power and the dangers of economic reductionism, but his argument that
media ownership is not a decisive explanatory framework is problematic. Firstly, as
we have already seen, this is a view deliberately promulgated by proponents of
ownership liberalisation who wish not only to contest specific measures of concentration,
but to de-prioritise concentration as a controversial issue in its own right.
Secondly, it is not necessarily the case that those who focus on ownership claim
that it explains everything about media performance. McChesney (2002, p. 3; 2004,
p. 208), for example, repeatedly points out that there are many factors that shape
media output apart from ownership – for example, the strength of professional journalism,
levels of investment and degree of social stability – but he argues, nevertheless,
that a public policy emphasis on stimulating competition within media markets
by curbing excessive concentration is needed precisely in order to facilitate diverse,
International Journal of Cultural Policy 181
creative, unexpected and antagonistic content. Thirdly, the emergence of behemoths
dominating sub-sectors of the digital economy – YouTube in online video, Amazon
in e-books, Facebook in social media and LinkedIn for online biographies – presents
all those interested in a diverse and independent media system with a significant
and immediate challenge: how to secure pluralism in an environment which
was supposed to be more resistant to the bureaucratisation and monopolisation that
marked major parts of the analogue world. Ongoing consolidation of the digital
domain has highlighted the flaws of contemporary ownership arrangements and
competition regimes and contributed to an atmosphere in which demands for reform
of media ownership structures are part and parcel of calls for wider democratic
change. Far from scaling down campaigns for more democratic forms of media
ownership, the current situation requires that more scholars engage in critical
research into plurality of and competition in media markets.
Heeding Hesmondhalgh’s warning against instrumentalism and reductionism,
however, this article has proposed a number of different ways in which we can
approach media ownership. It has suggested that the interested researcher may turn
to empirical data to substantiate particular claims or to justify certain policy recommendations;
it then turned to more normative assumptions about ‘desirable’ forms
of ownership or institutional arrangements that may best facilitate democratic dialogue;
and finally, it argued that researchers should consider ownership in ideological
terms, not as a collection of self-evident truths, but claims that reveal particular
ideological positions.
Each of these approaches may be singly justifiable but, taken together, they provide
a much more productive method of cultural policy analysis. The normative
without the empirical tends towards the abstract while the empirical without the
conceptual tends towards the tedious. By adding in the recognition that what are all
too often seen as rather bureaucratic processes are in fact systems of thought and
action that, in the present climate, mobilise market-oriented values and marginalise
non-commercial objectives; debates concerning ownership can be seen as crucial
analytical ciphers for contemporary neo-liberalism.
In conclusion, I am arguing for an approach to media ownership that integrates
empirical data, normative assumptions and ideological critique into a robust assessment
of ownership that acknowledges the role of agency, interests and structures.
We need to identify whose interests are most vociferously represented in ownership
debates and to highlight the mechanisms both of the inclusion and exclusion of different
perspectives. We need not only to evaluate the dominant paradigms that mark
the discussion of ownership but also to introduce alternative frames and new starting
points. Only by combining the empirical with the conceptual and the technical
with the ideological can we be assured of capturing the real significance of debates
on ownership and, in turn, be in a better position to press more effectively for
genuinely democratic forms of media ownership.
Note
1. For details of the campaign by Mexican students against Mexican media concentration,
see Wilkinson (2012). The Leveson Inquiry, instigated because of the phone hacking
crisis involving News Corp’s News of the World, into the ethics and standards of the
British press is at www.levesoninquiry.org.uk. Details of the review into Australia’s
media ownership rules can be found in Reuters 2012.
182 D. Freedman
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