power and counter- power in global media. michael eisner (formerly disney) ted turner (cnn-time...
TRANSCRIPT
Power and Counter-Power in Global Media
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•Michael Eisner (formerly Disney)
•Ted Turner (CNN-Time Warner)
•Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, (Mediaset)
•Thomas Middelhoff (Bertelsmann)
•Prince Waleed bin Talal (Rotana)
Global Media Market
• The 1980s and 90s saw a lot of mergers and buyouts of media and entertainment companies. Vertical vs. Horizontal integration
• Vertical Integration: ownership across various industries and verticals, such as distribution networks, toys and clothing manufacture and/or retailing etc. Maximizing profit (e.g. Viacom)
• Horizontal Integration: ownership in the same line of production-film studio buying another studio
The Mighty 7 (2011 revenue)
• * Disney (40.1 billion)
• * Time Warner (29 billion)
• * Viacom (market value: $30 billion)
• * General Electric (former owner of NBC, market value: $147 billion)
• * News Corporation ($33.4 billion)
• *Google (37.9 billion)
• * Microsoft (69.94 billion)
Vertical Integration
Viacom
Global Media Market
• Robert McChesney: First Tier: (Global Reach) AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corporation, TCI, General Electric, Sony, Seagram
• Second tier: (business at national/regional/niche level) Kirch, Thomson, Globo, Televisa, Canal Plus, Hachette, BBC, etc.
• The second tier is often aided in its expansion by the 1st tier
Why a media oligopoly?
•Deregulation since the 1980s: ATT was dissolved in 1984 only to allow for other companies to consolidate more
•Progress in media technologies
•Search for economies of scale
Why a media oligopoly?
•Telecommunications Act of 1996:
•foreign ownership was allowed
•Cross-industry ownership rules were relaxed: phone and cable now could merge
•Lower prices or more mergers?
Impact•Oligopolization of global media:
•7 companies : 75% of the US tv audience and 90% of tv news audience
•6 studios: 90% of American film revenues
•4 major record label companies: 80% of record revenues (EMI was recently bought by Universal Music Group)
•1 radio behemoth (Clear Channel): 105 million listeners (12-1,214 stations 96’ Act)
Impact•pay-per basis versus universal service
•Digital divide both domestically and globally
•Does free market necessarily lead to a democratic market of ideas?
•Habermas’ public sphere: unfettered discourse? Media space where consensus and deliberation are reached.
•What can you do in the face of oligopoly?
Counter-power
•The people strike back: participatory culture?
•Diffusion of information control: The Media: social space where power is decided;
•Horizontal comm: mass self-communication
Is this counter-power?
• “...any post in the Internet, regardless of the intention of its author, becomes a bottle drifting in the ocean of global communication, a message susceptible of being received and reprocessed in unexpected ways.” (Castells: 247)
Counter-Power?•Fordist model of information
production is over: p2p comm. Produsing instead of producing.
•ohmynews.com
•Bondy Blog
•Google Bombs
•Old media Barons can strike back: Newscorp buying Myspace; Google and YouTube, Yahoo and Flickr and Del.icio.us
•So, should we worry about global media consolidation in the age of horizontal communication?
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