Media Ownership and Agenda Control

The hidden limits of the information age

Justin Schlosberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138775466
• eBook ISBN: 9781317659617
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media Ownership and Agenda Control offers a detailed examination of media ownership amidst the complexities of the information age, from the resurgence of press barons to the new influence wielded by internet giants. Much of the discussion pivots around recent revelations and controversies in the media industry, such as the findings published in 2012 from the Leveson Inquiry, the US Federal Communications Commission's ruling on net neutrality in 2015, Edward Snowden's decision to leak National Security Agency (NSA) documents in 2013 and the legal battles over ancillary copyrights waged in Germany and elsewhere. Justin Schlosberg traces the obscure and often unnoticed ways in which agendas continue to be shaped by a small number of individual and institutional megaphones, despite the rise of grassroots and participatory platforms, and despite ubiquitous displays of adversarial journalism. Above all, it explores the web of connections and interdependence that binds old and new media gatekeepers, and cements them to the surveillance and warfare state. This ultimately foregrounds the book's call for a radical rethink of ownership regulation, situating the movement for progressive media reform alongside wider struggles against the iniquities and injustices of global capitalism.

This book's re-evaluation of the nature of media ownership and control in a postdigital world will prove to be an invaluable resource for students of media studies and journalism, as well as all those with an interest in the changing dynamics of media power.

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Part I
Heard and Not Seen

Chapter 1
Introduction

With great power comes great invisibility. This was the defining feature of what Stephen Lukes called the ‘third dimension of power’ (Lukes, 2005 [1974]). In contrast to both coercion and persuasion, here the very exercise of power is obscured not only from those subjected to it, but potentially even those who wield it. It was this obscurity that prompted Lukes to ask:

Is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?

(2005 [1974], p. 28)

The potential for powerful voices to shape ‘perceptions, cognitions and preferences’ has always been at the root of media ownership concerns. But historically these concerns tended to invoke a kind of power that is visible and vested in the hands of wealthy proprietors, who used their media assets openly for political leverage. In conventional histories of the British press, the rise of so-called press barons during the first half of the twentieth century epitomised this kind of power. Lord Beaverbrook, regarded by some historians as the first Baron of Fleet Street, told a Royal Commission inquiry in 1947 that he ran the Daily Express “merely for the purpose of making propaganda and with no other motive” (Curran and Seaton, 2003, p. 42).

Yet in spite of such bravado, the press barons were neither more hands-on nor propagandist compared to their predecessors and successors. As James Curran and Jean Seaton have shown, in reality:

They did not break with tradition by using their papers for political propaganda; their distinctive contribution was rather that they downgraded propaganda in favour of entertainment. Nor did they subvert the role of the press as a fourth estate; on the contrary it was they who detached the commercial press from the political parties and, consequently, from the state. What actually happened is, in some ways, the exact opposite of historical mythology.

(2003, p. 37)

But the conventional history of the British press depicted them as fourth estate deviants—examples of how media proprietors can undermine the values of independent journalism in their pursuit of profit and power. This served to mystify the ways in which propaganda and control were exercised by preceding and subsequent media owners who were less vocal, and less visible.

Today, the complexities of the information age have meant that the political, cultural and ideological influence of those who control major media groups seems ever more uncertain and, according to some, ever less significant. Behind the very concept of an information age lies a belief in the empowering potential of digital communications, fostering new forms of civic accountability. In place of a mass media audience, it has produced an endless ‘tail’ of fragmented user communities; in place of traditional gatekeepers—those who once exercised editorial control over mass media institutions—we have ‘prosumers’ and ‘produsers’, citizen journalists, hacktivists, culture jammers, gatewatchers, the ‘networked fourth estate’ and, above all, the crowd.

From this perspective, it is easy to see why media ownership appears less of a problem than it once was. If those who control mass media institutions no longer shape or define the agenda—be it the media agenda, public agenda or policy agenda—then there is arguably no longer a need to challenge media ownership, even when it is highly concentrated. The era of the media mogul may not yet be behind us, but the ability of wealthy individuals or vested interests to dominate public conversation seems, on the face of it, a product of the past.

My aim here is not to dismiss this broad narrative as naïve idealism or blind faith. There are many compelling reasons for believing that the implications of media ownership in a post-digital universe are not what they once were. But I do want to challenge this central premise: that the risks of concentrated media power for liberal democracies are dissolving amid an ever expanding horizon of information sources. On the contrary, I want to try and persuade you that rather than dissolving, these risks are rapidly evolving and in many ways intensifying, and that the agenda influence of major media brands has not so much waned but become increasingly opaque in a media landscape that is at once converged and fragmented, mass and social, open and closed. In light of these contradictions and complexities, there is a pressing need to think about, question and research media ownership in new ways, and to re-evaluate its implications for democracy and accountability.

Historically, both critical and defensive accounts of media ownership have tended to focus on the relationship between media concentration and diversity of expression (e.g. Kawashima, 2011). This often presumed connection has channelled academic and policy attention to media ownership through the lens of media plurality. What matters here above all is that there is a sufficient number of independent producers capable of fostering a marketplace of ideas and producing an informed citizenry. But the relationship between media plurality and diversity of expression is by no means clear-cut. Whereas some studies have indeed demonstrated an inverse correlation—suggesting that less media concentration corresponds to greater diversity—others have found the opposite, suggesting that the more competitive a media market is, the more prone it is to producing homogenised content across the board.¹

In his seminal work on concentrated media power, Edwin C. Baker (2007) argued that ownership matters partly because concentration is a problem irrespective of its impact on diversity of expression. According to this view, discussions of media ownership that focus exclusively on output diversity tend to miss a crucial point: that the range of sources matters more for democracy than the range of viewpoints. In essence, democracies require multiple independent media as a check against the threat of owner-driven bias that can manifest in subtle and often invisible ways; and as the best guarantee that certain types of content will not be suppressed in an otherwise diverse media offer.

It’s hard to argue with the view that democracies, by definition, cannot be meaningfully supported by highly concentrated media industries. Indeed, the idea of plurality as a democratic safeguard in this sense is a well-established policy norm in liberal democracies. For decades, lawmakers and regulators have espoused concerns that media concentration places too much power of voice in too few hands, to the detriment of plurality. Yet in spite of the rhetoric, media ownership policy has consistently been captured by the interests of large media conglomerates such that even when legislation has been drafted with clearly stated plurality objectives, it has nonetheless served to fuel the consolidation of media markets within and across sectors (Doyle, 2002; McChesney, 2004; Freedman, 2008).

For many critics, part of the problem is rooted in the way in which the plurality question is defined and addressed by policymakers, especially with its orientation towards a neoliberal market logic that places maximum weight on minimal intervention. Recently, there have been attempts to re-evaluate what plurality means from a radical perspective, as Karl Karppinen put it:

Old hierarchies of media ownership and control continue to persist, but there are also new forms of domination and concentration that are only beginning to emerge. These create a need to critically reflect on the pluralism made possibly by the new media, its limits, and the nature of the barriers that still persist […] Communicative abundance alone does not render questions about the distribution of communicative power and political voice obsolete, but only reconfigures them in a more complex form.

(2013, p. 110)

In reconfiguring the plurality question, Karppinen shifts our attention towards inequalities of access and—more acutely for the purposes here—prominence. This allows us to think beyond just the number of independent voices or outlets present in any given media system; or the diversity of viewpoints that are (in theory at least) accessible or represented; or the contested formulae that are used to measure levels of market concentration. It asks us instead to consider the various conditions in a formally pluralistic media system that can result in some voices being hugely amplified whereas others are left unheard. What seems certain is that against a backdrop of communicative abundance—indeed saturation (Compaine, 2005)—there remains a broadly coherent mainstream agenda defined by the limited range of headlines and hits that attract audiences en masse.

This requires us to consider a diversity of viewpoints not across media output as a whole, but within the confines of a mainstream agenda; that is, within the ‘head’ of the long tail of cultural and information niches characteristic of the digital realm (Anderson, 2009 [2006]). But equally, it requires us to think critically about the tail and the degree to which fragmentation and personalisation can undermine the public sphere and act as a barrier to certain voices and viewpoints reaching a critical mass audience.

This juxtaposition of niche and mainstream accounts for the book’s preoccupation with ‘the agenda’. Its core themes resonate with and draw on the radical pluralism advanced by Baker, Karppinen and others. But it sharpens the focus on what I believe to be a critical aspect of inequity in the ‘distribution of communicative power’. In particular, the book starts from the premise that amplification—the ability to be heard— is the major currency of communicative power, and that such power is all the less open to challenge because of its relative obscurity.

In this new reality, the boundaries of the mainstream agenda are neither sharply defined nor static and the potential levers of influence neither transparent nor one-directional. What this calls for is a broadening of media ownership questions beyond the traditional and linear perspective of control typified by the press barons. Since then, most critical work on media ownership has tended to focus on the agenda influence of individuals or corporations behind media outlets. But the direction or origin of agenda influence is not always obvious in relations between media owners, advertisers, political actors or other institutional elites. As a consequence, this approach has fostered a kind of intellectual apartheid, isolating ownership issues as peculiar to the private media in advanced capitalist democracies. A public media organisation may be formally publicly owned, but there are many different ways in which public ownership can be structured, and this can have a profound impact on the organisation’s accountability, independence and vulnerability to both state and commercial pressures. At a time when public media are facing an existential threat across Europe and much of the world, it is especially urgent that this kind of scrutiny is brought within the framework of media ownership debates (Cushion, 2012).

Recent developments also point to trends and patterns that transcend the divide between liberal, transitional and authoritarian societies. In the UK, disclosures during the Leveson Inquiry in 2012 revealed the intensely intimate relations between media and political elites and the private exchanges and reassurances offered during key moments of media policymaking (Leveson, 2012). This ‘integrated elite structure’ is also endemic in Putin’s Russia and much of the post-Soviet region, where political patronage of media oligarchs has become a defining feature of the ownership landscape (Vartanova, 2011). In Turkey, the opacity of media ownership and merger activity “has allowed an increasingly close relationship between the political establishment (particularly the ruling party, AKP), the Islamic networks, and media conglomerates” (Tunç, 2015). And in South Africa, a brief flirtation with authoritarian-style censorship under President Zuma has given way to a strategy of making and installing regime friends in key positions of both private and public media institutions (van der Westhuizen, 2013).

I am not suggesting that the problem of media ownership is equivalent across these different geopolitical contexts, or that journalists in Western democracies face anything like the scale of threats, pressures and attacks that are routine in countries like Russia. But I do want to suggest that agenda control is often best secured through alliance between political and media elites rather than conflict, and that this is a feature increasingly common to media systems that span the democratic-authoritarian spectrum.

To reach the heart of the matter then, we need to broaden our conception of media ownership beyond the limits of any given media institution or market. To this end, media ownership is considered here as a node within a wider network of power that integrates state and market forces, within and across borders. Above all, the book starts from an acknowledgement of the varied and complex ways in which political, market and media power tend to act in concert, albeit with imbalances in any direction and intermittent moments of conflict and crisis. Des Freedman articulates media ownership in this sense as a relational property that connects “the major social institutions and processes that circulate and embody media power in the world today” (2014, p. 15). It requires us to examine media ownership not just in the context of shareholdings, but as a dynamic and complex set of relationships with other sources of power and influence that make up the ‘media-technology-military-industrial complex’.

In many cases, the media’s entanglement and centrality within webs of networked power manifest directly in corrupt journalistic practices. This was the case, for instance, in 2012 when the owners of India’s Zee News were accused of offering to pull an investigative report centring on one of its major advertisers in return for US$16.4 million worth of committed advertising (Saeed, 2015). In other contexts, as we will see, agenda control is exercised without the presence or need for such overt threats or deals, but is nevertheless contingent on relations of power involving media owners. But in some contexts, those who control media companies may not be directly implicated at all in the agenda dominance of other powerful voices. Yet even here, it’s hard to imagine a more meaningful kind of remedy than one that seeks to democratise media ownership, and thereby make it harder for anyone to monopolise a public megaphone.

It’s worth emphasising at this point a key distinction between media owners and media ownership. Whereas the former is often invoked to highlight the influence of powerful media figures over public conversation, the latter draws our attention to the forms of governance, laws, regulation and institutional cultures associated with particular ownership structures. This leads me ultimately to consider these questions: What kind of media ownership structures can best preserve independence and autonomy? What forms of governance can best insulate journalists and creative workers from the full range of institutional pressures that may filter down via media owners, managers and editors?

Above all, this book seeks to bring ownership back to the centre of questions about media power. Rather than viewing it in isolation, media ownership is considered here as integral to wider concerns about surveillance, privacy, net neutrality and the implications of changing journalistic practices. Although I am not suggesting that all questions of media power are reducible to questions of ownership, we cannot begin to grasp its full significance in today’s media environment without considering the ways in which it cross-cuts with these wider issues.

This book is also steeped in the radical critical tradition that broadly conceives of media ownership as an ideological force, privileging the agendas and narratives of powerful interests in often subtle but systemic ways. But it aims in some small way to move this tradition forward by considering media ownership not as one of several forces or filters that shape the ideological character of the media (Herman and Chomsky, 2002 [1988]), but as a mechanism that is intimately connected to a whole range of pressures that ultimately impact on journalist autonomy. In a similar vein, it reconsiders media concentration as a problem that is central to enduring and emergent concerns around media plurality and diversity, rather than as a problem that has diminished in the wake of new technologies of communication (Napoli, 2011a).

Overall I want to persuade you that, nearly a decade on from Baker’s seminal analysis, media ownership still matters. It matters because “the way in which the media are organized has a significant impact on what the media report” (Aalberg and Curran, 2012, p. 193); it matters because professional media institutions retain a powerful presence in the new information environment; and it matters because those institutions are still needed to support meaningful democratic and cultural expression (Couldry, 2013). Their enduring publicity power provides access to the public consciousness, a window to reflect it back and, potentially, a common space in which to convene and converse as citizens.

But to begin with, I want to suggest that in the context of media ownership, we can think of invisible power in two broadly overlapping ways, each of which bears a close relation to the theory of power that Lukes developed. The first concerns the visibility of media owners themselves, their interactions and inter-relations with other powerful figures and institutions, as well as the nature and extent of their editorial control. The second relates to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Heard and Not Seen
• PART II Dispersal
• PART III Transferral
• PART IV Coexistence
• PART V Demanding the Impossible
• References
• Index