cent to 39 per cent, up from the historical 35 per cent. The FCC also lifted a restriction preventing a company from owning both a newspaper and TV station in all but the smallest markets, and relaxed ownership rules to allow a single company to own up to three TV stations in the largest cities. But Democrats criticized the proposals noting that the practical effect of the changes demanded by the White House is to protect Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network and CBS-Viacom from having to comply with the lower 35 per cent cap.8
The argument continued when News Corp’s move to acquire a control- ling stake in DirectTV parent Hughes Electronics Corp for US$6.6 billion – more than doubling its worldwide satellite TV presence to 22 million subscribers – was approved by the Republican-dominated FCC in December 2003, despite claims it would result in beneficial changes in content, tech- nology and pricing (Pasztor and Squeo 2003, p. A8). Even the New York Times– Noam Chomsky’s lead ‘agenda-setting’ newspaper for corporate America (Chomsky 1997) – was critical of the spate of media mergers, par- ticularly the unquestioning way the media covered them. The paper’s columnist William Safire claimed these mergers were covered as ‘gee whiz, which personality will be top dog, how will shareholders profit, which giant will go bust’. While the NY Timeswas protecting its own position, Safire raised an important point: how do we better protect the competition that keeps us free and different? He said that those who claimed the Internet kept variety and competition were wrong. Much of the Internet was con- trolled by the giants too, leading to a ‘headlong concentration of media power in the US’ (Safire 2004, p. 9).
Ironically, however, media conglomerates were still, ultimately, answerable to their company shareholders, something Rupert Murdoch attested to at a News Corporation shareholders meeting in October 2006. When questioned by representatives of the conservative Parent’s TV Council and Accuracy in the Media about News Corp’s television output, Murdoch revealed that he had intervened at the personal request of a leading shareholder, the Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal, to query Fox News’s description of riots in Paris the previous year as led by Muslims. Murdoch said that he was concerned because he understood that many of the rioters were from an Algerian Catholic background. ‘All I said [to Fox] was “you ought to look at that and see if it’s right. If it isn’t you ought to change it” ’(Clarke 2006, p. 35).
not consider in detail the massive technological advances, from analogue to digital, from coaxial cable to opticalfibre, from broad beam satellite to K Band, it is these technological developments that have helped the global conglomerates reach out around the world. And it is the impact of this reach that is the central concern of this book. Technological change has allowed the creation of the global media industry and, as the tyranny of distance crumbles, creating communities without boundaries in the global flow of mass media products, there are political and social consequences.
For, the global spread of the media conglomerates has been remarkable, creating concerns about transnational influence and widespread fears of US cultural imperialism. Despite falling numbers of hours of US television in countries like UK, Spain, Germany and Italy, and a strategy to, as CNN’s Chris Cramer described it, ‘de-Americanize’ the content, and make MTV-style-programming with ‘local content creation’ (The Economist 5 April 2003, p. 59), there was a worldwide pattern emerging – as a TV market or broadcaster matured, it tended to spend more on domestic pro- ductions or local remakes of imported formats – nevertheless the British Television Distributors Association estimated that more than 60 per cent of global trade in television exports, worth approximately $US4 billion, was controlled by the US. They may have been less visible in a country’s mainstream content due to a rise in US co-productions and the growth in the number of TV stations, but in the multi-channel world that needed cheap, long-running series ‘overall influence [was] undimmed’ (Financial Times 24 July 2003, p. 6).
As a result, changes in information communication which technology has made possible are first on the list of what Barrie Axford calls the complex and multidimensional character of globalization, and questions are raised about the shape of global society, the role of the state, and what member- ship means in the globalized world (Axford 1995, 1999). Transnational net- works from NGOs to Islamists, combined with increasingly porous borders, have created a paradox for open societies as to governance and identity, as well as aiding both the creation of transnational identities and the disinte- gration of imagined communities from the Balkans to Southeast Asia. As we shall see below, instant global communications has traditional authori- ties talking of media imperialism and national security, in a world that is
‘more complex, increasingly centre less, and featuring a multiplication of interacting parts that are increasingly fragmented and unstable’ (Buell 1994, p. 10).
To compete effectively, these media companies have opted to become colossal conglomerates through mergers and acquisitions. They are increasingly criticized as cartels, operating globally with little regulation or
social responsibility, and strongly influencing governments with their content. Surprisingly, perhaps, as globalization restructures both national economies and changes the media industry, there is less, not more, cover- age of global trends. There is half as much international coverage on the broadcast networks as there was ten years ago according to Stephen Hess, author of International News and Foreign Correspondent.Hess surveyed 404 foreign correspondents, and concluded that coverage has declined in newspapers too: two-thirds of the largest 1900 newspapers have no foreign correspondents at all.
Indeed, where there is coverage, it is the violent image that dominates half the stories in what is often called ‘bang bang’ coverage. It is about pic- tures not analysis and explanation. Writer Neil Hickey in the Columbia Journalism Reviewrecounts a conversation with one Gulf War journalist who spoke of:
getting a ‘rocket from New York’ – a missive telling him what competing net- works were airing – ordering him to file more on various firefights, regardless of their military significance. ‘New York wants John Wayne movies,’ he said, ‘not talking heads’. (Schechter 1997)
And, truth is as much a casualty in this media war as in any other.
Intentional or not, one effect of what is called the information age is the continuing under-informing of the larger public, while an elite sector is inundated with more news and information than it can possibly absorb.
And it is not just the media corporations that have merged:
There has been a merging of business and journalistic values as well, such that the different companies have become practically indistinguishable from one other. As the companies grow, often by taking on vast loads of debt, the inevitable downsizing and scaling back of news divisions has contributed to this sameness. (Schechter 1997)
During the run up to the war in Iraq, every major media company, Time Warner (CNN), Viacom (CBS), Disney (ABC), GE, (NBC), News Corp (FOX) and the New York Timeswith its new multi-platform, global ambi- tions was petitioning the FCC to change the regulations to allow these com- panies to make acquisitions that would create billions of dollars of new equity value. As public-listed companies, ‘at some level the decisions of the parent company – in this case the obvious need to avoid bitter acrimony with the Bush administration, if not to curry outright favour – became engaged with what the rest of the company is doing (if not, hello, share- holder suits)’ (Wolf 2004, p. 100).
Critics suggest that another impact of consolidation is that alternative voices are kept out of the mainstream. Concentration of ownership ‘threatens diversity in news and other programming . . . most people still rely on a handful of media sources which are being absorbed into giant con- glomerates willing to flex their muscles’ (BusinessWeek23 February 2004, p. 96). The latest round of mergers may look like good business, but they also mean fewer voices, as the concentration of media continues to ‘hurt’
the variety and quality of programs (Lowry et al. 2004, p. 38).
In Asia, concerns to protect distribution have led to the sanitization of media products. Former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten accused News Corp controlled Harper Collins of reneging on an agreement to publish his book East and West, when it looked likely to offend Beijing (BBC 27 February 1998). And, Murdoch’s apparent decision on Patten’s book was echoed in the comments of Sumner Redstone, Chairman and CEO of Viacom who, when discussing efforts to get MTV shown in China, was quoted as saying: ‘Of course we don’t want to offend the Chinese government or the people unnecessarily . . . we try to stay away from the three T’s: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen Square’ (Thal Larsen and Dickie 2004, p. 8).
Other products, popular in Asia, stand out because they are not contro- versial: ‘Discovery is unique in that our content tends to be government- friendly’ according to the travel and nature channel’s founder, chairman and Chief Executive John Hendricks (Financial Times25 September 2003).
Increased commercialization means audiences are viewed as consumers rather than citizens, with a concomitant increase in entertainment pro- gramming, and apparent abundance offering little genuine diversity and no real contribution to the creation of a meaningful public sphere, all of which are developments that are ‘bound to have serious consequences for nation- states with fragile and unstable policies’ (Chadhu and Kaviori 2000, pp. 428–9).
So while new communications technology like the Internet offers more space at lower entry costs, and there is programming plurality in numerical terms, what is particularly relevant to this book is that there is little genuine diversity of programming in Asia: ‘the emergence of the US-style com- mercialized model of broadcasting which is limited in terms of programme innovation and diversity and which contributes little to the creation of a meaningful public sphere’ (Chadhu and Kaviori 2000, p. 429). And, if Asia continues to mirror the highly competitive American TV news market where the four big broadcast networks continue to jostle with three big 24-hour cable news channels, what hope for the meaningful democratic debate? It is ‘angled, high-octane, opinionated news – not sober objectivity- that sells best’ (The Economist3 May 2003, p. 60).