The Media: Markets or Monopoly?

Ours is often described as the "information age," but a remarkably large portion of the information we receive is controlled by a remarkably small number of media sources. According to Freedom House, within states, of 187 governments, 92 own the television broadcasting structure outright, and 67 have part ownership (U.S. News & World Report). Ownership of the world's media sources, in comparison, is increasingly concentrated in a few giant national and multinational corporations. In the early 1980s they numbered about fifty; by the mid-1990s they had been reduced to twenty. Although thousands of other sources of information about politics, society, and culture are available, their influence is comparatively negligible. In the United States, for example, despite more than twenty-five thousand media outlets, only "23 corporations control most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures" (Bagdikian). As corporate America merges its media sources into ever larger but fewer units (as witnessed, for example, by the Disney Corporation’s buyout of ABC television), fewer and fewer corporate executives control what Americans hear and see about the world around them. Critics worry that the American people have become a "captive audience," subject to limited information from limited sources. Nonetheless, the promise of profits and the ability to exercise influence over "news, information, public ideas, popular culture, and political attitudes" spur the corporate giants and their investors onward (Bagdikian).

The media's impact on the global diffusion of Western culture is widely recognized. However, its impact on public affairs is more difficult to trace. Scholars generally agree that the media have the capacity to set the agenda of public discourse about political affairs. In the process of agenda setting, they also often shape public policy. Particular power is attributed to CNN (Cable News Network), the twenty-four-hour television news channel beamed around the world. For example, its global broadcasts of squalor and violence were often viewed as a catalyst to the humanitarian intervention in Somalia and to NATO’s proactive military effort to bring the disputants in Bosnia to the bargaining table. These reassuring examples of the positive contribution of information technology to international peacekeeping aside, some caution that this "virtual diplomacy" has limitations. One critic has described the impact of CNN and the media this way:

In foreign policy circles these days one often hears that the advent of instantaneous and global technology has given the news media far greater influence in international relations than ever before, robbing diplomacy of its rightful place at the helm in the process. Observers of international affairs call it the CNN curve. It suggests that when CNN floods the airwaves with news of a foreign crisis, it evokes an emotional outcry from the public to "do something." Under the spell of the CNN curve, goes this refrain, policymakers have no choice but to redirect their attention to the crisis at hand or risk unpopularity, whether or not such revision is merited by policy considerations. (Neuman)

Control of television and other media sources by the United States and a number of European countries became the focus of hot dispute with the Global South during the 1980s. Dissatisfied with the media coverage it received from Global North news agencies and resentful of Northern domination of other forms of communication, Global South leaders demanded a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to create a new regime with fair rules to right the imbalance of the information flows from North to South that painted what they perceived to be an unfavorable image of the South. This image, they believed, fostered Northern values, such as consumerism and conspicuous consumption, that perpetuated the South's dependence on the North. As the North-South conflict brewed, the United States withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in part due to its role in promoting the new communications order.

       The NWICO has since receded on the global agenda, but the issues remain very much alive in nongovernmental organizations concerned about the concentration of so much media power in so few hands. In 1995 Hollywood was able to beam the Academy Awards around the world to over a billion people, and American evangelist Billy Graham preached via electronic links to a similar number in over 185 countries. The new global information infrastructure is "especially disturbing because dominance in 'global' products implies not just the ability to ship products around the world, but dominance in cultural exports. This dominance provides the potential to displace indigenous culture with a tide of largely Western, largely consumerist, global conformity. Perhaps globalization is just a nice word that multinational corporations use to hide their efforts to infect the entire world with the cultural virus of commercialism" (Mowlana).

Whatever its true character, the $600 billion global telecommunications industry is without question the major vehicle for the rapid spread of ideas, information, and images worldwide. It also plays a role in the transfer of institutions and generation of income, as exhibited by the World Trade Organization’s World Telecom Pact. Issued by nearly seventy countries, the accord to open the industry to the free market creates a new regime that ends government and private telecommunication monopolies in many states and is expected to pump new funds into the global economy by slashing phone costs to consumers and creating countless jobs. Estimating that liberalization could add $ l trillion, or 4 percent, to the value of world economic output over the next decade, WTO Director-General Renato Ruggiero proclaimed that the accord "is good news for the international economy, it is good news for businesses and it is good news for the ordinary people around the world" (International Herald Tribune). Many, of course, agree with this assessment, and see global telecommunications liberating minds, expanding choices, penetrating societies closed to diplomatic communication, and creating a single, more united, homogenized global culture. Others disagree, however. They note that the airwaves can communicate divisive messages as well as unifying ones; what is said is more important than how much is said, and division rather than global solidarity can be created when particular values are disseminated.

One counterpoint to the "McWorld" of transnational media consumerism is "Jihad" – a world driven by "parochial hatreds," not "universalizing markets" (Barber). In this context, it is sobering to note that the Ayatollah Khomeini, author of the revival of Islamic fundamentalism that swept the shah of Iran from power in 1979, "combined his access to networks of mosques and bazaars with that of electronic communication and cassette tapes" to carry on a successful long-distance bid to create an Iranian theocracy (Mowlana).

Hence, because globalized communications and information may be used as tools for conflict and revolution as well as for community and peace, the creation of "a world without boundaries where everybody will know everything about everybody else" may not necessarily be a better world (Moisy). We must ask, would the world be better or worse if people throughout the globe were to become "rootless, atomistic individuals floating free of any ties to society,... a world without ties of history, language, culture and kinship, in which it is costless for people and objects to move around?" (Economist).