ets, controlling 60% of all rock programming. They outright own the
tours of musicians like Janet Jackson, Aerosmith, Pearl Jam, Madonna and N'Sync. They own the network which airs Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Casey Kasem, and the Fox Sports
Radio Network. With 103,000,000 listeners in the U.S. and 1,000,000,000 globally (1/6 of
the world population), this powerful company has grown unchecked, using their monopoly to
influence the entire music industry.
Media concentration not only reduces the variety of voices in the media culture, but it
represents an almost impassable barrier to new smaller companies that want to enter the
media business. Large media companies have flexibility with regard to advertising rates,
access to converged media outlets, and economies of scale that are very difficult to
compete with. For this reason, the number of daily newspapers in North America has shrunk
dramatically, and many North American cities now have only one daily newspaper
competing for readers. An example: Vancouver, the third-largest city in Canada, has only
two daily papers. Both Vancouver’s broadsheet Sun and the tabloid Province are owned by
the same company, CanWest Global, which also owns the National Post and the Global and
CH TV networks. It is in every meaningful sense a one-newspaper town. (For the sake of
argument, we’ll ignore the free commuter papers now in vogue, and which feature mostly
wire copy and not original writing.)
McChesney英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】 identifies a pattern that has defined the development of media throughout
th
century,
modern history. Beginning with the newspaper, a medium that originated in the 17
media have started out as competitive enterprises, then slowly evolved into concentrated
oligopoly. The dismal trend from openness and plurality to closed systems and homogeneity
contradicts claims from defenders of market forces that private ownership is the best
guarantor of the freedom of expression and abundant variety of opinion. Media industries in
th
century developed trade associations—the Canadian Association of Broadcasters
the 20
(CAB), representing Canada’s private broadcasters, for example—to lobby governments
and the public, create self-serving “codes of conduct” that allow these industries to self-
regulate (rather than fall under public scrutiny), and make use of substantial PR talent to
shape opinion in their favour.
Major developments in broadcast policy and related matters have turned in favour of large
media corporations. McChesney cites policy, copyright, and anti-trust law as particular
problems, and his points are itemized here:
Media Economics, Policy, and Regulation 4-25
(1) The U.S. 1996 Telecommunications Act was widely interpreted as offering a private
and for-profit direction to American media.
(2) Copyright, originally intended to give artists, writers, and other creators control over
their works, has been extended to seventy years
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