Coexistence—Odds Appear to be Slim
Media consolidation has its ups and downs; big businesses purchase and sell small companies easily, so economically it allows for savings, which benefits the consumer and investor in us all. Nonetheless, media consolidation in television limit’s the diversity of programs, so what we consume through television channels (broadcast and cable) are controlled and selected by fewer and fewer people, which we know fewer and fewer about. Apparently, then we are in the midst of losing localism thus losing the promotion of diversity to the masses, at large.
Moreover, according to an article titled “Consolidation, Budget Cuts Mean Party Must Learn How to Play by New Rules” by Flavia Colgan, a MSNBC-TV Contributor, published November 18, 2005, “Investigative reporting is expensive, but talk is cheap. Very little investigative journalism is done by television news anymore. When is the last time you heard of Fox News Channel breaking a story, for example?” Colgan added, this problem is not isolated to television news; “competition [overall] in the news business has increased dramatically and this has led to a decrease in the ability of news organizations to take risks.” This competition is fueled by appearing the most appealing.
Ted Turner, CNN founder and Turner Enterprises chairman, stated in article, “My Beef with Big Media,” that “the media giants now own not only broadcast networks and local stations; they also own the cable companies that pipe in the signals of their competitors and the studios that produce most of the programming.” Turner shows how consolidated the television industry has become throughout the past fifteen years by mentioning, “In 1990, the major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—fully or partially owned just 12.5 percent of the new series they aired. By 2000, it was 56.3 percent. Just two years later, it had surged to 77.5 percent.”
So one can grasp consolidating the television industry, the most consumed media in the United States, is restricting the variety of programs. A poll conducted by Project for Excellence in Journalism found through surveying journalists, editors, and news executives that editors say their staff size has declined over the last three years by forty-three percent. Of national journalists forty-four percent write or produce four stories a week, if not more; only thirty-five percent say they compose three or less. Colgan also states, “When asked if the ‘bottom line’ was hurting news coverage or just changing the way organizations do things, 74 percent of journalists said it was hurting coverage, as did 69 percent of editors.”
Furthermore, in an interview with Newspaper & Technology in June of 2001, Joseph Basara, chief executive officer of WRH (Walter Reist Holding) marketing, discussed the company’s U.S. plans for Ferag. Basara replied to the question about the effects of newspaper consolidation on the manner he carries out business by saying, “Yes, there is some consolidation and fewer individual ownership entities that are in the market.… What we also need to acknowledge is that while newspaper consolidation has occurred in terms of ownership, this has not necessarily translated to operations. While it has some national components to it, the newspaper is still a local product.”
Andrew Carnegie, 19th Century steel industrial giant, believed the reason for a single company to own the whole production process of a particular commodity or product was to protect the customer--from start to finish the sole company has control over the item in return regulating the quality of the product firsthand. So, with Carnegie’s concept of consolidation, it is a good idea, yet we, as consumers, cannot rely fully on a single enterprise to care about our billfolds more than their bottom-line, e.g Enron. However, media consolidation has its ups and downs; nevertheless, I full hearty support diversity (the ability to have a variety of minds and beliefs represented and distributed to the masses) in a single market.
Concluding, consolidation is good, when it does not interfere with the quality and diversity of a particular media outlet, yet the odds appear to be slim that both can successfully coexist.
Media consolidation raises the fear of the Orwell's 1984 Big Brother society, which could be across the horizon--if we, as members of a free society, unlearn the precious able to question, even our authorities. That is, we leave ourselves open for a Jerry Cantrell-like "Degradation Trip."
