Outline and Discuss the View that Increasing Concentration in Ownership of the Mass Media is bad for Audiences.
Lindsay Glover L63
Outline and Discuss the View that Increasing Concentration in Ownership of the Mass Media is bad for Audiences.
To sociologists, the increasing concentration of the mass media is a very debatable topic. There are two different ways at looking at this situation. One way is that it is good to increase concentration because it will benefit the public. However many people look at concentration as a bad thing because only a small amount of people are able to control the media, increasing their own power.
People, who have a radical view, would agree that media concentration is bad for the audience. One of their main concerns is that too few people are gaining too much power, through concentration. Especially from a manipulative point of view, this means that the top executives and company owners are having too much control over what we, the public, are subjected to. This suggests that if more concentration occurs then soon enough only a few people will have the ultimate power to regulate what we see and read. An example of this is the power Rupert Murdoch has over the entire mass media. He owns a huge 37% market share of national newspapers, which is the biggest amount that just one company owns and the rest is split between lots of smaller groups. By Murdoch having so much control especially over the newspaper industry, he is able to manipulate the stories in his papers to reflect his own personal views. This is bad for audiences because if it is only Murdoch’s opinion that is being shown through the papers, then it could be that we are not getting the whole truth of a certain story. We are never able to know what is the opinion of some top executive or the actual truth. When the war began in Iraq, Murdoch supported Bush’s view that it was the best thing to do and he was right to have gone ahead with it. So whenever Murdoch’s papers wrote an article on the progress of the war, it was always very much in favour , saying things were going well and they were on the edge of a breakthrough. However the same story may have been published in a different paper, not owned by Murdoch and that would read that the war wasn’t moving anywhere and there was no progress being made. This again is bad for audiences because if the same story is being shown but on separate papers with a completely different view then who is the reader supposed to believe.
