Courtesy of Jose S.
“Because media companies are businesses, they should be allowed to operate without interference from the government”
As time goes by, it is clearer that media companies’ operations should not be limited by the United States government. The economic potential of a company, struggle among types of media, and the approval of the public are all important factors that shape the ways in which media companies function. The American capitalist system combined with all these factors shaped the media industry into a business that the government decided to regulate in a special unusual manner than any other business. Therefore, since media companies are regulated by all these nongovernmental factors, there is no need for the government to limit the operations of media companies.
Since businesses provide goods or services to those who want them and media companies provide the service of communication and goods through its commercials, the media companies are businesses. As a business, media companies must have enough resources to operate and compete against other media companies. Those media companies with limited resources will be more incompetent than larger well-financed companies; thus, they are more vulnerable to failure than those big companies that can afford changes on the working environment due to its financial stability. Since money is the principal means through which a business functions, the lack of it would be damaging to smaller corporations. As Benjamin Compaine described,
…mass media cannot be sustained only by meaning well… No newspaper ever folded because of lack of something to write about, but only for a lack of circulation and therefore advertising. Writers, artists, graphics designers, producers and editors want and need profitable employers to provide livable wages, appropriate equipment, sufficient travel and similar resources (Compaine, 2001)
in the American capitalist economic system it is very important the productiveness of a business because its success and profit will be traduced into growth. As in the “newspaper” that Compaine talks about, small media companies that lack resources are more likely to fail than those huge companies that can afford the failure of a program but will create new ones to recover.
In any business, including the media of course, financial flexibility plays an important role. It defines a company’s boundaries and its magnitude in the market. This means that small media companies are limited by its financial limitations and not big media companies. At the same time big healthy media companies are growing and increasing their size. In fact, we can see how in 1983, 50 companies owned approximately 50% of the total media outlets in the U. S.; then by 2000 it narrowed to 6 companies: General Electric, Viacom, Time Warner, Bertelsmann, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and Disney (Newman, 2008, p. 66). Taking this into consideration, the limitations that the government puts on media ownership is due to the success of some companies. This seems as if the government would be punishing those media companies that are doing well just because other media companies are not as successful as these.
The type of media a company focuses on is another factor that contributes to the expansion of media companies and thus the greater ability to compete against other companies. A company that specializes on a single type of media such as print, radio, television, or internet might be significant among companies that specialize on the same type of media. However, a newspaper company is insignificant compared to a company that owns internet and television outlets. In addition to the fact that media companies that own several outlets of different types of media are more progressive that those focused on a single type, we have to acknowledge that popularity and relevance of a type of media are also important. In the early 1900s, newspaper and radio where the primary form of media. By the mid-twentieth century with the emergence of television, the popularity of newspaper and radio had to be redistributed now into three subdivisions. Within time, the improvement of television easily surpassed newspaper and radio. Then, late in the 1990s the introduction of the internet revolutionized the media industry leaving all the other types of media behind do to its singularity of being able to include all of them in one.
As we see, the introduction of a new type of media, once it is established, outdates older forms of media. Basically this means that media types compete among themselves and those new innovative forms of media attract the audience of the other types of media. In an openDemocracy Article, Benjamin Compaine wrote,
There are fewer newspaper publishers in the US, but then again the newspaper industry has been contracting in size for decades, and faces far more competition from other media than in its heyday early in the twentieth century. Circulation has fallen steadily, as has its share of advertising. One can’t expect a dying industry to do anything but consolidate (Compaine, 2001),
pointing out the effect that media completion has had on newspaper. In other words, what happens is that media compete against other types of media, not media companies against other media companies. Government regulations on media ownership is not the right solution to fix the problem, since the problem is that older media companies are falling apart due to its irrelevance as compared to more innovative types of media.
While talking about media regulation on ownership, it is very important to take into account media customers. In the media industry, viewers are customers who want to see what they want. Those media companies that satisfy their viewers’ needs are the ones that will succeed in the industry. By choosing what they want to see, viewers regulate what they like and what they don’t, thus what media offers. Since the public chooses who gets its money or in other words who makes profit, they are regulating the media; therefore, there is no need for the government to regulate media ownership since the public regulating it by demanding it.
These are just a few of the many factors that indicate how media ownership needs no interference from the government, since it is regulated by many other factors more efficiently.
Bibliography
Compaine, B. (2001, November 8). The myths of encroaching global media ownership. openDemocracy: free thinking for the world. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from http://online.und.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2fwebapps%2fblackboard%2fexecute%2flauncher%3ftype%3dCourse%26id%3d_12415_1%26url%3d.
Conway, K. (2009). Technology /form. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota.
Henderson, D. (1993). The fortune encyclopedia of economics. New York: Warner Books.
McEachern, W. A. (2009). MICRO ECON. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.
McEachern, W. A. (2009). MACRO ECON. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.
Newman, D. M. (2008). Sociology: Exploring the architecture of everyday life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
