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2. Mass Media as Business Organizations: A U.S.-Japanese Comparison
- University of Hawai'i Press
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47 2 MassMediaasBusinessOrganizations: A U.S.–Japanese Comparison D. ELEANOR WESTNEY M a s s media organizations rank among the major business firms in highly industrialized societies,1 and the business side of the media is a continuing focus of research, regulatory scrutiny, and media attention. Changes in the strategies or performance of mass media firms, mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies and start-ups, management difficulties and labor problems in media industries are reminders that media organizations are businesses, with business goals of returns on investment and vulnerabilities to changing business conditions. Such issues evoke long-standing anxieties about the potentially contradictory pulls between the two roles of mass media firms: as providers of the critically important public goods of information and values, and as businesses that buy and sell and are themselves bought and sold. The business side of mass media firms has widely been viewed with suspicion. The figure of the press baron is a standard figure both of fiction and of media history, and illustrates one of the oldest fears about the business aspect of the media firm: that the pursuit of profits will foster sensationalism and a lowering of journalistic and artistic standards.2 Another recurring fear is that the owners of media firms will suppress or distort information or values, out of a desire either to propitiate advertisers or to serve their own interests in other business ventures.3 The expansion of conglomerate ownership in the United States and Great Britain in the 1970s and 1980s generated a new anxiety: that the orientation to profits will drive managers to cut costs by reducing expenditures on information gathering or on the “quality” of their product.4 Conglomerate ownership can also intensify a more general inclination on the part of media firms to increase profits by reducing competition, either by acquiring their competitors or by engaging in 48 D. Eleanor Westney cutthroat competition to drive them out of business, thereby concentrating ownership in fewer hands. The international scope of a growing number of media conglomerates adds to the anxieties. Two aspects of media concentration have received extensive attention from regulators and media critics: cross-media ownership and the development of media monopolies within an industry, especially within regional media markets.5 Both developments are seen as reducing the array of choice for media consumers, a reduction that is the more insidious because it is often invisible to them. Still another concern is that—at least in media industries where distribution is a significant element of cost structure, such as publishing, cinema, and cable television—media firms will make a considered judgment that certain segments of the market, such as isolated regions or low income groups, are simply not worth reaching in a business sense, thereby creating major inequalities in access to media within the society.6 These various anxieties can be grouped into three dimensions in which the business and public service aspects of the media may be in conflict: diversity within the media system as a whole, decision making within each firm about the information and values conveyed in the media “product,” and audience access to the media through the distribution system. These dimensions in turn impinge directly on the ideals of the political role of the press in a liberal democratic society: pluralism, freedom of speech, and equality. Given the importance of these ideals, owners and managers of media enterprises are not allowed to follow business self-interest without restrictions. Two other sets of stakeholders intervene to influence the behavior of media firms: the media professionals who generate and shape content and the authorities who regulate the operation of markets in media industries. Media professionals have focused their energies on limiting the business influences on the internal decision-making processes of the firm, largely by trying to establish strong norms of professional control over content-related decision making. Regulatory authorities have concentrated primarily on maintaining diversity in ownership by restricting the ownership and the buying and selling of media enterprises. As a result, the ownership and acquisition of firms are more highly regulated in the major mass media industries, particularly broadcasting, than in virtually any other industry. In addition, the state imposes varying legal restraints on journalistic freedom in the form of libel laws and laws governing the publication of information whose secrecy is deemed vital to the national interest. Up to the present day, in most societies the third dimension of [3.94.102.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:19 GMT) Mass Media...