The Journalistic Values and Media Reforms - Assignment Example

Media reforms are bad for democracy and media”: Analysis of 2007 Media Reforms in Australia 2008 Mass media has become pervasive in all countries, whether the developed or the developing. Particularly in the western countries, including Australia, the amount of time the exposure that the average citizens get to information disseminated through mass media has increased manifold. While radio broadcast has been on the decline, television has played a pervasive role in distributing information as has the print media. In the age of fast technological growth, the Internet has also emerged as a particularly strong media. However, with this has issued the journalistic values and media reforms that has occurred over the years. Media, which was considered as a vehicle of public service worldwide in the 1930s, has gradually integrated with the economic system which is essentially market-driven. While on the one hand, neo-liberal free market economies espouse democratic political values, media reforms have meant that the media organizations have become consolidated and now operate as conglomerates. As a result, the media becomes a vehicle of campaign for political organizations. In Australia, media ownership rules regarding foreign ownership had been based on Broadcasting Services Act, 1992, which was removed in 2007. The Foreign Acquisitions and Takeover Act was also removed for media although the sector was retained as a “sensitive sector” under Foreign Investment policy. Thus, the autonomy of Australian media was more or less removed by making it open to foreign competition. Besides foreign ownership, cross-media transactions have also been allowed for Australian media reforms in 2007 (Australian Government, 2006). The reform package was finally passed through the Parliament in 2007 and it included, besides the ownership issues, the digital media, regulatory powers of Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and free-to-air television access (Hitchens, 2007). What really rules the media content is the advertising economy, which in turn depends on the hyper-consumerism in the society. Hence, independent and investigative journalism tends to take a back seat to the commercially-viable content of the media. In this paper, I will argue that media reforms, which essentially entail consolidation of media organizations, corporate ownership and information explosion through the various media have an adverse effect on democratic values of a society as well as on the media itself, since the reforms lead to a process of self-destruction. The media has essentially come to be linked with the capitalist economy system in which the market is the ultimate arbitrator. Modern western democracies of today vouch for the free market in which the players have competitive freedom. Hence, most western economies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, have been engaging in media reforms that would enable greater competition in the sector (Hitchens, 2007). However, as it has turned out, in most sectors of the economy – including the media – the markets are ruled by the conglomerates. As McChensey (1999) notes, such democracies are closer to the libertian democracies of the 18th century, when the political system was ruled by the rich elite and not by the common citizens, as the democratic ethos dictates. In such a system, media reforms that promote the market-based system of concentrated media providing content that is also dictated by the rules of the market, are bad for the democracy. People then are provided with a flood of information through the market but the subjectivity of the information depends on the business interests of the conglomerates. This, according to McChensey, has serious political implications. It is assumed that the commercial media system, which works under the free market regime, is fundamentally strong and does not require to be regulated by the state. This neo-liberal stand is similar to that which is advocated for free markets for industries. It goes unnoticed that the commercial media feeds the audience content that it wants to. The First Amendment Principle, which provides the Americans the freedom of speech and expression then is given a go by in the interest of freedom of property rights, which essentially is what happens in this case (McChensey, 1999). The core problems of media reforms, according to McChensey, are the result of “a profit-driven, advertising-supported media system: hypercommercialism and denigration of journalism and public service”, which he thinks is poison pill for democracy. The media industry in Australia, including Rupert Murdoch, owner of Australia’s largest media company, has criticized the 2007 media reforms saying that it continues to give undue advantage to free-to-air media channels to cable operators. However, the industry welcomed the cross-ownership legislations stating that it would make the industry more competitive (SMH). The media industry claims that opening up the sector to foreign ownership would result in foreign companies taking up most of the ownership, as it has done in New Zealand where major programming is foreign (Alliance). In contrast, the earlier Broadcasting Services Act of 1992 ensured “that Australians have effective control of the more influential broadcasting services” (Alliance). Cross media transactions would limit the number of cities that commercial media players would be permitted in to five. Maximum of two radio licenses and one license would, however, be given to each player in a region and 75 percent for those that have national reach. Despite the protests, some media organizations in Australia stand to gain from the reforms, for example Packer and Murdoch’s proposed merger that has now been allowed through the cross-ownership clauses. The end of new free-to-air broadcast licenses and multiple channels while retaining the existing cross-media laws will lead to greater concentration in the Australian media (The Age, 2005). Although there is no systematic study on the effect of the media and the political ideas that are resulted in the minds of the audiences, some researchers have attempted to pinpoint on the effect of television viewing on the political standpoint of viewers. It is thought that the social environment is significantly altered through the messages transmitted by the media. As a result, social parameters like childhood, adulthood, femininity, masculinity, race are all qualified by the messages from the media. Different media, however, have different capacities to change the social environment. The new media, particularly the electronic, for example, can alter the social environment significantly. As a result, the bias potential of alternate medium may be considerably different. The electronic media and the commercialization of the media together play a distinctive role in defining the cultural attitudes of the society that have grown apolitical in nature (Meyrowitz, 1996). With globalization of cultures and foreign ownership of media being allowed in most countries, including Australia, there is a tendency of homogenizing broadcast programming. As a result, despite the flood of information through the various channels of media and the high exposure of the audience to media content, political awareness has been on the decline. Hence, the basis of democracy, that is the exercise of universal suffrage, has been downgraded through the media which in a way shapes the cultural positioning of the society (McChensey and Nichols, 2001). Media reforms are explicit particularly in countries that are moving from an autocratic polity and regulated economy to a relatively liberalized one. Like, for example China. During the days of Mao, the media was used as a persuasive tool for propaganda. Since the late 1970s, the economy of China has been successively been liberalized although the political regime continues to be a regulated one. While on the one hand, the media is still regulated, its use as a propaganda machinery has been reduced. This is to some extent the result of change in the cultural environment that has been affected by economic liberalization. Yet, the media is far from achieving democratic principles in China. The political stranglehold remains and the public service broadcasts are more in the nature of propaganda (Zhao, 1998). Media reforms that result in a commercially-oriented, concentrated media have crucial implications for the nature of the media itself. While the traditional approach to the role of the media considers it as a channel between the citizens and the government, in which the media is used to voice citizens’ opinion, the more radical approach harps on its association with partisan and investigative journalism (Dahlgren, 1993). In a situation that media becomes a tool for business interests, neither of these roles remain valid any longer. In the traditional sense, the media becomes a channel of information flow between the business and the consumer. In the radical approach, a business-associated media has no interest either in public service content or in investigative journalism. Hence, media reform in the neo-liberal sense is self-defeating in purpose and hence destructive for itself. The relationship between media reform and democracy, thus, is ubiquitous. While on the one hand, media reforms, through less restrictive state intervention, is considered to liberate the media from shackles, it ultimately results in a system that controls it through the business interests of a small group of people. Hence, not only the values of democracy undermined, the main role of the media as a change agent is also destroyed. The effectiveness of relaxation of regulations on media, therefore, needs to be studied in this context for all types of political systems – mature and developing democracies. In Australia, in particular, media reforms of 2007 have opened up the doors to greater concentration and thus lower democratic powers of the people. This raises the research question whether media reforms in a particular country, for instance Australia, leads to higher or lower concentration in the media industry and the subsequent effect on programming and content. The purpose of the research is to study whether media reforms that affect concentration makes the media a tool for business interests, foregoing its responsibility towards investigative journalism and independent opinion. For the purpose, it is necessary to study the level of concentration and the association with other businesses that media organizations in Australia has. The methodology of the study will include an analysis of ownership patterns of media organizations, the possibilities of mergers and takeovers as a result of media reforms and the subsequent changes in content. Works Cited McChensey, Robert W and John Nichols, “The Making of a Movement”, The Nation, December 20, 2001, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020107/mcchesney Baker, Edwin, “Media Concentration: Giving up on Democracy”, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, Beacon Press, 2000 McChesney, Robert W., Rich Media Poor Democracy; Communication Politics in Dubious Times, University of Illinois Press, 1999 Meyrowitz, Joshua, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Behavior on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, 1996 Zhao, Yueshi, Media, Market and Democracy in China: Between Party Line and Bottom Line, University of Illinois, 1998 Dahlgren, Peter, Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, Routledge, 1993 Shah, Anup, Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, April 29, 2007, http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/Corporations/Owners.asp Australian Government, Meeting the Digital Challenge: Reforming Australia’s Media in the Digital Age, March 2006, http://www.dbcde.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/37572/Media_consultation_paper_Final_.pdf Hitchens, Lesley, Australian Media Reform: Discerning the Policy, UNSW Law Journal Forum, Vol 13, No 1, 2007 Sunday Morning Herald (SMH), Mursoch rejects media reform plan, http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/murdoch-rejects-media-reform-plan/2006/06/16/1149964721784.html, June 16, 2006 The Alliance and Media Reforms, http://www.alliance.org.au/images/stories/fact_sheet3_the_alliance_and_media_reform.pdf The Age, Packer and Murdoch to win from Howard's changes, The Age, September 29, 2005, http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/packer-and-murdoch-to-win-from-howards-changes/2005/09/28/1127804542849.html Read More