Chapter 3 Synopsis

Chapter 3, in the book Understanding the Media, by Eoin Devereux, is called Media Ownership: Concentration and Conglomeration. This chapter focuses on the ownership and control of the mainstream media. Ownership can be non-profit, public, or private. Community-based media includes local radio, blogs, or newsletters, organized on a non-profit basis. They attract small audiences in a community and are run on a modest budget. With the continually growing concentration of media ownership, alliances and the merging of media and other companies into larger conglomerates has raised serious concerns for many media scholars. Media ownership is now characterized by concentration and conglomeration. Conglomerates operate at the local, regional, national or transnational levels. They are controlled through allocative control and operational control.
Concentration is described as being vertical or horizontol. Vertical integration is the process by which one owner acquires all aspects of production and distribution of a single type of media product. Horizontol integration is the process by which one company buys different kinds of media, concentrating ownership across differing types of media rather than up and down through one industry. In media conglomerates, synergy is the core in maintaining a position of power or dominance where as parts of the company work as a whole and are worth more than the sum of its parts acting alone.
The political economy theory is concerned with investigating how the capitalist class promotes and ensures their dominant position and focuses on the relation between the economic structure and dynamics of media industries and the content of media. According to this perspective, concentration and conglomeration have seious implications for media content and media audiences. Casualization of media work has increased but the scale demand by the media oligopolies has resulted in job losses. In order to understand media content, we must examine the ownership and control of the media industries in relation to other political and economic groups in society.
German sociologist Jurgen Habermas developed the concept of the public sphere, which informs thinking on how media organizations operate. There are three types of spheres in our society; the private sphere consists of family and economy, the sphere of public authority consists of state and judiciary and the bourgeois public spehere. Habermas' public sphere stresses the importance of political discourse among citizens and plays a crucial role in ensuring the continuation of civic and democratic society. The Internet is a media based public sphere because one can search for information and engage in on-line discussions about endless lists of topics or communicate through forums and blogs. The Internet is dominated by mass media conglomerates and oligopolies, who own and control the most widely used Internet Service Providers.
In conclusion, this chapter stresses the importance of media ownership through conglomerates and concentration which have placed an emphasis on different culture industries.