Missed Media Work

Definition of Media Institutions: large organisations that own,produce or regulate different kinds of media content

—Rank the following texts in order of how likely they are to contain ‘institutional bias' (Least to most)

— 

1)  An episode of Big Brother on C5 

2) A typical Hollywood action film 

3)  A typical British ‘social realist’ drama film (e.g. Ill Manors) 

4) —8) —A police/crime documentary on ITV1

5) —The front page of The Sun

—6) The headlines on Fox News 

7) —An editorial in The Guardian —

8) — —A parliamentary report on BBC News 24

There is less censorship and a lack of control of online information in comparison to traditional ‘mass media’  therefore it has become associated with what Castells describes as a “technological blossoming of the culture of freedom, individual innovation and entrepreneurialism” (Castells, 1996, 5). 

The existence of this ‘anti-establishment culture’ has led some people to question the power that traditional institutions have over the internet. 

Negroponte writes that ‘the monolithic empires of mass media are dissolving into an array of cottage industries’ (1997, 106).

Herman and McChesney (1997) were not convinced that the power of traditional institutions will be relinquished so easily: 

The internet and the digital revolution do not pose an immediate or even foreseeable threat to the market power of the media giants. In the current political climate, moreover, it is likely that the global media firms will be able to incorporate the internet and related computer networks into their empires, while the egalitarian potential of the technology is minimised

FIVE ‘media giants’ who have internet empires

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. News Corporation 
4. Viacom
5. Microsoft

The power of institutions is said to be increasing because fewer companies control more and more

 of the global media wealth. In 1983, about fifty corporations dominated the global media market

Today it is just eight companies who dominate the media, nearly all of whom are based in the US. These companies are:

• —Comcast (€48 billion) NBC, Universal Studios… 
• Google (€45 billion) 
• —Disney (€33 billion) 
• —News Corp (€27 billion) 
• DirecTV (€23 billion) 
• —Time Warner (€22 billion) HBO, Warner Bros… 
• Viacom (€21 billion) MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount… 
• —Sony (€17 billion)

—Have the inequalities that characterise old media ownership extended into new media ownership? 

Yes, the larger institutions control all the smaller ones

—Is the internet run by powerful media institutions?

Yes, as represented through the several facts stated above.