However, I think that most people would also agree that there is a limit to this power of ownership. The owners are limited by their need to serve their customers. These owners would not be able to operate if they didn't have paying customers. We can all agree that the individual interests of the media owners are limited by the requirements of their advertisers!
Advertisers are certainly the main source of income for most broadcast media, newspapers, and magazines. The majority of the cost of production and distribution of commercial newspapers and magazines ( approx. 80% ) are covered by advertisements, as are all the costs of commercial broadcast media, and much of the media distributed by cable monopolies.
Since most advertisements
are paid for by commercial
enterprises, the most common political and economic biases of an
advertiser
based media, would be biases common to all private owners and
stockholders
of commercial enterprises. This helps insure that the
political and
economic interests of the owners of media companies
are counter-balanced
by the political and economic interests of the owners of
non-media companies!
This creates a certain harmony among the capitalist owners.
Hey -
Think of how envious the powerless non-media owners
would be of
media
owners if this were not the case!
.
The main argument against
a public or state supported
media is that it will be biased in favor of the government.
In a
democratic society, if one political party controls a majority in the
government,
it may use its power of control of the media to help maintain its
power.
While a state supported media can be non-profit, the fact that a
democratic
government is rule by majority tends to endanger the rights of
minorities,
and therefore diversity.
PBS is a non-profit form of broadcasting, however it is corporate and foundation dominated, and it certainly is not democratic. You may be have given your pledge for $60 or $100, and have "become a member" ,and are "proud to be a member of the PBS family"; however, you should understand your place within that "family". You are one of the children and the adults make the decisions. Your "membership" does not give you the right to vote for representation on your local stations corporate board of directors. Only a few stations have elected board of directors. Board members elect their own replacements.
Quote:
"KQED (PBS station)
is one of the few stations in the country that has an elected board of
directors." I found this in the Article
-
"Activists
Put The Public in Public TV" : By Kim Deterline in EXTRA
magazine, Dec 1992. However, I had heard about it earlier
from many
people.
WEB location -
www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/public-tv-activists.html
There are many way to make the media more responsive to the public's political and economic interests.
Disregarding any freedom of speech issues, banning advertising would be a major improvement. The commercial media can provide diversity if it is not advertiser funded. However, the corporate media would still represent large groups of stockholders, and they would tend to reflect a view of the political economy; at least somewhat antagonistic to the interests of the majority of the public. Also the best researched reporting would tend to only be available for the highest prices, not to mention the difficulty in legally defining advertising, or other forms of major economic influence - such as foundation grants.
If a public or state media was non-profit, and at least partially government funded, and had an elected board of governors, then the only remaining problem would be the "tyranny of the majority" - limiting opposing viewpoints. This problem can be solved in a number of ways.
First you could set up, say, three government media systems, broadcast or print, and hold elections in which each citizen ( or member ) has one vote - but the top three vote getters are elected to each manage one of them. This would tend to provide diversity.
A slightly more realistic answer might be to elect; with only one vote by each citizen/member, five candidates to the board of directors of a public media organization. If about 50% of the funding was allocated by majority vote. and 10% by each of the 5 board member individually, this would also tend to promote diversity.
The important point is that it is perfectly possible to have a democratically oriented, non-profit, public, media - with diversity, and a great deal of independence from the centralized political state.
Author: Jack Stewart