Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
generated a worldwide market for media services in which a few giants have
established powerful distribution and production networks (Schiller 1999).
As the process of oligopolization has transformed telecommunications, a
cartel of very large providers has come to dominate the globe's media and
information sectors. Today, a handful of giants such as AOL Time Warner,
Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, and Vivendi dominate global
media and telecommunications. As ownership in many countries has become
concentrated in a handful of powerful media barons, the content of mass
media has been a
cantly, with important consequences for
consumers and society at large. Because the leading giants originate dis-
proportionately in the U.S., corporate commercialism of the media is likely to
enhance the hegemony of American culture around the world, already a key
feature of the global economy. The political implications of this process are
disturbing: the maintenance of an independent, critical perspective among
the media may well be threatened by the steady oligopolization and associ-
ated globalization of the industry. Barber (1995:123) notes that “A free and
democratic society depends on competition of ideas and heterogeneity of
outlets,” yet the number of such outlets has declined as the industry has
become concentrated in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of media
moguls. McChesney (1999:14) points out that under such circumstances,
“Consumerism, class inequality and individualism tend to be taken as natural
and even benevolent, whereas political activity, civic values and anti-market
activities are marginalized.” In societies in which a diversity of voices is
critical to the political process, consolidation of the media is no friend to
participatory democracy (McChesney 2001).
Habermas (1979, 1989) argued persuasively that communications are cen-
tral to the social process of consensus and truth construction, through which
individuals and communities of interest partake in the public, discursive
interpretation of reality. Habermas's “ideal speech situation” consisting of
unfettered discourse is central to the “public sphere” in which social life is
constructed and reproduced and through which truth is constructed in the
absence of barriers to communication. In this reading, all participants in a
debate would theoretically have equal rights and abilities to make their views
known and to challenge any other view; when all power relations have been
removed from the freedom to engage in discourse, the only criteria for resolv-
ing contesting claims is their truth-value. And, importantly, “the participants
in an ideal speech situation [must] be motivated solely by the desire to reach
a consensus about the truth of statements and the validity of norms”
(Bernstein 1995:50). Habermas theorized that the bourgeois public sphere,
the space between the state and everyday life in civil society that arose with
the growth of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment, has become dom-
inated by large corporations, while citizens were largely reduced to spectators
and consumers of goods (see Kellner 1979, 1990). To the extent that demo-
cratic discourse requires a diversity of voices, as indicated by Habermas's
notion of an ideal speech situation, media oligopolization is inherently and
ff
ected signi
fi
Search WWH ::
Custom Search