The global media system is the province of some seventy or eighty firms that provide the vast majority of the world’s media fare. There are two distinct tiers to this hierarchy. The first tier is comprised of eight transitional media conglomerates (AOL-Time Warner, Disney, O, News Corporation, Viacom, Sony, AT&T, and Vivendi Universal) that all collect between $10 billion and $30 billion per year in annual media-related revenues. These firms tend to be dominant players in numerous media sectors and to do business all across the world. The remaining sixty or seventy firms are smaller, tend to concentrate more upon one or two media sectors, and are more likely to be national or regional powerhouses. A great chasm separates the first tier media firms and those near the bottom of the second tier. AOL-Time Warner, for example, will do some $35 billion in business in 2000; a firm near the bottom like Spain’s domestic giant Sogecable will do around $700 million. 

The transnational media giants, as one leading media analyst notes, “are increasingly setting their sights on global expansion.” In 1999, for example, Disney completely reorganized its corporate structure to expand and strengthen its “global presence.” Disney’s enthusiasm is understandable; experts project that the major Hollywood studios, which currently earn around one-half of their income outside the United States, will see that portion rise to two-thirds in the next five to ten years. An examination of the top ten grossing films in each of the eight largest national markets after the United States in the summer of 1999 reveals that Hollywood films, each produced by a first-tier media giant, accounted for seventy of them. 

But the global media system should not be perceived as one where U.S.-based transnational conglomerates dump their standard fare on new audiences. On the contrary, the media giants localize their content whenever feasible, and almost always enter new markets in a partnership with local firms and investors. Sony’s Hollywood-based studios have been most aggressive in producing films and localized TV content, doing so across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., however, is the flagship firm for establishing major joint ventures with local firms across the globe, especially with regard to cable and satellite television. By 1999, even India’s massive domestic film industry had been penetrated by joint ventures with News Corp.’s Fox studios and several other Hollywood giants. 

The balance of the largest media firms are meeting the challenge and going global with a vengeance. AT&T’s Liberty Media and Microsoft have both made major investments in global cable systems. Even second-tier global media firms find it necessary to move beyond their national or regional markets in order to grow -and to avoid being taken over by more aggressive competitors. 

Nor is this pattern of global growth and concentration exclusive to the largest, mostly U.S.-based firms. Deregulation of national media ownership restrictions has both opened up national markets to outsiders and permitted domestic giants to grow ever more powerful. Spanish media and telecommunication firms, for example, “are invading Latin America in search of its corporate treasures.” Major national media markets like Mexico, Brazil, and India are each increasingly dominated by just a few massive media firms, and these firms all work closely in joint ventures with the transnational media giants. In no sense can the massive capitalist media firms of the developing world like Mexico’s Televisa or Brazil’s Globo be characterized as “oppositional” to the global corporate media system; they are integral players in that system. 

This is not just a process taking place in what has been called the Third World. In Britain, the television and newspaper industries have undergone a tremendous consolidation in recent years, and U.S.-based firms are now prominent players in these oligopolistic markers. Indeed, most nations have vastly more concentrated ownership of media that the United States, if only due to their smaller populations and geographic sizes. And the process is far from over. 

The European Union, for example, is working to help European media firms become not only regional, but global, powers. As a result of deregulation, the New York Times observed that “Europe’s television industry is suddenly in the grip of an American-style consolidation.” (July 7, 1999) In addition to the first-tier media giants like News Corps. and Bertelsmann, European TV is falling into the hands of a few regional giants like Canal Plus, SBS, Fininvest, and Kirch. These firms hope to use their European base as the foundation for eventual expansion into the United States, either directly or through joint ventures. 

One other development is working hand in hand with global media concentration: the rise of a highly concentrated global advertising industry. For the past decade the advertising industry has consolidated as a rate even greater than that of the media industry, and is now dominated by three to six global giants that dwarf the remaining players. These giants tend to have subsidiaries in every major market, and they increasingly represent corporate clients who need global marketing campaigns. These ad agency titans find that the global media giants are best positioned to provide them with the global reach their clients need and demand. ... 

As the power of the largest firms grows, they use that power to commercialize content to the greatest extent possible and, if necessary, to protect their political interests, and they denigrate any notion of public service that might interfere with either of those aims. 

This attack on public service assumes many forms. Deregulation and the rise of the commercial media market have cast the future of public service broadcasting in grave jeopardy. Traditional public service broadcasters, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), have begun to look like square pegs in a world of round holes. They are increasingly pressured to adopt the practices of commercial firms in order to establish their efficiency and worth, but as they go commercial they lose their raison d’être. They even get chastised for being publicly subsidized competitors to the now dominant commercial media. The Economist calls this the “conundrum” of public-service broadcasting: “If it goes upmarket, nobody watches it, so it is hard to justify state finance. If it goes downmarket, it ceases to look like public-service broadcasting, so it is hard to justify state finance.” (August 7, 1999) There is a crucial change assumed in that formulation, however. At its best, public broadcasters sought to provide high-quality, noncommercial fare to the entire population regardless of what the commercial media were doing. This made it possible for them to develop mass audiences while providing noncommercial standards. In this new era where corporate media giants ride roughshod over governments, public service broadcasters are expected to concede popular programming to commercial interests, and to concentrate upon that for which here is not much of a market. A vicious cycle is created, wherein underfunded public broadcasting outlets are unable to compete for viewers, are told to turn to commercial support, and ultimately are threatened with privatization. ... 

The most visible manifestation of the rise of the global commercial media has been not its journalism but its broader popular consumer culture, as its fare is drenched in advertising and commercialism. Report after report chronicles the rapid and stunning shift in culture especially among middle-and upper-class youth, across the world as the commercial media system subsumes each nation’s television system. Although there is considerable debate over whether this is a “U.S. invasion” or a broader corporate invasion, or whether this is good or bad, there is little debate over one point. This is a generation that is under pressure from the media it consumes to be brazenly materialistic, selfish, depoliticized and non-socially minded. To the extent one finds these values problematic for a democracy, we all should be concerned. The commercial media system is the ideological linchpin of the globalizing market economy. Consider the case of the Czech Republic. Only a decade ago the young generation led the “Velvet Revolution” against the communist regime under the slogan: Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred. Ten years later even the Wall Street Journal acknowledged that the Czech Republic had turned into a demoralized morass, where “an unnerving dash of the free market” had created a society awash with greed, selfishness, corruption, and scams. (November 30, 1999) 
 

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