Media institutions

Media institutions

Media institutions - large organisations that own, produce or regulate different kinds of media content

Institutional bias task

• The headlines on Fox News
• The front page of The Sun
• An editorial in The Guardian
• A parliamentary report on BBC News 24
• A police/crime documentary on ITV1
• A typical British 'social realist' drama film (e.g. Ill Manors)
• A typical Hollywood action film
• An episode of Big Brother on C5

• 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).

Current descriptions of the Internet:

• Less censorship - pornography, extreme politics, conspiracy theories
• More freedom - blogs, forums, global
• Supporting innovation and entrepreneurialism - internet startups, social networks 
• Anti-establishment - G8 protests, file sharing such as with Edward Snowden
• Cottage industry - eBay, Gumtree

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

Internet empires:

• Google
• Facebook
• Viacom
• Microsoft
• News Corp

Online corporate power can be said to be on the rise since less companies control the global media wealth and rather there are just a select few that do this and dominate theoverall media:

• 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)