Who Owns The Media

This publication moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. Based on an extensive data collection effort from scholars around the world, it covers 13 media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, and wireless telecommunication, across a 10-25 year period in 30 countries.

This thorough update to Benjamin Compaine's original 1979 benchmark and 1982 revisit of media ownership tackles the question of media ownership, providing a detailed examination of the current state of the media industry. Retaining the wealth of data of the earlier volumes, Compaine and his co-author Douglas Gomery chronicle the myriad changes in the media industry and the factors contributing to these changes. They also examine how the media industry is being reshaped by technological forces in all segments, as well as by social and cultural reactions to these forces. This third edition of Who Owns the Media? has been reorganized and expanded, reflecting the evolution of the media industry structure. Looking beyond conventional wisdom and expectations, Compaine and Gomery examine the characteristics of competition in the media marketplace, present alternative positions on the meanings of concentration, and ultimately urge readers to draw their own conclusions on an issue that is neither black nor white. Appropriate for media practitioners and sociologists, historians, and economists studying mass media, this volume can also be used for advanced courses in broadcasting, journalism, mass communication, telecommunications, and media education. As a new benchmark for the current state of media ownership, it is invaluable to anyone needing to understand who controls the media and thus the information and entertainment messages received by media consumers.

This long-awaited third edition analyzes corporate ownership of major media, including television, film, on-line, and print, and includes primary influences, government's roles, and key criteria for evaluating the current state of media ownership.

Describes in detail the most recent rapid growth and cross border activities and linkages of an industry of large global media conglomerates.

Publisher Description

The emergence of a few powerful individuals in control of large sections of mass communication industries has coincided with world-wide media de-regulation. In the first book to take a close look at media moguls as a species, Jeremy Tunstall and Michael Palmer show how a handful of own-and-operate entrepreneurs run their empires with a highly eccentric and highly political management style. Individuals such as Berlusconi, Hersant, and Murdoch, in France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the US, are considered in the context of the changing European media industry. The book considers other, non-mogul trends: the emergence of a European media policy and a European-US-Japanese world media industry. Additional case studies focus on Reuters as a news-and-data super-agency and the part played by advertising and other media lobbies in shaping media policy.