Looks at media ownership policies in Great Britain and Europe.

People have worried for many years about the concentration of private power over the media, as evidenced by controversy over Federal Communication Commission rulings on broadcast ownership limits. The fear, it seems, is of a media mogul with a political agenda: a new William Randolph Hearst who could help start wars or run for political office using the power of the media. In the light of these concerns about freedom of speech, Eli Noam provides a comprehensive survey of media concentration in America, covering everything from the early media empire of Benjamin Franklin to the modern-day cellular phone industry.

Who Owns the World's Media? 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, the book covers 13 media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, wireless telecommunication and others, across a 10-25 year period in 30 countries.

Firmly rooting its argument in democratic and economic theory, the book argues that a more democratic distribution of communicative power within the public sphere and a structure that provides safeguards against abuse of media power provide two of three primary arguments for ownership dispersal. It also shows that dispersal is likely to result in more owners who will reasonably pursue socially valuable journalistic or creative objectives rather than a socially dysfunctional focus on the 'bottom line'. The middle chapters answer those agents, including the Federal Communication Commission, who favor 'deregulation' and who argue that existing or foreseeable ownership concentration is not a problem. The final chapter evaluates the constitutionality and desirability of various policy responses to concentration, including strict limits on media mergers.

This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

This volume provides a comparative analysis of media systems in the Arab world, based on criteria informed by the historical, political, social, and economic factors influencing a country’s media. Reaching beyond classical western media system typologies, Arab Media Systems brings together contributions from experts in the field of media in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to provide valuable insights into the heterogeneity of this region’s media systems. It focuses on trends in government stances towards media, media ownership models, technological innovation, and the role of transnational mobility in shaping media structure and practices. Each chapter in the volume traces a specific country’s media – from Lebanon to Morocco – and assesses its media system in terms of historical roots, political and legal frameworks, media economy and ownership patterns, technology and infrastructure, and social factors (including diversity and equality in gender, age, ethnicities, religions, and languages). This book is a welcome contribution to the field of media studies, constituting the only edited collection in recent years to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of Arab media systems. As such, it will be of great use to students and scholars in media, journalism and communication studies, as well as political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists with an interest in the MENA region.

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.

American newspapers have faced competition from new media for over ninety years. Today digital media challenge the printed word. In the 1920s, broadcast radio was the threatening upstart. At the time, newspaper publishers of all sizes turned threat into opportunity by establishing their own stations. Many, such as the Chicago Tribune's WGN, are still in operation. By 1940 newspapers owned 30 percent of America's radio stations. This new type of enterprise, the multimedia corporation, troubled those who feared its power to control the flow of news and information. In Sound Business, historian Michael Stamm traces how these corporations and their critics reshaped the ways Americans received the news. Stamm is attuned to a neglected aspect of U.S. media history: the role newspaper owners played in communications from the dawn of radio to the rise of television. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, he recounts the controversies surrounding joint newspaper and radio operations. These companies capitalized on synergies between print and broadcast production. As their advertising revenue grew, so did concern over their concentrated influence. Federal policymakers, especially during the New Deal, responded to widespread concerns about the consequences of media consolidation by seeking to limit and even ban cross ownership. The debates between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately structured the channels of information distribution in the United States and determined who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics. Sound Business is a timely examination of the connections between media ownership, content, and distribution, one that both expands our understanding of mid-twentieth-century America and offers lessons for the digital age.