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A major debate has been unfolding in the United States and around the world over media concentration and its implications. This book is a study of the American mass media and information sector over two decades—its change, its dynamics, and its concentration and ownership trends. First, it discusses the dynamics of industries or industry clusters and provides a methodology. It then provides market share data analysis and narration for each industry; calculates national, local, vertical, and ownership concentration trends; and aggregates the data into increasingly larger segments and sectors. It provides an explanatory model for long-term concentration trends and a new index for measuring local media concentration. This chapter provides the setting for the book: its aim; the history of media concentration issues in America; today's debate and its combatants; goals and fears (localism, commercialism, quality, diversity, social reform); past research; and the international dimension.

Where companies compete against each other across the country, one must analyze an industry's market structure on a national scale. But in other situations, the relevant geographic markets are not national or international but local. This chapter examines local media concentration trends for several local media over a period of twenty years. The relevant industries of local mass media that are analyzed are: radio stations, television stations, newspapers, city magazines and periodicals, and cable television operators. The following, also considered, are also local distribution media, although of a different kind and dynamics: local wireline telephone networks and cellular mobile networks. Here, the local market is defined as the city itself. Since there are many hundreds of cities large and small in the United States, and it would be impractical to seek the media concentration trends for each, thirty markets are chosen to be representative of their categories. All of the seven local media are then averaged by using weights based on their revenue volumes.

This book investigates whether the American information sector has become more concentrated. To provide an empirical answer, a methodology that is straightforward, simple, and transparent is adopted: the trend of two media concentration indices used in American antitrust enforcement, the so-called Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (HHI) and the four-firm market share index, the C4. This book looks at the market concentration trends for 100 separate information industries in the United States. Examples for such industries are broadcast television, cable television, film distribution, daily newspapers, Internet service providers, television set makers, microcomputers, local phone service, and cellular mobile providers. For each of these industries, individual firms' revenues in the US market are analyzed and their US market shares in this particular industry are calculated.

This chapter examines the electronic mass media of retail distribution—radio, television, cable, and direct broadcast satellites. These media consist of two major segments; there are local retail media and national wholesale networks. Retail media distribute content directly to audiences. Examples are local radio and television stations and cable distribution systems. In contrast, wholesale networks bundle programs created by content producers and distribute them to retailers. Examples are radio and television networks, cable channels, and program syndicators. Radio has become the poster boy for media concentration. Most public discussions of media trends refer to the developments in radio and its lessons for public policy. No media industry in the United States has changed more in ownership than local radio stations. The level of local television station concentration is the lowest among all of the eight local mass media analyzed.

Data in this chapter show that mass media in the United States have, in the aggregate, steadily increased in concentration since 1988. But they also show that the concentration on a national basis is usually fairly low by the standards of US antitrust. Here, the official US Government guidelines define an unconcentrated industry as having a Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (HHI) of less than 1,000. But the problem with the HHI (and the C4) is that although it considers market power, which is essential, it does not make allowance for pluralism, which is also essential. That is, it looks only at actual choices rather than at options. This chapter proposes a new measure for media concentration, known as the Media Ownership Concentration and Diversity Index. It takes into account the regular HHI for market power (the sum of squared market shares) as well as the number of voices in a media market. As one divides concentration by voice value, the ratio (the index) rises in size with more market concentration and with less diversity, and declines with less concentration and more diversity.

Since World War II, the information sector in the United States has been evolving through three stages: the stages of limited media, multichannel media, and digital media. In the lengthy stage of limited media, major segments of the information sector were dominated by large firms. This stage of limited media, so different from the image of a past golden age of open media, prevailed into the early 1980s, when it changed quite rapidly, at least in the electronic realm. The third stage, that of digital media, is characterized by the emergence of computer communications as a mass medium and is exemplified by the Internet. The key to this stage is digitalization: the transformation of voice, text, video, and data information into binary on-off signals, and their move toward common platforms of transmission, storage, processing, and display. The overall trend of media concentration is the composite of three separate dynamics that overlay each other: the growth in economies of scale in information sector operations, the lowering of entry barriers, and digital convergence.

Given the relative cheapness of electronic and physical distribution, it is usually more cost effective to produce a program centrally and distribute it widely rather than for each retail outlet to produce its own content. Thus, networks and syndicators emerged from which retail outlets acquired programming, or they produced the program themselves. These networks and syndicators package the content and distribute it to retail outlets such as broadcast stations, cable network operators, and satellite distribution systems. This chapter analyzes the concentration of trends in radio program networks and television broadcast networks. Because radio is often used as an example for media concentration trends, it needs to be discussed at greater length. In about one decade, from 1992 to 2001, the market share of the top four firms increased from 9% to 38%. The national level of radio concentration was less dramatic than its rapid rate of change suggests, coupled with local concentration. In the case of television stations, the concentration trend in ownership has received high visibility. Cable television has become the major delivery platform for additional video channels.

There are few industries whose ownership and control are more important than those of media, given their central role in social, cultural, economic, and political life. The preceding chapters have analyzed these industries. This chapter summarizes and interprets the findings across the world, and provides answers to the series of questions, from A to Z, posed in the introductory chapter. These questions include: how large is the media sector? What are the largest media markets? Is content really king? What are the levels of media concentration globally? Are the world’s media becoming more concentrated? Have American media become more concentrated? Does the transition to Internet-based media reduce concentration? What countries have particularly high media concentration? Where is there a high pluralism of voices? What are the factors for high national media concentration? What countries have particularly high cross-media ownership? What countries are high importers and exporters of media? Do American media dominate world media? How does media concentration differ for emerging countries from that of richer countries? What are the trends of convergence among countries and among industries? What are the world’s most dominant media companies? What companies dominate the attention for news? Who are the largest media owners? What are the priority problems? And lastly, what might policy remedies look like?

This chapter discusses the concentration of the 13 media industries that the countries surveyed. National data for an industry are measured against the other of the 30 countries. The chapter also compares the major regions of the world by averaging the countries for six regions: North America, Latin America, the emerging BRICS countries, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Also compared are the average per capita spendings on the various media among countries, along with the share of a particular medium in overall national consumption.

This chapter focuses on the use and abuse of data for information policy development and the search for evidence-based research for evidence-based policy. It considers the debate over media concentration as an important element in the struggle over rules and power in the new economy and suggests that empirical evidence is secondary in this debate, used by academics selectively and in pursuit of advocacy rather than of science. It provides some of the numbers relevant to the debate, along with the dynamics underlying them. It also asks whether Congress and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are interested in serious data analysis. It identifies a specific structural impediment in the rule-making process and recommends a requirement for an “academic impact statement” in rulemakings, which would be an independent literature review of relevant peer-reviewed literature.

This chapter examines the organization and methodology of the present study on global media ownership and concentration, which covers 30 countries and 13 media industries. It describes the data sources, market and geographic definitions, concentration measures, the media ownership and concentration diversity index, and owners of the world’s media.

In this chapter, the authors analyse the role of Belgian news media in policy-making. The chapter starts with a characterization of the Belgian media landscape, with its absence of ‘national’ media, a strong public service broadcast and an increasing degree of media concentration. Next, by analysing the ways in which the media report on and define issues, the chapter explores how the media are generators of knowledge, what their resources are, and what influence they have on decision-makers. What is the current role of the Belgian news media as policy players; how are policy problems framed; and what is their role as advocates, investigators and evaluators? To answer these questions, the authors rely on empirical research on Belgian media, agenda-setting, and framing.

Chapter 2 engages with two major background themes: a review of inequality trends and how these are addressed by researchers in the economics field, and, secondly, the contours of change in the news media landscape. The first section reviews a key set of recent contributions in the field of economics on economic inequality. The next section turns to an overview of wealth and income inequality in the four countries that are at the centre of the empirical part of this volume (UK, Germany, Austria, and Ireland). The next two sections are concerned with academic responses to Piketty’s (2014) book and the subsequent academic debate on shifts in policies and institutional settings which can contribute to the reduction of inequality. The latter part of the chapter turn to the analysis of communicative resources, in particular changes in the news media sectors. It examines forms of inequality in ownership structures and concentration trends unfolding within the daily newspaper markets. Chapter 2 also wraps up with some concluding comments.

Chapter 4 reviews a focused selection of the existing research which sheds light on the role that the media play in relation to the circulation of certain sets of ideas and discourses concerning inequality issues and redistribution policies (i.e., the shaping of inequality preferences and beliefs). The main aim in this chapter is to analyse prior empirical studies which explore how this is shaped and informed by media coverage and engagement. To do so, the authors first outline the findings of survey data analyses on individuals’ perception of inequality, and their related position towards the necessity of redistribution. After that, the chapter provides a systematic overview of contemporary empirical studies which examine the media coverage of economic inequality and redistribution policies, and thus debate the role mass media play as information providers. We assess the underlying assumptions and the methodological approaches guiding the respective empirical findings, highlight the merits of this body of work and identify open questions for further research. The last part of this chapter provides a discussion of (currently rather neglected) political economy theories that offer rich theoretical approaches to study media, power, and inequality, thus an enhanced theoretically informed understanding beyond the mere empiricism.

This chapter compares the concentration processes in media and information-related industries in the European countries. As far as possible, five data for six years were used to envision the long-term dynamics of concentration: 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. The graphs presented use the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) calculated in the preceding country chapters, taken as a quantitative indicator of concentration.