Lecture 6 - Comercial Media

Talk about premonitions! Having just written about the responsibility of the media, and the controll and power they wield, the issues raised and discussed at the week 6 lecture could not have come at a better time.

This weeks lecture was the first of a two part series. Commercial media this week, public media next. The description of the type of media really sums it up - it is COMMERCIAL. Profit driven, commercial media is less about the journalists and content than it is about advertising and making the big bucks. Just as the advertising web model of 1.0 has died out, Bruce hinted at the eventual decline of commercial media for the very same reason - people are sick of ads!

The most important issue raised, I believe, was the control certain major players have over what news the public is exposed to. With huge companies such as News Limited and Fairfax owning what seems like the entire media of Australia between them, what hope is their for unbiased reporting? This has been brought to light with the recent attempt by Gina Rinehart to control the board of Fairfax News.


However, after my last lets-slam-the-media post, I feel the fundamentals of commercial media, the majority of media that the public is exposed to, need to be considered. While propaganda and bias is a serious threat with the monopoly of media in Australia, and the world, under the current system commercial media is advertising based and therefore needs to attract the public to be viable for the advertising companies.

This weeks reading, Margaret Simons' The Content Makers, illustrated the inner workings of such commercial television stations as channel seven and nine. There is immense competition between channels for view ratings. Both channels have directors and teams which analyse ratings, and can therefore work out exactly which stories rate, which stories people change channels on and even which channel they turn to afterwards! With all this technology, there is no doubt that what is shown on stations such as these is very much dictated by the public. It is, therefore, what the public wants to see; but is what is shown on television stations entirely in the public interest? One look at the type of coverage political, environmental , foreign affair and business issues in comparison to the trivial feel-good stories tells us otherwise.


 


So, is it the public or the media monopolies dictating what content is publish, and in what manner issues are reported?