Issues raised by media ownership
Media ownership is the commercial and legal control of interpersonal and mass communication technologies by individuals, corporations, and/or governments. Funding is the money provided, especially by an organization or government, for a particular purpose. In contemporary media practice, which is a specialist interdisciplinary focus and is one of the longest-running undergraduate media courses in the UK, these two things raise issues. These issues are confinement, fragmented audiences, and political bias. Confinement is being restrained and unable to move freely. Media ownership and funding create confinement because companies that have smaller ones within them completely control all the work being done on their grounds. Therefore, there’s less competition, which refines companies, specifically ones that produce movies, to only having one way of doing things. The confinement could also lead to a lack in creativity when creating movies. We see this in most sequels to a movie. The smaller companies have no control over what they’re putting into the world, so it’s out of their hands. Fragmented audiences are audiences that aren’t being reached due to a lack of spreading out what is being produced or a lack of promotion. This comes from, for an example, a movie only being shown in theaters. People that have smart televisions, regular televisions, and streaming applications, such as Netflix and Hulu, are not being included in the final product. All those people could’ve seen the coming attractions for said movie, but the company deciding to only put its funding into a movie theatre causes them to lose that other business. This is also a result of smaller companies not having enough money to put their final product out anywhere else. Some companies only have enough money to invest in one way of streaming their movie. A lot of companies' main goal is to inherit investors. These investors could heavily benefit these companies and raise the funding available for their products. However, investors want to put their money into companies that support their thoughts and beliefs. This causes companies to create thing in favor of that, which can turn a lot of viewers away from what they’re putting out there. It's also a risky move because some people could perceive the message the company is sending out in the wrong way ad nasty rumors could e started about said company and taint their business. All in all, media ownership and funding can create issues for contemporary media practice. It can limit creativity, audience, and diversity in a company. To avoid these things, companies should be conscious in the companies they sell to or allow to invest because it could put a strain on their business and their reputation. A lot of these issues are found in big companies today that own smaller ones within them and prevent those smaller companies from being unique, which only enforces these issues.
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AuthorKayla Hall Archives
April 2021
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