The influence of the owners and making a profit✅
Although the manipulative view discussed in Topic 1, with the owners controlling media content, is rather oversimplified, sometimes the private owners of the media will impose their own views on their editors, directly or indirectly. The political learnings of the owners and editors are overwhelmingly conservative.
Influence of the owners on news content
Owners occasionally give direct instructions to news editors.
The owners, via editors, influence the resources made available to cover news stories, such as whether to allocate resources for reporters to pursue a story, or whether to have reporters or TV camera crews in different countries.
Journalists, and particularly editors, depend for their careers on not upsetting the owners. This can lead to editors and journalists adopting a form of self-censorship, whereby they will avoid reporting some events, or reporting them in a way that risks offending the owners or directly challenging their political preferences.
The owners are concerned with making profits, and this search for profit and the desire to attract large audiences in an increasingly competitive global media environment means that news and information gets squeezed out or turned into unthreatening, unchallenging, inoffensive and bland infotainment.
This encourages the development of a media culture in which unethical journalist practices can thrive. These include things like illegal hacking, the invasion of individuals privacy, bribery to encourage people to tell all, and the use of intrusive paparazzi to gain photos of celebrities and other famous people.
It was such methods which led to the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry in 2011-12 into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press, following claims of illegal phone hacking and allegations of illegal payments to police by the press.
Making a profit
The mainstream media are predominantly run by large business corporations with the aim of making money, and the source of much of this profit is advertising, particularly in newspapers and commercial television and in social media websites.
It is this dependence on advertising which explains why so much concern is expressed about ‘ratings’ for TV programmes, the circulation figures of newspapers and the social class of their readers, and the number of ‘hits’ on websites.
Advertisers will usually advertise only if they know that there is a large audience for their advertisements, or, if the audience is small, that it is well-off and likely to buy their products or services.
Bagdikian suggests that the importance of advertising means news reports will be presented in such a way as to avoid offending advertisers, with some stories repressed or killed off altogether.
In order to attract the widest possible audience, it becomes important to appeal to everyone and offend no one (unless offending helps to generate a larger audience). This leads to conservatism in the media, which tries to avoid too much criticism of the way society is organised in case it offends media audiences.
This often means that minority or unpopular points of view go unrepresented in the media, and this helps to maintain the hegemony of the dominant ideas in society.
This pressure to attract audiences in an increasingly competitive media market to, in turn, attract advertisers also can lead to a dumbing down or tabloidisation of news content, with serious hard news journalism being replaced by human interest and entertainment.
Barnett and Gaber suggested that such pressures lead to a more conformist, less informed and less critical approach to reporting politics.
Thussu found this move to tabloidisation or infotainment was found in TV news across the world.