Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

180 Online Journalism
of the company differently from the owners, or protect them any less
vigorously. ‘Moles’ such as Mark Thomas or Michael Moore, operating
from inside the media corporations can equally be seen as
evidence of an overweaning confidence and a desire to take profit
from the very limits of their constituency rather than any vulnerability.
As importantly, Murdoch suggests that ‘control is not a
quantity [the largest shareholding] but a social relation’, 35 the ability
of shareholders to work in concert across a range of companies to
dictate a whole industrial sector.
Again, some strands of cultural studies and media analysis
propose a model which stresses the autonomy of the consumer.
Drawing on a range of feedback devices it places the determining
agency of what is programmed and how in the hands of media
consumers. Corporate decision-making is determined solely on the
strength of a classical understanding of the market economy. Both
models seem inadequate in the face of the oligopoly and an
economy based on advertising, not least since audiences only see
content that has been ‘pre-filtered’ by a media hierarchy that knows
what its advertisers expect. The 1999 scandal of genetically modified
crops was constructed around the wilder claims of environmentalists.
Neither the economic argument – that the owners of the new
products were using them to turn global agriculture into a closed
market – nor the consumerist arguments around choice were
examined in most news coverage. Outright censorship is unnecessary
in traditional media where hegemonic control works as well and
where producers, at the editorial and newsroom level, have learnt to
police themselves.
On the web, regular panics around issues such as pornography,
universal failure of copyright and political extremisms are rapidly
producing a similar hegemony and can be understood as part of the
machinery that is driving it into private hands. Hegemonic control
of online media is increasingly reinforced by the state. The DTI
Future Unit report looks towards the state to ‘pioneer regulation for
the new digital knowledge-driven economy, to provide the vital
positive framework of institutional support for business’. 36 The
market and Big Media are likely to be further advantaged as Internet
2 is developed in association with business and we see the emergence
of what Eric Meyer has called the ‘new, new media’ which will once
more lock independent and small producers out of the means of