Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The Information Society 15
email, to intervene in and extend the discourse. Such interventions
by consumers have not always been welcome, or even possible, and,
if they are to be at all meaningful, seem to signal moves towards a
participatory democracy and more autonomous models of consumption
based around communities.
Audiences and Producers in the Information Society
The large audiences that have resulted from globalisation of the
traditional media corporations, especially of news-gathering and
distribution, have attracted a series of mergers and buyouts in the
closing decades of the century resulting in fewer, louder broadcast
voices. It is the surviving brands, a global media rump dominated
by about nine conglomerates such as AOL-Time Warner, Disney
(including ABC), News International and, arguably, although its
corporate structure is rather different and its capitalisation significantly
less, the BBC, which have the resources to develop extensive
holdings across the spectrum of media and to occupy maximum
bandwidth in all of them. In the traditional media – television,
radio and print journalism – they have attained what increasingly,
as their business is developed through production partnerships and
joint equity ventures with each other and their own subsidiaries,
looks like a cartel. This method of reducing risk and locking out new
competition is pervasive. McChesney and Herman suggest that
‘each of the nine … media giants has joint ventures with, on
average, two-thirds of the other eight’. They are truly global in the
sense that the world beyond their national boundaries is no longer
discounted as a series of less profitable residual markets. Disney, for
instance, now takes more than 50 per cent of its turnover from non-
US markets. 4
An important aside on this cartel, and one which has important
implications for journalism, might be to emphasise that the holdings
of the conglomerates are not limited to media companies. NBC, for
instance, is owned by the conglomerate headed by General Electric,
much of whose core business is armaments. In the representation of
a news event such as the Kosovo War reporters for NBC are, on the
face of it, heavily compromised. Recent history suggests that
contemporary media conglomerates are increasingly ambivalent
about the concept of ‘glass walls’. The determining philosophies of