Kultur in Gefahr - ITI

14 Artistic Expression in a Corporate World
Artistic Expression in a Corporate World 15
and social power in very few hands.’ (2002: 49). A film, for instance, is not
merely a film anymore. ‘The great profit in the media today comes from
taking a movie or TV show and milking it for maximum return through spinoff
books, CDs, video games, and merchandise. Hence it is virtually
impossible to compete as a “stand-alone” movie studio, TV network, or
music company, when one’s competitors are part of vast empires. This has
fuelled the massive conglomeration rush of the past fifteen years.’ (Ibid.).
Therefore Benjamin Barber claims that with ‘a few conglomerates
controlling what is created, who distributes it, where it is shown, and how
it is subsequently licensed for further use, the very idea of a genuinely
competitive market place in ideas or images disappears . . .’ (1996: 89).
Besides these super-conglomerates, there are fifty or so second tier
giants that are national or regional powerhouses, like Mexico’s Televisa,
Brazil’s Globo, Argentina’s Clara, Venezuela’s Cisneros Group, and
Berlusconi’s Mediaset in Italy. ‘These firms tend to dominate their own
national markets and media markets, which have been experiencing rapid
consolidation as well. They have extensive ties and joint-ventures with the
largest media Transnational Corporations, as well as with Wall Street
investment banks.’ 1 Their political influence is abundant. Gillian Doyle
remarks that ‘the Berlusconi case provides compelling evidence of a
causal connection between concentrated media ownership and
undesirable narrowing in the diversity of political opinions available to the
public via the media.’ (2002: 20).
An interesting question is ‘what gains arise when media firms
embark on strategies of enlargement and cross-sectoral expansion?’
(Doyle 2002: 45). This is a serious issue, because ‘arguments based
around “economic” concerns have gained increased status in debates
about media ownership policy in recent years. Gillian Doyle judges it
‘important to investigate what, if any, economic benefits or costs may be
associated with enlarged and diversified firms. One of the worrying
conclusions that emerges from studying recent changes in media
ownership policy in the UK and across Europe is that relatively little
independent investigation or systematic analysis of the consequences of
these changes has been carried out by policy-makers.’ (2002: 172). She
claims, that ‘the general absence of any robust body of independent
research into the economic implications of deregulating media ownership
has greatly favoured corporate interests. It has meant that, in general,
large media firms’ own interpretations of technological and market
developments, and of the economic implications of these developments,
have been allowed to dominate the policy agenda in the UK and elsewhere
in Europe without any attempt at systematic empirical corroboration.’
(2002: 173).
Without any doubt such research would show that cultural
conglomerates are rather inefficiently operating enterprises. Their financial
gains depend upon an extremely limited number of big successes, while
most of what they produce and distribute is loosing even its initial
investments. They are not merging endlessly because of their strength,
but it is their financial and organisational catastrophic position that drives
them to eating up even bigger slices of the cultural market. This is a
synergy that has been born out of need, while many banks do hope to see
a return on the invested money.
Will Hutton makes Gillian Doyle’s amazement concrete with an
example. ‘The telecom companies wanted less regulation, they wanted the
right to build their own self-standing networks and they wanted their
allocations on the terrestrial spectrum to be as free as possible from public
service obligations; long-distance carriers wanted to enter local markets;
all wanted cross-ownership rules relaxed. All that they wanted, they got.’
(2002: 204). And then the dot-com bubble burst, ‘followed inevitably by
the end of the telecoms boom – in which trillions of dollars were at stake.
We are left with vast overcapacity, threatened bankruptcies and a massive
debt overhang in which only a fraction of the capital invested is remotely
recoverable.’ The conclusion of these failed success stories? Will Hutton:
‘And despite it all, no country can boast a complete broadband cable
network. If the public sector in the leading industrial countries had spent a
fraction of the lost cash in each building one public network, the spread of
the information economy would have been faster by years. That was
forbidden by the conservative orthodoxy.’ (2002: 206,7).
His observation may help us to be less reserved when in chapter 4
we propose regulations in favour of the protection and promotion of
cultural diversity. We should take into account that there is no objective
requirement as to why we should have such huge cultural conglomerates
that dominate nearly all the cultural fields in our societies.
1 Robert McChesney, The New Global Media. It’s a Small World of Big
Conglomerates, The Nation, November 1999.