MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA

MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA
4 Media market
Media market is a speciic type of market consisting of three aspects:
existence of medium is manifestation of freedom of expression and
information dissemination; running commercial medium is economic
enterprising; medium is a means which can in a signiicant way
inluence public opinion – it has become means to its managing, using
for propaganda purposes.
Media market has been fundamentally changing and these changes
are striking not only in the print media, where it comes to the change
of paradigm of journalism that stops to be dominantly on newscasting,
commentaries and analyses, but it is increasingly more concerned with
entertainment and service information. It is clear that quality content
will be shifted into low-cost magazines. The behaviour of readers has
also changed – they move their attention to the electronic media – TV,
the Internet. The interest in media content and information has changed
from quality one to entertainment one. There is a fall in economic
performance of print media and changes in ownership structure are
logic.
Changes of owners themselves are neutral, but currently they have
a signiicant impact on the complete course of events in the media, where
especially a negative reaction of a part of editorial staff from the daily
newspaper SME symbolizes a change of ownership terms for the Slovak
public.
Apart from having doubts of the fact that ownership of media
organizations has concentrated in the hands of increasingly less amount
of individuals; there appear discussions on the fact if the concentration
is harmful at all from the viewpoint of the quality of media content.
Looking for the answer to the question if accession of powerful economic
groups into ownership structures of media publishers is a direct threat
of freedom of speech is widely discussed. Freedom of speech is one of
unavoidable conditions for accomplishing fundamental social functions
of media as a tool of a watchdog of democracy.
In this context the interconnection between economic interests and
media inluence is extremely dangerous when media stop acting as
watchdogs and become an important tool not only for economic interest
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