Corporate Media

Overview

The term "corporate media," sometimes used as an epithet, refers to a news reporting agency that is owned or otherwise controlled by a large corporation. The implication is that this ownership status makes it difficult if not impossible for the media outlet to be objective and unbiased, as journalism traditionally strives to be. The type of media can be print, radio, television, or online; many news organizations now have a presence in several of these areas at once, as happens when a radio station broadcasts over the airwaves and via its website. While the use of the term "media" might suggest that any type of media is being referred to, in practice the phrase "corporate media" is used to describe news reporting organizations. The issues of ownership and control are most pressing where news is concerned, because other forms of media exist for entertainment or other subjective purposes, while news is assumed to be informative and reliable, presenting objective truths insofar as is possible (Boyd-Barrett, 2011).

A fundamental principle of journalism has long been that while advertising often funds the work of reporting, there must always be a bright line drawn between the editorial functions of the organization and its advertising department. This has been done in order to avoid the temptation of allowing money or other incentives to influence what is reported, either by emphasizing information favorable to the organization's benefactors, or by remaining silent about or actively concealing information that would cast them in an unfavorable light.

When a media outlet is owned by a major corporation, the concern is that this line will fade or disappear entirely. This is because corporations are controlled by executives and trustees whose primary duty is to maximize the corporation's profits on behalf of the corporation's shareholders (Pettigrew & Reber, 2010). The traditional model of media ownership was for the organization's highest duty to be reporting the truth of events to the public, yet when a corporation is the owner, there is suddenly the possibility that truth may take a backseat to profitability. As a hypothetical example, one can imagine a corporation that owns a fleet of oil tankers and a major newspaper with nationwide circulation. If one of the company's oil tankers runs aground and leaks oil, causing an environmental catastrophe, it would be headline news all around the world. The company's newspaper will be one of many news outlets trying to determine what caused the accident—human error, poorly maintained equipment, or some other factor. If the facts point to an equipment failure that could easily have been avoided through reasonable diligence, then the company newspaper would face a quandary. It would have to choose between reporting the facts as they appear to be, possibly having a detrimental effect on the financial state of the company, or either downplaying or concealing the facts in order to preserve the company's reputation. While the choice may seem clear in an abstract example, in reality there would be people's careers at stake, as well as financial losses that could easily run into the billions of dollars, making the outcome far from uncertain. It is precisely this type of scenario that has engendered widespread skepticism of corporate media (Polakow-Suransky, 2003).

Further Insights

A major concern regarding corporate media is the issue of advertising and product promotion. While in the example above the fear is that corporate media would conceal information, in the case of advertising the worry is that there can be a tendency for corporate media to include, along with its reporting, subtle or overt endorsements for products and services that are sold by other divisions within the corporation. The idea is similar to the concept of product placement, which is seen in television programs and movies; each time an actor sets down a can of soda so the label just happens to be visible, or wears a piece of clothing with an easily identifiable brand, the audience may not realize that these things have not happened without careful planning and financial remuneration. Companies pay large sums to have their products featured in entertainment media in ways that can be so subtle as to escape viewers' conscious awareness (Pallas & Fredriksson, 2013). Given this fact, it is understandable that many people suspect corporate media of considering, or actually performing, such behavior, including references within their stories and broadcasts to products or brands that are sold by the media outlet's parent company.

Corporate media ownership reflects a trend of consolidation that has been occurring for a number of years. Just as the tendency has been for companies to merge with one another or to expand their influence by acquiring other firms, corporate media ownership has become more concentrated with each passing year. Whereas several dozen companies owned media outlets in the not too distant past, by the twenty-first century, media ownership had concentrated in a handful of giant multinationals. This consolidation is cause for concern. In the marketplace, when companies merge with their competitors, the number of firms vying for consumers' favor is reduced. This process places greater power in the hands of those companies that remain, because with fewer competitors, they are more able to set prices and to offer only those services they deem profitable to themselves or otherwise serving the interests of the corporation. When this happens, companies are more likely to take advantage of consumers since consumers often have nowhere else to go for the services they need. This is what happens when a monopoly forms in the marketplace: The number of producers of a particular good or service is reduced to a handful, or even one, and consumers are forced to take or leave whatever the owners of the monopoly wish to offer them. In the case of corporate media, multinational corporations now control most print and broadcast outlets, meaning that people have very few options for news and information that do not originate with corporations (Serper, 2013). Dissatisfied consumers have less of a voice with which to press media companies for the coverage they want.

A major factor in the rise of corporate media has been the economics of journalism in the age of the Internet. Technology has drastically changed the way people share information, and for the most part this has not had a positive financial effect on media organizations. Whether one looks at newspapers, radio, or television, the availability of the Internet has tended to draw away the attention of audiences, causing newspaper subscriptions to decline and fewer people to tune in to the radio or television news. With declines in audience numbers, advertisers have reduced the amount they spend on these types of media, so they can instead invest in online ads that have a better chance of capturing viewers' attention. These trends have left traditional media struggling to find new financial models and new strategies to keep themselves relevant and interesting; people no longer rely on the morning or evening paper, or the six o'clock news, when they can check current events online at any time, and even receive automatic updates about breaking news. For many, the solution (or at least the end) of the struggle has arrived in the form of a corporate buyout, in which a corporation takes over the media outlet and provides it with the operating capital it needs in order to keep running as it brings itself into the modern age. This can be a mixed blessing, for while the outlet is able to continue operating, corporate ownership tends to result in a change of focus as to what is reported and how the story is told (Murray, 2005).

This change of focus is often especially notable with reference to local news that comes under corporate ownership. Local news has always been a particularly challenging business, because it can be very expensive to operate a newspaper, television station, or radio facility. These expenses are supported by the subscribers and advertisers, and in the case of local news this will be a fairly small group of people. Thus, the television news in a city of 100,000 will have far fewer resources than any of the multiple stations in a city of several million people. Local news thus tends to be popular but underfunded, making it a ripe candidate for corporate acquisition. Once a local outlet is acquired, the usual pattern is for the corporation to reorganize its operations in order to make the outlet more profitable, cutting expenses (such as journalists) and increasing profits (by reporting less about local developments and presenting topics of general interest that can be printed in all markets). When these changes take place, communities not only lose part of their unique character but also their ability to remain informed on issues that are of the most immediate interest or concern. It is possible to view the websites of hundreds of small town newspapers across the United States, and in so doing, find that many of them appear almost identical to one another, and even run many of the same stories that have been pulled from international press agencies, since running such stories is cheaper than paying reporters to cover local events.

To compensate for the loss of local journalistic coverage, some owners of corporate media have begun to experiment with methods of preserving the immediacy and unique character of local news by recruiting ordinary people to contribute their own pictures, videos, and commentary. Generally, this only happens when there is an unusually newsworthy event unfolding—a tornado or hostage crisis, for example—and it may very well be that the efforts are as much about saving money on journalist salaries as they are about preserving local character. Still these types of initiatives have some promise for keeping at least some categories of news coverage authentic and immediate (Pallas & Fredriksson, 2011).

Issues

Perhaps the most chilling scenario that the phrase "corporate media" conjures up is one in which a corporate-owned media outlet seeks to exert its influence over the political sphere. Corporations have long had an interest in government and political campaigns, and in recent years this interest has intensified as courts have handed down rulings that permit greater political involvement on their part. A corporation that can get its candidate elected may stand to gain millions or even billions of dollars over the long term. Having media outlets owned by self-interested corporations raises the possibility that the corporation could use its media outlet to build support for one party or candidate over another. This would be much more cost-effective than relying solely on political donations to achieve policy goals, because the media outlet could be used to guide public opinion on an unlimited number of issues and for an indefinite period of time (Cuellar-Fernandez, Fuertes-Callen & Lainez-Gadea, 2010).

The deeper issue lies not so much with corporate media per se, but with the role that prominent media outlets, often referred to as the "mainstream media," plays in society. Corporate media is one aspect of this large issue, which comes down to the fact that in most parts of the developed world, mainstream and corporate media are the primary drivers of public opinion (Durham, 2008). The media tells people what issues are important in society, and people respond by paying attention to those issues, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This state of affairs is extremely dangerous, because huge social movements can rise and fall at the whim of corporations using the media to steer public opinion. Also of concern is that the media landscape of the twenty-first century has been dominated by a group of five or six large conglomerates that control about 90 percent of the media outlets in the United States.

Many activists point to the way the media has been used to build public support for military conflicts all over the world. In developed countries, citizens usually are skeptical or outright opposed to having their nation's military deployed to another part of the world to intervene in what seems like a local dispute. Leaders can find this troublesome when there are other considerations (e.g., political, economic) that argue in favor of intervention, so it often happens that even in democratic countries, politicians may begin persuading the public to support military action by using the corporate media to emphasize reasons why such action is desirable. One of the surprises revealed by even a cursory study of the interactions between media and politics is that influence flows in both directions: Corporate media influence political maneuvering, and politicians influence the messaging of corporate media in order to guide public opinion, in a process referred to as "manufacturing consent" (Beshara, 2018).

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