Following the appearance last fall of his book Media Ownership and Concentration in America, professor Eli Noam from the New York-based Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) launched this year a massive research project on media ownership worldwide. Noam put together a team of researchers from 20 or so countries to produce a comparative study, and I hope it will be useful in improving media policy.
Most of these researchers gathered at Columbia University recently to discuss their preliminary findings, the project’s methodology, and the use of this research for policy aims. The study is mapping ownership in a wide array of markets, including broadcasting, print media, ISPs, wireless and wireline telecoms, search engines, music and book publishing industries.
It uses academically established indexes such as the C4 ratio and the HHI to assess the level of concentration in an industry for a given year. On top of that, an index worked out by Noam is used by the project’s researchers to detect the level of concentration in the media as a whole.
Many researchers stressed that they needed to take a step further and analyze the link between concentration and bias in the media. Such a study would be a ground-breaker.
I expect an impressive amount of data and solid economic assessments to come out of this. But I also hope that we can use this study practically. Many civil society organizations and think-tanks have been craving for years solid comparative research on ownership concentration in the media to be able to advocate in an informed matter for more transparent, independent and open media systems. CITI’s initiative could meet this need.
3 Comments
Hi.
This research has the potential to not only change media policy amongst development agencies, but to also completely transform the wider public debate around media development, freedom of speech and the "saving journalism" hysteria currently cripplying industry fora.
What's great is that the methodology looks robust, and has been published for comment.
What isn't good is that it limits the research to only analyse "national" media. That will skew the results in developing nations, will bring into question any attempt to compare 1st world with developing world economies.
It will also ignore some of the most important new trends in media both in the US/EU and elsewhere in the world: the evolution of independent, hyper-local, platform-agnostic content hubs. This is serious oversight in light of the growing importance of location-aware media as part of the growing shift to mobile.
Cheers,
Justin
Hi again.
Many of us have conducted similar kinds of surveys in our regions (although on much smaller & less ambitious scales).
It would be fantastic if the researchers could make available their results in a Wiki format, so that the rest of us can continue building on & expanding (or updating) the findings.
If there is wide enough consensus on the methodology, the Wiki could easily grow into the definitive resource on global media ownership / concentration.
Cheers,
Justin
Agreed with Justin. The research should be extended beyond socio-geographical areas, especially now that the "e" era is here.
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