Why the Media Matter and Why Critical Engagement with the Media Is Necessary.

Media & Society Assignment 1
Why the media matter and why critical engagement with the media is necessary.
Use your chosen point of focus (e.g. political economy) to argue for the importance of having a critical understanding of media. Why should we be concerned with media ownership and concentration? Why should we care about the ideologies the media perpetuate? Try to relate your arguments to solid, practical examples.
Media are “…technologically developed communication industries, normally making money, which can transmit information and entertainment across time and space to individuals and/or large groups of people…” (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2008:3).The media are an integral part of modern life experience in society today (Giddens 2001, 452). They surround us in its various forms through each waking moment of our lives, whether TV or radio, newspapers and magazines or most recently the internet and mobile phones.
In the 21st century, critical media literacy is an imperative for participatory democracy because new information communication technologies and a market based media culture have fragmented, connected, converged, diversified, broadened and reshaped the world. These changes have been framing the way people think and restructuring societies at local and global levels. http://www.academia.edu/200953/Critical_Media_Literacy_is_Not_an_Option According to William Melody, the greatest threat to freedom of expression in the United States or elsewhere is the possibility that private entrepreneurs will always tend to monopolise the marketplace of ideas in the name of economic efficiency and private profit (Melody 1978). As a result of economic conditions or circumstances, access to the marketplace of ideas is restricted to a privileged few.
Twenty-five years ago, when Melody made this statement, only 37 cities out of 1,519 in the United States had two or more daily newspapers. By 2000, the number had decreased and the one-newspaper town had become the national norm (Sterling 2000: xvi). In 1996, the number of the cities with two or more dailies declined to 19 or 1.3% of all American cities (Compaine and Gomery 2000: 9). Fewer owners have control over more newspapers and their circulation, and most of the media have been absorbed by large conglomerates, ‘families’ or chains.
In addition to ownership concentration of the mass media industry, content provision, packaging and distribution have also ‘become a standardised production and marketing process in which the messages communicated are constrained and directed in both quantity and quality to meet the economic imperatives of that process’ (Melody 1978: 219). What are the implications of this? The result is that what most people hear and see in the mass media is remarkably uniform in content and world-view (Neuman 1991: 130). Giddens goes even further when he calls for ‘the democratising of the democracy’. He criticises the untamed power of media owners:
The media...have a double relation to democracy. On the one hand ... the emergence of a global information society is a powerful democratising force. Yet, television, and the other media, tend to destroy the very public space of dialogue they open up, through relentless trivializing, and personalizing of political issues. Moreover, the growth of giant multinational media corporations means that unelected business tycoons can hold enormous power (Giddens 1999: np).

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