Media Ownership and Bias

When analyzing the environment under which American media outlets operate, it is certainly understandable why public mistrust and cynicism of the media are so prevalent in today’s society. To completely understand the roots of this cynicism, it is necessary to examine the role of our country’s media institutions and the external forces acting upon them. While many areas have influenced the operation of American media, it has been the pressures of society and economy that have been most responsible in constructing the roles of media and the way in which it functions today.


Throughout his life, Karl Marx asserted that “the state was clearly a servant of those who had the greatest accumulation of material resources” (“The Many Facets of Political Psychology” 27). To protect the status quo, Marx stated that those who possessed enormous economic wealth, would use their prosperity to influence politics, business and public perception to ensure that their interests would be represented at all echelons of high-level decision making. If one were to analyze modern American society it would be found that Marx’s words are still valid. In America, those involved in goal formation and the direction of government, business, banking, education and media all belong to the highest social strata and economic class. While the naïve may insist that this control is merely coincidental, it seems clear that the primacy of wealth and the market over the state is the result of a designed plan to control and protect the interests of a small group and prevent any force from rising to defy their social and economic power.


Today, 8 companies own and control all of the world’s media outlets. By its very nature, this consolidated system of ownership puts a considerable amount of power in the hands of only a few people. In America, no institution plays more of a socializing role than the mass media. Because of this, those with large equity positions in media institutions can dictate and influence the thoughts, behaviors and attitudes of the masses in a way that protects the elitist interests of society and the social and financial stratifications on which they are based. As a result, those with great economic wealth can safeguard the social and economic status quo and manipulate information about societal roles and norms and their positions.


Control of the media also prevents the masses from realizing their inherent position of social and financial inferiority. This is important when one considers the sheer size and numbers that the non-elitist class possesses. Through the use of media institutions to control discourse and frame certain topics, the elitist owners of society can direct mass attention away from the problems associated with society’s asymmetrical construction and prevent this group from organizing in a way that can drastically change society. According to C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite, “the media 1) tell the man of the masses who he is (they give him identity); 2) they tell him what he wants to be – (they give him aspirations); 3) they tell him how to get that way – (they give him technique) ; and 4) they tell him how to feel that he is that way even when his not – (they give him escape) (314). By doing so, the media socializes each individual and ensures that he or she will work/operate in a way that is most attuned to the goals of society’s owners and will not rise up to challenge their roles.


Besides being influenced by socioeconomic forces that protect elitist interests, mass media institutions are also driven by basic economic pressures that influence businesses all over the world. Regardless of what good or service is provided, a business must operate as efficiently as possible to increase profits by maximizing revenues and minimizing expenses if they wish to exist in the face of competition. In the world of media, advertising revenues comprise the majority of each institution’s income. Therefore, since these advertising revenues from businesses are directly correlated with the size of a program or station’s audience, the incentive exists for media outlets to create programs and disperse information that appeals to the largest part number of people over an extended period of time. Besides simply socializing these people to protect their interests, the owners of media companies have realized the public’s role in helping to generate their own personal profits. The sequence in which owners rely on audiences to generate sales revenue has created a situation where media institutions are induced to frame particular narratives to protect the interests of their corporate sponsors and advertisers before they even consider the interests of the masses.


Incorporated into the incentives to appeal to the largest audience and protect the status quo is the incentive to entertain. To entertain is to create an audience that will come back time after time. While pertinent, unframed news and information is certainly relevant to the life of each individual, it does not instill the same emotional ties as entertainment. Therefore, in order to achieve the high ratings and large audiences that they need to survive and compete against other news outlets, media institutions are forced to marginalize newsworthy and provocative information in favor of filtered stories designed to entertain and create emotions in their viewers (fear, happiness, etc.) Since emotional appeals create the largest audience, the greatest amount of revenue and are more entertaining than appeals based on “just the facts” , the media are also able to subvert the cognition and rational thought needed to mobilize a movement against the status quo.


The fact the media sets the agenda of relevant topics and news and does so out of an allegiance to profits and socioeconomic concerns has created a media system protected by certain routines and formulas. By having accepted ways of efficiently presenting news to the public and knowing exactly how to present each news item, media institutions are able to maximize their entertainment value while preventing thought provoking discourses from emerging. Routines and formulas act as the rails and wheels of the train car that is media; these prescribed ways of presenting information ensure that the media will always aim to maximize its entertainment value by avoiding the real discussion of relevant topics. Rather than breaking down over time as the rails and wheels a train would, however, the routines and formulas in place only become more and more effective as they are used and modified. Thus, as long as the media does not stray from its path, it will continue to achieve it corporate goals. Through the use of these routines and formulas, all of today’s news and information is filtered through opinions that frame issues with an emotional appeal. While they are restrictive, they are very effective and easy to follow and will not be discarded any time soon because of the success that is associated with them.


Upon analyzing the number of pressures influencing American media, it seems pretty obvious why some people are cynical of the media and feel that their needs and rights are subservient to many others; they really are! Before even considering what actual material to disperse to the masses, media must first consider the interests of the owner/ elitist class, the need to protect the status quo, the need to generate profits, the interests of the their advertisers, the need entertain the masses, as well as the political pressure that they receive from the FCC (pressure from above) and grass-root organizations (pressure from below) and the ideological pressures that force them to believe in this method of operation. Many Americans do not trust the information they receive from the media for this reason. When bearing in mind how late the interests of the American people are considered by the American media, it is hard not to blame them. Change can come, but considering the number of external forces influencing the information that we receive, it will only come as a result of a long-fought gradual modifications to the system under which media operates