Power comes to those who own our media

Comment by PAUL NORRIS*

"It doesn't really matter who owns news outlets," read the headline on a column by Deborah Coddington.

But it really does matter because ownership of media confers power, and power can be abused.

Consider this example. Two reporters for an American television station were working on a story critical of the giant chemical firm Monsanto. They were asked by their bosses to soften their report. They refused and were fired.

The station had recently been bought by a company owned by Rupert Murdoch. Defending their firing of the reporters, the station executives explained: "We paid $3 billion for these stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."

This example is unusual only in that the incident was so transparent and the justification so candid. It is certainly not atypical of Murdoch's style. When the BBC's reporting offended the Chinese, Murdoch promptly removed the BBC service from his Star satellite beaming into China because the issue threatened his delicate negotiations to break into the vast Chinese media market.

Thus the free flow of information falls victim to the commercial priorities of a media mogul. Indeed, governments have been made or broken by the deliberate actions of media owners.

Deborah Coddington says the owner of the magazine for which she wrote, Australian Kerry Packer, didn't interfere with her or the magazine. She was more fortunate than other editors and employees of Kerry Packer. His hands-on approach to running his newspapers, magazines and TV stations is well documented in The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer by Paul Barry.

The abuse of power by media owners is all the more serious given that the trend worldwide is towards fewer owners each owning more media assets. Analysis by the American academic Robert McChesney found that the world's media are dominated by seven multinational corporations, most of these based in America and including AOL Time Warner, Disney/ABC, and Murdoch's News Corporation.

This trend towards consolidation - fewer owners - has accelerated wherever deregulation has taken place. Changes to the regulations in America allowing companies a larger market share are likely to increase this trend. Proposals to loosen regulation in Britain - a topic of hot debate - would have a similar effect.

Deborah Coddington suggests that the increasing amount of information on the internet in some way offsets the power of corporate media. But it will be a long time, if ever, before the internet achieves the power of mainstream media to influence the hearts and minds of the mass of the population.

Furthermore, many of the sites used by news junkies are also part of the corporate landscape. CNN and ABC News are two obvious examples. Independent sites, such as the Drudge Report lauded by Deborah Coddington, rely often on linking back to corporate media.

New Zealand is no exception to the trend to consolidation. We have no rules limiting the size of any media company or preventing cross-media ownership - a newspaper owning a television or radio station, or vice versa. The only restraint is the Commerce Commission, which is responsible for ensuring competition prevails in all markets.

Since deregulation of the airwaves in 1988, we have many more radio stations but fewer companies owning them - down from six to two. The question is whether such a duopoly provides enough real choice and diversity of opinion.

Critics would argue that listener choice and serving the needs of the local community have been diminished by stations concentrating on the more popular formats and networking out of Auckland.

Leaving aside the state-owned media for the moment, most of our media is under the control of four companies - Tony OReilly's APN, which controls the Herald, other newspapers and magazines, and most radio stations; CanWest Global, which owns TV3 and TV4 and many radio stations; Murdoch's News Corporation, which controls Sky and is selling its INL newspapers to Fairfax in Australia; and Packer, who owns a clutch of magazines and has an interest in Prime.

Not only is this a remarkably small group but they are all foreign owners. New Zealand is the only country in the Western world which allows total foreign ownership of its media companies, a measure hastily brought in by the National Government in 1991 to save TV3.

Foreign ownership may bring benefits, such as size, management know-how and investment. The main concern is that what is best for the interests of the shareholders of a foreign company may be at odds with what is in the public interest of New Zealand.

Why should foreign shareholders give a damn about our national identity and culture? If TV3 is under financial pressure, it reduces the amount of money it spends on New Zealand programmes. Fairfax has made no secret of its intention to squeeze higher profits from the INL newspapers, but such cost-cutting may affect the quality of service to readers.

It is worth adding that if healthy profits were generated by any of these media companies, such money may not be reinvested here. It could equally well be distributed to foreign shareholders. Such decisions would probably be made by corporate boards overseas.

If our private media are to remain in the hands of foreign owners, even benign ones, they need the counterbalance of strong public media, which here means Radio New Zealand and TVNZ, Maori TV and their various funding agencies. In a sense the mixed economy of public and private media serves to keep each other honest.

And Barbara Sumner Burstyn, whose column provoked Deborah Coddington, is surely right when she says that in our public media lie our best hopes for knowing who we are and ensuring that the voices of all groups can be heard.

That is why Radio New Zealand and now TVNZ each have a charter.

Charters require the public media to do things the private media may not do. They also offer protection against government abusing its ownership.

Ownership should confer power and responsibilities. Ownership matters.

* Paul Norris is the head of Christchurch Polytechnic's broadcasting school. He is responding to the view of Act MP Deborah Coddington that fears about the ownership of our press, radio and TV are unfounded.