Media Ownership

Research and Regulation//

Winter 2005

Media and Politics in the United States Today

Robert McChesney

Sunday February 13,
3:00-5:00 PM
Corwin Pavilion, UCSB
UCTV Broadcast

Robert McChesney is one of the nation's leading media researchers and analysts, whose pioneering work focuses on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies. A research professor at the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, McChesney has written or edited eight books and more than 120 journal articles on media and politics. His most recent book, "The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communications Politics in the 21st Century," examines the decline in hard news, the growth of "info-tainment" and "advertorials," staff cuts and concentration of ownership, and the increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. It provides a comprehensive critique of journalism with a detailed analysis of contemporary media policies and practices. Historian Howard Zinn said that McChesney in "The Problem of the Media" follows in the great tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, I.F. Stone, and Ben Bagdikian in exposing the ruthless hold of corporate power on the nation's media. He brings the analysis up to date in this revealing book, and suggests how we may work to create the free marketplace of information that is essential if we are to live in a democratic society."

New Paradigms in Global Entertainment Economics;
Or, The Companies that Ate Hollywood

Jennifer Holt

March 3

3:30-4:45 PM
UCen Flying A Studio, UCSB
UCTV Broadcast

Jennifer Holt (PhD, UCLA) is a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California in the School of Cinema-Television and has also taught at UCLA and UC-Santa Barbara. She is a media historian specializing in the political economy and industrial history of American film and television. Her current research looks at the effects of deregulation and current policy on the industrial structure and entertainment products of today’s global media conglomerates. She is finishing a manuscript entitled “In Deregulation We Trust: The Business of Entertainment in the New Hollywood.”

Media Ownership: Research and Regulation is a year-long series sponsored by:
The Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media, The Critical Issues in America Endowment of the College of Letters & Science, The Arthur N. Rupe Chair in the Social Effects of Mass Communication in the Department of Communication, Department of Film and Media Studies, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center

The media landscape in the U.S. and around the globe is rapidly being reconfigured by technological developments, regulatory policies, political ideologies, cultural trends, economic forces, and globalization. Many people are deeply concerned about the increasing concentration of media production and distribution, and worry about the effect of such consolidation on creativity, competition and democratic access to the marketplace of ideas.

The Federal Communications Commission has aggressively moved to craft new rules on media ownership that allow unprecedented forms of vertical and horizontal integration of the media and entertainment industries. Congress, the courts, and
millions of citizens have opposed the rule changes, often on the grounds that the FCC supported those changes with research that the courts said was “arbitrary” and “capricious” and marked by “irrational assumptions and inconsistencies.”

Compounding the problem of the lack of authoritative research on the social and political effects of media concentration is the lack of press coverage of regulatory debates. The time is right for a major public research university to use its resources to discover the kind of research programs needed to understand this rapid reconfiguring of the media landscape and to increase public literacy about who owns what and why it matters.

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