Why Does Media Ownership Matter? The Press, Propaganda, and Power

Hi, My name is Justin Schlossberg.

I am a reader in journalism and media here at Birkbeck University of London.

My main interest, my main research interest.

My main interest in terms of my activism

and advocacy is around issues to do with media power

and media. Power is intimately associated

with media ownership,

and what I'd like to do today is try and persuade you

that media ownership is something

that still matters

even in today's

very

diffused, proliferated digital media environment.

And I also want to explain why it matters.

The roots of concern about media ownership

is the ability

of sometimes very wealthy,

very powerful individuals to exert dominance over the public conversation

over the public agenda, even over the public consciousness,

by virtue of their control of critical media resources.

Of course,

we're not only concerned about individuals owning media

people like Rupert Murdoch people like Jeff Bezos,

who owns The Washington Post, or even Elon Musk, who just bought Twitter.

We're also concerned about corporations. We're also concerned about states

having ownership and control of mass media and being able to

use those platforms to further their own particular vested interests.

But traditionally

there was always.

There has always been a long standing concern that newspapers in particular,

who are distinct from broadcasters, at least in Britain, in being

relatively free of regulation

and being able

to really say what they want in terms

of certainly their political editorial leanings and coverage.

And so newspapers owned by very powerful individuals have always been seen

as a political weapon in many sense or a tool of propaganda. And if we think back to

the early days of the press barons

in in Britain in the early part of the 20th century,

this was actually quite apparent and

quite obvious that newspaper owners were using

their newspapers for

tools of propaganda and political influence. In fact,

Lord Beaverbrook, who was the owner of The Daily Express in the 19 forties,

told a Royal Commission inquiry into the press pretty much exactly that that he

bought the newspaper and owns the newspaper for the sole purpose of propaganda.

Nowadays, newspaper owners tend to be a little bit more

shy or coy about the power that they may or may not wield.

In fact,

people like Rupert Murdoch are very often at pains

to stress that they don't have much power,

and they certainly have much less power

in the face of tech giants like Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple.

Um, and that, really,

they're just struggling to maintain their corner of the sand pit

in

this hyper competitive media environment,

where eyeballs and attention are subject to all sorts of competing influences,

not least on on social media.

So

let's go back to some basics.

What is it about the power

that media can wield? That is of special concern

and in some ways potentially even more significant and

pervasive than the power wielded by political elites?

For example.

Well,

in the early part of the 20th century,

as mass media

became, uh, established

as, um AAA tool of propaganda,

cultural theorists and critics in particular became very concerned.

And this is particularly in the wake of Nazi Germany

and the horrific way in which

the Nazi regime used audio visual media in

particular to propagate its extremist racist ideology.

People became very concerned

that with the advent of television and radio in particular,

that the media had an extraordinary power to

essentially brainwash us to

reach into our

deepest

consciousness and shape the way we think about the

world and the way that we think about ourselves.

And this was sometimes known as the hypodermic needle

theory of media power,

the imagery invoking the idea that we are literally being injected

with messages

by the media that we consume. And it's not just

the newspapers

that we may or not read ourselves, not just our own social media feeds,

but the ubiquitous presence of media

in our lives, the way in which headlines on a

metro newspaper and a bus by someone sitting next to us might just

catch the corner of our eyes and have some subliminal or subconscious influence.

That prompted a lot of what became

a kind of radical critical response

to media power,

which is rooted in Marxist ideas.

That those who own the means of production and, in this case,

the means of media production

can shape

the culture

and world views in accordance with their own material interests.