Category: media

“The familiar argument against such concentration is that, by giving a small number of companies too much control over the flow of information and content, it erodes democracy. But the problem isn’t just that a small number of companies run the media business right now; it’s that, under the current system, the same companies will likely be running the media business twenty years from now. Media concentration would be fine if there were genuine competition, but, practically speaking, there isn’t very much (at least, on the broadcast and programming side), thanks to the regulatory reforms of the early nineties (which, among other things, allowed TV networks to own their own shows, instead of having to buy them from outside studios) and the merger boom of the past few years.”

TV studios and network executives are cracking down on writers and directors who deliver their scripts late. “A survey found that of the 651 hourlong episodes studied in the latest survey, 333 (51%) were on time, while 318 (49%) were late from one to 15 days, while 20% of the late scripts were late by as many as seven to 15 days.” Studios say the late scripts add greatly to the budgets of the shows.

Those who think that the corporatization of hasn’t destroyed local radio aren’t listening to radio. “Radio stations where unknown bands might once have come knocking at the door no longer even have doors. They have become drone stations, where a once multifarious body of music has been pared down and segmented in bland formats, overlaid with commercials. As record companies scramble to replicate the music that gets airplay, pop music is turning in on itself and flattening out.”

The Australian government has banned the American film “Ken Park” from the Sydney Film Festival. The film, which has been screened at several film festivals internationally, “includes scenes of explicit sex, suicide and auto-erotic asphyxiation, is about four teenagers struggling with uncertain futures in suburban California.” The Sydney Festival’s director protests: “It seems ironic that in the festival’s 50th year, we are still fighting censorship battles.”

Prominent Australian movie and TV actors get together to protest a proposed free trade agreement between Australia and the United States. If the deal goes ahead, they fear, “the local screen industry will be consumed by American content.”

“Television is no longer an experience we share with the neighbours, except on such dire occasions. When we gather to drink and mourn and shout idiotically at the screen, it is part of a wider life. At other times in public places, it is merely part of the furniture, a familiar but unobserved accessory, while in the home it has become a utility as plentiful as tap water. All this seems a long way from a working-class Stirlingshire village in June 1953, when there was a sense that the box of tricks had been invented for the purpose of giving ordinary people an access to extraordinary events.”

It wasn’t that long ago that there was genuine excitement about the coming 500-channel TV landscape. So how come now that we have it there doesn’t ever seem to be anything on? “The truth is, as the networks become ever smaller pieces of ever-growing media empires, there is dwindling potential for the kind of risk-taking that gave us breakout programming such as All In The Family or Seinfeld. Imagine some boardroom type green-lighting a comedy about a bigoted, racist right-winger or “a show about nothing.”

The movie business is so big, so powerful, so slick, it seems as though it’s never been in better shape. Consider that “30 years ago the summer blockbuster hadn’t been invented, films weren’t equated with franchises, ‘multiplex’ wasn’t a word, and the people calling the creative shots were the artists, not the bean counters. This situation didn’t last long, but it spawned a group of films so satisfying and challenging that many consider the late-’60s-to-late-’70s to be cinema’s best era.”

“Since the 1950s, the free American broadcast system has served as the great galvanizer and equalizer, accessible to anyone in the nation owning a rooftop antenna and a TV. Even today, most Americans get their news from broadcast TV. Yet some critics say the system is irreparably broken and growing more irrelevant in the face of competition from cable and satellite services, even as the federal government has moved to prop up the broadcast industry.”

More and more Britons are going to the movies. But British films are losing ground, says a new study. “Although younger people are flocking to the cinema in ever increasing numbers they are overwhelmingly watching films made by the big US studios. No solely British film reached the list of top 20 films released last year, nor the top 20 list for the past 10 years.”