Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/36571

Title

Let's not throw in the towel on media diversity

Author(s)

Given, Jock

Abstract

As policy-makers have moved in unison to deregulate media markets in the United States, Britain and Australia, their children have been indulging in a little synchronicity of their own. At a minute past midnight on Saturday June 21 Greenwich Mean Time (9.01am in Melbourne), any British, American or Australian child who could read and afford the local currency equivalent of $A45, less some aggressive discounting, was in a queue to buy the fifth Harry Potter novel. Minutes later, they were holding their piece of the largest first-print run in publishing history. Not to be outdone by their Potterised siblings, young adults have, for the past few years, been watching, listening, texting and interacting with local versions of the global reality television phenomenon, Big Brother. Australia's biggest TV audiences have come not in the ancient past, but recently - the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, the biggest audience for an event shown on a single channel, and Princess Diana's funeral, shown across four networks in 1997, which, like her wedding, attracted about four in five Australian TV households. The policy-making parents of these global media synchronisers, however, have been proclaiming the end of mass media. They've been celebrating the expansion of traditional media outlets, such as new radio stations, the arrival of new media, such as multi-channel pay TV and the internet, and the alleged decline of the power of the moguls. They've concluded it's high time for some loosening of the rules that restrict how much media any one mogul can control.

Publication type

Newspaper article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Institute for Social Research

Source

The Age, 24 June 2003, p. 11

Publication year

2003

Keyword(s)

Australia;  Communication;  Competition;  Government policy;  Media;  Media moguls;  Media ownership

Publisher

Fairfax

Publisher URL

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/23/1056220540317.html

Copyright

Copyright © 2003 Jock Given.