Commercial Media - All Aboard!

In media today there are two different outlets: public and commercial. This week we examined the commercial strand of media through mediums including TV, radio, newspaper, magazines and the new digital methods.

So why do we have commercial media? Well companies want to make money, and the easiest way to advertise is when you’ve got your audiences’ eyes and ears at your full command. The larger the market share your media outlet commands, the more you can charge the advertisers – a simple economics supply and demand model.

Advertisers are the real customers of a commercial media organisation, not its readers, viewers or listeners.

Commercial media is like any other business, whereby its success is dependent on the audiences it can generate, and the revenue and profit it can make through selling advertising. So who are the major players in this media battlefield? 

It was interesting to break down just what media outlets each of these overarching companies controlled, and as such their approach to attracting different social groups for advertising. However, the crux of this lecture was about form and function.

The form of commercial media can be broken into three sub-categories; subscription, sponsored and subsidised. These include channels such as Foxtel, regular free-to-air channels and government subsidised channels respectively. The function can also be broken down into three sub-categories being commercial, propaganda and social. These include Ausradio, Fox News and Living Local respectively.

According to the Hutchins Commission, the social responsibility of the media in a democracy is to:

1. a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning;

2. a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism;

3. the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;

4. the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society;

5. full access to the day’s intelligence.

However, can we ever really guarantee that commercial media will fulfil this responsibility when profiteering is so lucrative? In Australia we’ve got formal state requirements, legal prescription, and state oversight to control media actions, as well as statutory and voluntary bodies to ensure adherence to the media’s social responsibility. As such we see an “ethical wall” between editorial content and the commercial side of media – well that’s the idea anyway!

But what is the problem with commercial media? Well to put it bluntly, most people in society don’t want the hard hitting news. People would rather engage in tabloid news than to hear an in-depth analysis on what’s happening in Syria or with the Greek riots. Moreover locals really don’t care about politics until they think the government’s trying to take their money or tell them what they can and can’t do.

So where is commercial media heading? We see a large decrease in advertising spending on the traditional media forms as society shifts their attention to the web. Nonetheless, of the top 10 news websites, seven are commercially owned, as such we see still a huge sphere of influence from these commercial outlets.

The most exciting thing I discovered thanks to this lecture was the Global Mail. Not only does this form of commercial media go against the critique of commercial “Mickey Mouse” news but it also shows that not all commercial media outlets are profiteering business men with hidden agendas…. Or at least this one is exceptionally good at hiding it.