JOUR/IR 246

International Communiation Online

WEEK FOUR

SUMMER 2002

 
 

Instructor: Jack Lule 
Phone: (610)758-4177 
Email: jack.lule@lehigh.edu 

On this page are the assignments for Monday, June 10 and Thursday, June 13. 

DEADLINES:  You should have Monday's assignments completed by Thursday, June 13, at 7 p.m. You should have Thursday's assignment -- your second research paper -- completed by the following Thursday, June 20, at 7 p.m.


WEEK FOUR, MONDAY: 

We now look at international communication from another perspective: conglomerations and mergers. 

If you're like me, global economics is not the most . . . exciting topic. But global conglomerations can actually be very intriguing. And there is probably no more important topic in international communication. 

A handful of media companies and moguls -- "Lords of the Global Village" -- own and control a huge percentage of the world's media. The percentage rises regularly. 

We are heading toward a future where, quite possibly, less than a dozen people or companies will own most of the media of the world. 

It's one of the most important and disturbing aspects of international communication. Yet very few people know much about it. Where would they get the information? From the media owned and controlled by these very moguls? Not likely. 

This week we'll think about the implications of the growing global media monopoly. 
 

ASSIGNMENTS 

1) Our first reading is a small excerpt from a classic. The author is Ben Bagdikian, a journalist with a wonderfully varied career. As a Washington Post reporter, he worked with the Pentagon Papers, a hugely important story from
the Nixon era. 

Bagdikian eventually left journalism for the university life. He has done important research in media economics. His book, The Media Monopoly, is regularly revised and reprinted. 

In June 1989, Bagdikian published a long cover story for the progressive weekly, The Nation. The story, "The Lords of the Global Village," was a detailed report of media conglomeration on a global scale. Though its details are dated, the issues and themes are timeless and will give us a
great introduction to the issues. I have put a small excerpt at my site for you to read. 

2) As I noted, the Bagdikian article was written in 1989. It predicts the trends well but we will need to update the information. 

To update the Bagdikian piece, I will send you to work by the scholars Robert McChesney and Mark Crispin Miller. McChesney and Miller both have written extensively on the continuing conglomeration of international news media. 

A McChesney article, "Oligopoly: The Big Media
Game Has Fewer and Fewer Players," is from the
Progressive magazine. It provides information and also offers some possible solutions to the huge problem of conglomeration. The Progressive link should work but just in case, here's a copy of the article at my site.

3) The Miller article, "What's Wrong With This Picture," is a bit more recent. The article was originally published in The Nation. Here's a copy if the link doesn't work.

He writes about The Big Ten conglomerates who control much of the world's media. 

4) After reading about this major issue, I would like to hear your thoughts on the Bagdikian excerpt and the McChesney and Miller articles. Send me an email message, jack.lule@lehigh.edu, discussing important points and trends and McChensey's solutions. 

5) For our conference, however, I want to take a step back. Not everyone thinks the trend in mergers and monopolies is a bad thing. 

A recent symposium, "Corporatization of the Media," took up the issue of conglomeration. It asked whether growth was necessarily a bad thing. It questioned whether critics were simply paranoid over inevitable growth.

I would like you to read over parts of this panel discussion so you can see other points of view. Then I would like to take up these views in our conference. 

How do you feel about global media conglomeration? Is it good? Bad? Inevitable? Try to take up points by McChesney and other participants on the panel. Listen to the thoughts of your classmates. What do you think? See you in conference. 


WEEK FOUR, THURSDAY: 

To complete our section on global conglomeration, it's time for us to become more acquainted with some of "The
Lords of the Global Village." 

I used to follow Bagdikian and ask students to study particular individuals, such as Rupert Murdoch of Fox and Michael Eisner of Disney, or Jack Welch of General Electric and Gerald Levin of Time-Warner. 

However, the particular individuals come and go; the conglomerate itself has become the enduring and important subject. We are rapidly seeing a time when a handful of companies are in control of much of the world's media. 

We don't have the time, energy or resources for each of you to study all of the world's major media companies. But we can do it as a group. 

SECOND RESEARCH ESSAY 

For your second research essay, I would like each of you to do a profile of a media company -- one of the lords of the global village -- whom I will assign to you in the table below. 

You should give some company history. You should provide a fairly comprehensive rundown (it can be a list) of media and non-media holdings of the company. You should give a sense of future plans. You should find articles and quote criticism or praise of your subject.

Keep in mind that you're writing a research essay. You'll want to quote the writers of articles and people who have been quoted in the articles. You will need endnotes or footnotes. Show clearly where your information came from. Provide full URL addresses if the information was taken online.

The research essay should be 1,000 to 2,000 words, perhaps 4 to 8 double-spaced, typewritten pages or 2 to 4 single-spaced pages. 

Again, you should probably write it in a word processing program first, such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, saving as you go along. Be sure to make a copy on a disk. You can then send the file to me via email. If you have trouble doing it, you could paste the text into an email message but a file is preferable. 

You should find plenty of information. Nexis and the old reliable Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature should be useful. I also ran each of the names through Infotrac at Lehigh's Information Resources page under Article Indexes and came away with many articles. 

The Web will have much to offer. But as always, be careful about taking information directly from unknown web sites. You may not know how reliable the information is. Learning how to do good, focused, reliable searches is a valuable skill
you can take from the course. 

You may also try to find and search the archives of various publications such as Mother Jones, Business Week, The Nation, Forbes and others. 

There are ten companies on the list. In some cases, more than one student has been assigned to each name.

The essays will be due by 7 p.m. Thursday, June 20. We
won't have any email or conference assignments from Thursday, June 13, to Monday, June 17, so you can get a good start to studying your media mogul. We will have assignments posted on Monday, June 17.

Let me know if you have questions. I think you'll have an interesting time learning about these "lords of the global village." 

If you have questions: jack.lule@lehigh.edu.

Company Student Student
Disney /ABC Chris Cangelose Jung-hee Cho
News Corp./Fox Chelsea Guzowski Andrew Kelly-Hayes
General Electric/NBC Kevin Wardlow Jung-ho Lee
Vivendi/Seagram Hannah Maxwell Brendan Moore
AOL/Time-Warner Maria Panichelli Bryan Tomlinson
Bertelsmann/BMG Alex Holz Alefiyah Shambhoora
Viacom/CBS Taryn Singer  
AT&T Rob Pennachio  
Sony Stephanie Whitacre  
Liberty Media Ronnie Shah