Topic: Media Moguls: Lords of the Global Village Instructor:
Jack Lule On this page are the assignments for Thursday of Week 4. You should have Thursday's reading assignments finished by Monday at 7 p.m. Your research paper on a media mogul should be completed by next Thursday, Week 5, at 7 p.m.
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) Two other writers have followed Bagdikian's lead and made media conglomeration central to their research. I would like you to look at 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. Here's a copy of the article at my site. 3) The Miller article, "What's Wrong With This Picture," 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 a Word document or an email message, jack.lule@lehigh.edu, discussing important points and trends from each of the articles. Devote at least a paragraph to McChesney's solutions. 5) EXTRA CREDIT: For extra credit, you can consider the case of Rupert Murdoch, who has emerged as one of the dominant owners of media in the world. He is truly one of the world's media moguls. I want you to read "Rupert's World," a Business Week cover story on Murdoch. Here also is a map of Rupert's world. For extra credit, please send me a Word document or an email message, jack.lule@lehigh.edu, of three paragraphs discussing Murdoch's empire. ******* To complete our section on global conglomeration, it's time for us to become more more acquainted with some of "The Lords of the Global Village." We need to update these classics. 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 via email from the list above. Here is the minimum: You should give some company history. You should talk about when the company moved into the media business. You should provide a fairly comprehensive rundown (it can be a list) of media and non-media holdings of the company. You should talk about the current officers. You should give a sense of future plans. You should find articles and quote criticism or praise of your subject. You will get a lot from company web sites but you must go beyond that. You need at least three references besides a company web site for a passing grade, more for a better grade. 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 want to cite web sites and/or paper sources. You can use in-text citations (Smith, 2006, para. 6) with a full bibliography. Show clearly where your information came from. Provide full URL addresses if the information was taken online. The research essay should be a minimum of 1500 words for a passing grade, perhaps 4 to 6 double-spaced, typewritten pages or 2 to 3 single-spaced pages, more for a better grade. Again, you should probably write it in a word processing program first, such as Microsoft Word, saving as you go along. Be sure to make a copy on a hard drive or disk. You can then send the file to me via email. 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 companies through Infotrac at Lehigh's Information Resources page under Article Indexes and came away with many articles. A great starting place for media holdings is: http://www.cjr.org/owners/. You also may want to poke around at http://www.mediachannel.org. You may also try to find and search the archives of various publications such as Mother Jones, Business Week, The Nation, Forbes, and Hoover's, as well as the SEC, the FCC and other locations. 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. Be very careful about plagiarism. If you use information from a web site or article, please be sure to cite it. Lots of citations are good for a research paper. I'll be sending the email with your "designated mogul" soon. The essays will be due by 7 p.m. next Thursday, Week 5. 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. return to J/IR 246 International Communication |
