Media Economics

We read today on Tapped that

"Wall Street will shape what Main Street sees, hears and reads so long as publicly traded media corporations have got to return fat margins to profit-hungry investors", or so we would have learned at the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference.

TAPPED believes "that a critical media are essential to a working democracy. But we are veering dangerously off track when the mainstream media are increasingly driven by economic considerations... With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers, independent journalism is compromised."

First of all, any journalist who expresses concern about corporations having to "return fat margins to profit-hungry investors" might as well tattoo to their forehead the statement "I skipped econ class to attend sit-ins". I don't know how the person who made this comment invests his/her 401(k) money, but for his/her sake I hope most of it is invested in corporations that have fat margins and not thin ones.

I too agree that a critical media is essential to a working democracy. But the writer of the quote at top got the Wall Street/Main Street relationship totally back-assward.

Like it or not, operating a newspaper or broadcasting station requires capital and (unless you can persuade somebody to fund another non-profit foundation) acquiring capital requires investors and responsible fiscal management and selling a product that customers want to buy. Yes, the people in media conglomerate board rooms and their bankers on Wall Street might be whores, but they are whores to the tastes of the people who watch and read their products. It's not that Wall Street shapes what Main Street sees, it's that Main Street shapes what Wall Street will invest in. In the final analysis, the mainstream media looks the way that it does because it satisfies the tastes of its consumers. The Nation, American Prospect and Mother Jones are all available at my local Borders Books, along with Time, People and Forbes. That People manages to sell more copies than The Nation is the outcome of the choices of millions of consumers, not the machinations of a handful of "powerful people" sitting in corporate boardrooms.

The choices made by the members of a democracy are often times frustratingly unlike the choices some of us would make ourselves. If the writers at TAPPED want to see their opinions and favored journalism reach a wider audience they will have more success by crafting their product in a way that appeals to more consumers, not by fretting about the laws of economics, that fair or unfair, aren't going to change anytime soon.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at June 05, 2002 05:38 PM