Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

100 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
of intensified globalization have proved to be too powerful to disregard.
The combination of deregulation (and subsequent reregulation in favour
of the private media) and the heavy dependence on competition policy
to deal with the consequences of liberalization have led to intensified
concentration of ownership not only in the EU space but also within the
newly acceded countries. Ownership concentration is reaching alarming
levels in Central and Eastern European countries, where major German,
US and other transnationals are acquiring local and national media and
establishing themselves in the audience market.
Deregulation has benefited the major transnational media corporations
through their expansion of ownership and programming into national
markets. Obviously US-based corporations from films to Internet
providers have seized the opportunity for which they have been waiting.
National capital, however, also needs to care for its interests and in this
effort very often alliances are formed among cultural and media workers,
producers and national capital that in most cases are not comparable to
the size and influence of Hollywood. For these countries, broadcasting
policy has to be accompanied by measures that offer some protection and
establish a ‘favourable’ position in the market. Possibly the best example
of national policy that reached the supranational and international level
has been the insistence of France on excluding cultural goods from international
trade agreements. Although it has been the will of the vast
(but not ‘absolute’) 10 majority of the European Parliament to include the
content quotas in the TVWF directive, a clause which would have forced
commercial broadcasters to seek out and promote indigenous (European)
content for at least half of the airtime, France’s role was central in this battle.
The defeat of the EP’s noble cause to protect domestic cultural products
vis-à-vis the Hollywood industry was neither easy nor smooth, as the
tensions between ‘protectionists’ and liberalists resurfaced as fiercely as
ever. Despite the rather vague formulation of the TVWF directive about
content quota, which left it up to the individual broadcasters to deem
when it is ‘practicable’ to devote the majority of programming to domestic
content, the objections against unregulated liberalization of cultural
goods continued. Broadcasting (liberalizing) policy for most countries
did not automatically provide their national cultural or media industries
with access to borderless markets.
One of the few ways for media companies to survive and indeed expand
in the market is by the concentration of ownership, through mergers
and acquisitions, that rationalizes (that is, reduces costs) in areas of production
and distribution whether vertically, horizontally or both. Crossownership
has gradually become the accepted norm in policy terms,
despite strong opposition by civil society about the detrimental effects