Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

102 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
ownership. It is always more difficult to reverse a phenomenon rather
than prevent its spread in the first place. Given the powerful position
of most of these media and their powerful positions within their own
countries (in the respective German, Finnish or Greek markets) and the
role of the media in affecting and generally influencing voting behaviour
and elite politics, it is rather hard to imagine how any policy can be
pursued that can break away from the now well-secured status quo of
ownership. The EP has maintained a public (albeit elite) debate on the
need for regulation at an EU level and has fought the good fight for the
last two decades on the front of media ownership without much success,
as it came face to face with national and transnational capital interests.
A first directive on pluralism, produced by the Commission in 1996
initiated by the EP, was badly defeated and the Commission was forced to
withdraw it hastily. The arguments against any form of regulation, often
repeated by scholars and analysts, derive largely from the objections of
industrial lobbies to the measurement of concentration. It was argued
that ownership concentration would be impossible to measure, as concentration
for one country may be just ownership for another. The different
(market) size of nation-states and the organization of media systems were
also presented as major problems for the definition of ‘concentration’ and
therefore the definition of the problem and its solution. Although market
sizes and particularities in the organizational cultures of media systems
might be part of the difficulty in constructing a prescriptive and detailed
policy, the lack of any substantial control has only helped existing players
(with considerable access to national political elites) to expand their operations.
An exmple of this is the Antenna Group, owned by a Greek media
mogul who controls 40 per cent of Greek television audience, owns radio
stations in Greece and has expanded to Cyprus and Bulgaria. Although
Kyriakou (the owner of Antenna, who also owns its own journalism school
in Greece) is not in the same financial league as Murdoch, he is nevertheless
the owner of a regional transnational media company and very
close to the newly elected conservative government in Greece. Similarly,
other European companies are using the TVWF not only to transmit audiovisual
goods and services but also to acquire shares in national media.
There emerges within the very space of Europe a situation of internal
media imperialism, alongside the much-debated American media or cultural
imperialism (Sarikakis 2005). Exemplified by the development of
media technologies, the consequences of the absence of restrictive regulation
are noted anew by the European Parliament which is trying to
bring back onto the agenda the subject of ‘pluralism’. But even the calls
made by the sixth European Parliament for regulation are unlikely to
lead the Commission to introduce a directive that can bring any changes.
The question of pluralism and diversity seems to be addressed in a rather