Lecture 7: Commercial Media

What is Commercial Media?

• Profit-driven media production
• Not government funded (or license funded)
• It survives or fails on business success
• Its business is generating ‘audiences’
• Audiences generate profit through selling advertising

Social responsibility of The Media in a Democracy:

1. a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning;
2. a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism;
3. the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;
4. the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society;
5. full access to the day’s intelligence.

To keep it under control :

• Formal State Requirements
• Legal Prescription
• State Oversight
• Statutory
• Voluntary

Functions –commercial, social AND POLICING
The ‘first duty [of the media] is to shun the temptations of monopoly.Its primary office is the gathering of news.At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted.Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong.Comment is free, but factsare sacred.

New (social?) controls on commercial media

• Government agency –regulating content
• State press subsidies
• Licensed journalism