Competition vs cross media monopolies
Hammer and Tongs
ALOKE THAKORE
Even as The Economics Times reported a further concentration of media with Bennett & Coleman, which owns The Economic Times buying Vijay Times, Business Standard reported that a new bill (Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006) dealing with among other things cross-media ownership would be put up for the approval of the Union Cabinet. Intriguingly, the Business Standard report said that the cross-media restrictions would apply to the broadcasting sector and would be extended to the print media at a later date. But whence this delay, why at a later date?
Cross-media ownership, as the very term indicates, is an issue that concerns ownership across media channels or forms. Issues of ownership of content production, delivery mechanism, and within-broadcast media are undoubtedly important, but not as crucial as the regulation of newspaper and broadcast cross-ownership. One can see that Indian media owners who despite being great votaries of free-market are fiercely protective of their interests, recall the motley Indian Media Group desiring to restrict foreign participation in media, will try subtle and not-so-subtle ways of subverting the cross-media regulation. Only recently a senior media executive told me about the wish to own the city where the group has operated for a long time. The usual terms of leveraging, building upon, data, archive, strengthening market presence, creating barriers to entry, and others were trotted out. Fair and rational as far as I can see, and only too fully free-market blooded. The problem is that the logic of the free-market is predicated on the idea of liberty and not vice-versa.
As Friedrich Hayek pointed out it is intellectual freedom that is the basic tenet of liberalism. He wrote: "The central belief from which all liberal postulates may be said to spring is that more successful solutions of the problems of society are to be expected if we do not rely on the application of anyone’s given knowledge, but encourage the interpersonal process of the exchange of opinion from which better knowledge can be expected to emerge." The point that he was making is that it is intellectual freedom, the freedom to express and allow for diverse kinds of opinions, the classic liberal battle-ground of ideas that is necessary for individual freedom and liberty. It is not surprising to see that during the battle over the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to relax cross-media ownership in the United States, traditional free-market conservatives (in the American sense) were also opposed to these moves and joined hands with left (liberal in the American sense) groups.
When the media voices within communities are in the hands of the same people, the spectrum of opinion, political or otherwise, tends to become narrow. Notice that even when the ownership is diversified, groups have pointed to biased coverage because of the caste composition of the journalists. The problem can only be exacerbated when even the purse strings are in the hands of a few. After all A.J. Liebling’s dictum that the freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns it, is axiomatic. One can say that without going into a history of editorial easing from the days of Pothan Joseph to B.G.Verghese, Arun Shourie, and many others. One needs to recall the just concluded election campaign in Tamil Nadu. In other words, the control of management matters to what is published or what is aired. Anybody who thinks that this is a recent phenomenon should only read the lament of the first Press Commission, which with hindsight one might say naively declared that even the editorial has been taken over by management.
And concentration not only affects political speech, it affects commercial speech, too. The sense of relief among media buyers when DNA began in Mumbai or the relief of those who wanted to insert classifieds when Divya Bhaskar started in Ahmedabad point to the problems that monopolies or near-monopolies pose to even those who pay for the media’s bread and butter. Witness the litigation over publication of readership figures for Chennai post the launch of Deccan Chronicle. What such competition does for journalists is another matter. Anyone with a mild acquaintance with the eager faces of even the youngest journalists as they flitted from one newspaper office to another will attest to those cornucopian moments.
But the most visible defence of competition comes from the way The Times of India improved its Mumbai edition once DNA entered the market. Even the most charitable view cannot ascribe this change to an editorial determination for providing a better newspaper to its loyal readers. Or else, we would have witnessed changes many years before it took place.
We may all agree that competition is good, but why desire government intervention to ensure regulation. This turns on the vital importance of the media not as an adjunct of free-market, but as a guarantor of liberty, which is ensured by free-markets. Such curbs on cross-ownership are needed to ensure diversity of local voices, marginalized voices, and generally of different voices in a community. That engenders liberty.
There is a reason why I have ignored to appeal to the left intellectual traditions for such curbs. Such restrictions are par for the course for those on that green. It is those who are not on the road to serfdom who have to be alerted not to confuse free-market with liberty because such confusions can be dangerous, and in the case of the media downrightly self-destructive. This is one policy measure where the entire political spectrum can join hands and ensure cross-media regulations include newspapers, and do it right now.
Aloke Thakore is a media consultant, journalist, and teacher. He is completing a manuscript on newspaper coverage of ethnic violence. He can be reached at hammerntongs@fastmail.in