Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

Two simple questions. No simple answers. The speakers at Columbia University’s “Media Concentration Around the World” launched the two-day event last Thursday, March 11, 2010  by taking a step back from the gloom and doom view that media concentration jeopardizes quality content and asked the most basic preliminary questions: what is media concentration and why should we care?

Presenter Tim Wu, Columbia law professor and Schwartz Fellow at The New America Foundation, took on the “what” question. Is the concentration of Warner Communications with varied assets like DC Comics and Home Box Office the same as an AT&T or a Google? To demonstrate the range of media concentration types, Wu went to the chalk board and drew basic five models:

Wu then asked if some models deserve more scrutiny than others. Does the efficiency offered in the layer cake model where a company like Google provides an efficient platform cancel some of the pitfalls of its market control? For Wu, the model of concentrated control poses the greatest threat and deserves more attention than a layer cake model.

Presenters Ben Compaine, Eli Noam, and New America Foundation Knight Media Policy Fellow Phil Napoli tackled the “so what” question. Compaine of Northeasten University asked if the focus on media concentration as a destructive force has obscured analysis. Why is concentration a buzz word and divestiture not? The Time Warner spin off of its cable division received almost no media coverage when compared with stories of pending mergers. Compaine suggested that sticking to a McChesney definition of media concentration as on the rise and the enemy of content diversity negates other factors. One study of a newspaper company with divisions scattered across the country found that whether the paper’s readership was from a “red” or a “blue” state determined how liberal or conservative content was, not the CEO’s personal opinions.

The conference chair Eli Noam attacked the “so what” question with a rapid fire presentation of correlation statistics. Where media concentration is high, government effectiveness and regulatory quality decline, technological innovation wanes, and, in the case of television and newspapers, the economy tends to be in a downward spiral. (Noam did not suggest that there was a causal relationship between media concentration and these variables, but felt it deserved exploration all the same.)

It was New America Foundation’s Phil Napoli who asked the “so what” question outright. The answer? According to Napoli, We don’t know and can’t know until relevant databases have been compiled. “Research is easy. Data are hard,” he said. “In other words, research is cheap. Data are expensive.”  Academics, policy makers, and advocacy groups can’t even get to the “so what” until they have the data. That’s where New America’s Media Policy Initiative comes in. A database of local ecologies scattered across the United States will help explain what media concentration actually does to a community’s media consumption, its political participation, and its access to quality content. For Napoli, answering the “so what” rests in building databases similar to the Media Policy Initiative’s local ecologies database and in pooling resources with other non-profits and advocacy groups. (Phil Napoli's slides are available here.)

By asking the basic questions about media concentration, the conference’s first panel laid down the framework for the rest of the event. The “what?” and the “so what?” questions challenged basic assumptions and suggested a starting point for further research. (For more detail on other panels at the conference click here.)