Media Ownership and Control

James M. Wall

An éminence grise at this year's Montreal Film Festival was the long-time editor of The Christian Century and president of Interfilm North America. In the following short article, he reflects on new releases and finds room for hope.

Andrés Opazo

The question of social and public ethics, and the more general subject of culture, have both been the focus of social and political debate. It is a subject that was previously overlooked in political studies, which today is recognised to have great theoretical and practical importance. Responding to a closely related concern, the theme of citizenship and the conditions under which it can be made to work are being strongly emphasised in intellectual and political discourse today. The conviction is being more and more shared that democracy does not just depend on good institutional design. Proof of this is that the not infrequent copying of democratic institutions in advanced countries does not in itself guarantee progress for democracy in those countries that replicate them.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Media ownership and control in Cameroon has since colonial times been subjected more to political exigencies than economic forces. Successive governments have, in the laws they enact and enforce, made it abundantly clear that the press was at the mercy of politics, and that the political tune to which a paper dances was enough to ensure its survival or death. The laws and their implementation have seldom encouraged private investment in the media nor given newspaper proprietors reason to believe that it is feasible to run a paper as a business by attracting advertisement revenue with good circulation figures.

Florence Chioma Nwachuku

Two remarkable developments of the 1990s had immense implications for media ownership and control in Nigeria. These are the deregulation of the broadcast media by the Federal government in 1992 and the annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election. The deregulation of the broadcast media brought to an end government’s monopoly of the broadcast media and the emergence of independent broadcasting stations. The annulment led to greater political awareness and the presence of a committed courageous press. The following article examines the interaction of these events.

Zaharom Nain & Mustafa K. Anuar

The history of the mainstream press and broadcasting in Malaysia has been one of stringent political, legal and, more recently, economic controls. From the emergence of the first newspaper, The Prince of Wales Gazette, in 1806, the introduction of state-run television, RTM, in 1963, the emergence of commercial television, TV3, in 1984, and the launching of Malaysia's first broadcast satellite, Measat 1, in 1996, the state's role in the overall scheme of things has been central. The following article discusses the implications for contemporary Malasian society.

Stephen McDowell and Kartik Pashupati

What should be the role of state-owned enterprises in offering new media services, and what is the role of new media and Internet technologies and services in social and economic development, and how should these policies be guided? This article outlines the development of India’s ISP policy over the past two years. It then sets this policy formation in the context of broader questions of the importance of ownership and control of communications and media activities, and the role of new media in development.

Robert W. McChesney

By the end of the 1990s a major turning point was reached in the realm of media. Whereas media systems had been primarily national before the 1990s, a global commercial media market has emerged full force by the dawn of the twenty-first century. In the past, to understand any nation's media situation, one first had to understand the local and national media and then determine where the global market - which largely meant imports and exports of films, TV shows, books, and music - fit in. Today one must first grasp the nature and logic of the global commercial system and then determine how local and national media deviate from the overall system. The rise of a global commercial media system is closely linked to the rise of a significantly more integrated 'neoliberal' global capitalist economic system.

Hugo de Burgh

Earlier this year the author of the following article was in China meeting journalists and academics who teach television journalism. Here he reports on some of the developments in Chinese TV, and joins in the debate, carried on in two recent issues of Media Development, as to whether the Chinese media are becoming westernised. His is a culturalist perspective, and he sees the changes not as evidence of western values but of the prevailing of Chinese tradition over Leninism.

There is eager competition to train as a journalist, particularly a television journalist, in China today.

Some 180 people from 40 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and North America participated in the International Forum: Communication and Citizenship, which took place in San Salvador, El Salvador, 9-11 September 1998. Participants agreed the following final declaration.

Sheila S. Coronel

The fall of Ferdinand Marcos in a 'people power' uprising in 1986 transformed the structure of media ownership in the Philippines. Marcos had held the media firmly in his grip. From the day he declared martial law in September 1972 to the time he fled the presidential palace on the tumultuous evening of 25 February 1986, the media were the prop of his dictatorship. Marcos controlled the media by limiting the ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations to his kin and cronies, and by imposing a regime of censorship over what used to be one of the freest presses in Asia. The following article explores the post-Marcos media scene.