Television and Everyday Life

tout court
(Europe’s
SuperChannel)).
Graham Murdock (1990) identifies four aspects of the formation process of
the newly emerging and increasingly powerful media conglomerates. The new
‘deregulation’ is regulation in disguise: a re-regulation of media ownership and
control vested in the interests not of the public but of the corporation, and having
significant effects on the power of national governments as well as of the citizen
(see Schiller, 1989). Murdock (1990, 9) describes this process as ‘privatisation’,
by which he means all the ‘forms of public intervention that increase the size of
the market sector within the communication and information industries and give
entrepreneurs operating within it increased freedom of manoeuvre’.
Denationalisation, which despite its intention (at least in the UK) has led to further
concentration of share ownership; liberalisation, which introduces competition
into markets previously served only by public enterprise; commercialisation,
in which public service broadcasters open up some or all of their airwaves to
private and commercial use; and re-regulation itself which has released but not
erased the restrictions on cross-media ownership: all of these elements of the
privatisation process have dramatically favoured the large corporations.
Although the trend is not uniform (different strategies and paces of
privatisation; the emergence of community television and the independent
production sector), the overall direction and implications are clear. The
commercialisation of the media and information industries is well nigh
complete. As Murdock (1990, 15) concludes:
The cumulative result of these shifts, and the other dimensions of the
privatisation process…has been to strengthen and extend the power of the
leading corporations and to pose more sharply than ever the dilemma that
faces a liberal democratic society in which most key communications
facilities are held in private hands.
Convergence of ownership and convergence in the regulative environment (the

---

The tele-technological system
91
two are closely connected of course) tend to suggest a convergence of another
kind: that within the product, the programmes and the content of the media. Here
once again there are a number of dimensions. The spread of US-dominated material,