Lecture 7 - Commercial Media

In this week's lecture the part of the media landscape where the big bucks lie (or do they?!):  Commercial Media. To distinguish commercial from public media, the following defining characteristics were mentioned:

- 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

We had a look at the commercial media landscape in Australia today, which was very interesting for me as a foreigner trying to find my way around said landscape!

We briefly talked about the form and function of commercial media. What I thought was the most interesting part of the lecture was the question about commercial media's role in a democratic society. Commercial media has to meet both commercial (profit/business success) and social functions, which are, as it seemed to be the general consensus in the lecture, not exactly compatible.
Commercial media's social role, according to the Hutchins Commission (1947), includes...

...a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning;
...a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism;
...the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;
...the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society;
...full access to the day’s intelligence. (Hutchins Commission 1947)

This important social role and the commercial media's need to please the audience are seemingly conflicting. Terms like "dumbing down" were used in the lecture to describe what's going on in commercial media nowadays. We talked about challenges and possible chances for commercial media and the general tone was pretty pessimistic regarding the developments in quality. Apparently, people want to read rather tabloids and entertainment news instead of politics or economics - and therefore, it was argued, "serious" journalism might be dying if it was not for drastic measures like governmental subsidies. But I personally think that this can't be entirely true and that there still is a market for "serious" news. Nowadays, more people attend tertiary education institutions and are well educated. I can't believe that the demand for quality journalism is going to cease to the point where it commercially can't exist anymore. But time will tell, I guess...