"Media concentration has been an issue around the world. To some observers the power of large corporations has never been higher. To others, the Internet has brought openness and diversity. What perspective is correct? The answer has significant implications for politics, business, culture, regulati
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on, and innovation. It addresses a highly contentious subject of public debate in many countries around the world. In this discussion, one side fears the emergence of media empires that can sway public opinion and endanger democracy. The other side believes the Internet has opened media to unprecedented diversity and worries about excessive regulation by government. Strong opinions and policy advocates abound on each side, yet a lack of quantitative research across time, media industries, and countries undermines these positions. This book moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. The book covers thirteen media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, wireless telecommunication, and others across a 10- to 25-year period in thirty countries. After examining these countries, this book offers comparisons and analysis across industries, regions, companies, and development levels. It calculates overall national concentration trends beyond specific media industries, the market share of individual companies in the overall national media sector, and the size and trends of transnational companies in overall global media." (Publisher description)
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"Adopting a truly global, theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, Media Pluralism and Diversity intends to advance our understanding of media pluralism across the globe. It compares metrics that have been developed in different parts of the world to assess levels of, or threats to, media plur
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alism." (Publisher description)
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"This chapter explores the South African experience in attempting to achieve a more diverse and representative media that articulate the aspirations of the country, after decades of apartheid which skewed the media towards white people. South Africa has not developed a diversity measurement tool, su
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ch as the one developed for the European Commission to assess risks to media plurality in member states.1 A key problem the country faces in tracking the extent of concentration and diversity is that it has no ‘objective’2 means of assessing the extent of diversity, which up to this point has simply been ‘read off’ the number of existing media outlets. While a plurality of outlets may arguably be a necessary condition for diversity, it is by no means a sufficient condition." (Abstract)
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"Featuring specially commissioned chapters from experts in the field of media and communications law, this book provides an authoritative survey of media law from a comparative perspective. The handbook does not simply offer a synopsis of the state of affairs in media law jurisprudence, rather it pr
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ovides a better understanding of the forces that generate media rules, norms, and standards against the background of major transformations in the way information is mediated as a result of democratization, economic development, cultural change, globalization and technological innovation." (Publisher description)
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"The outcome of this study is a prototype for a European Media Pluralism Monitor – a riskbased, holistic, user-friendly and evolving monitoring tool that includes indicators of a legal, economic and socio-demographic nature. In order to account for the multi-faceted character of media pluralism, t
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hese indicators relate to various risk domains, including media ownership and/or control, media types and genres, political pluralism, cultural pluralism and geographic pluralism. Furthermore, they cover the various stages of the media value chain: supply, distribution and use. The Monitor offers a diagnostic, not a prescriptive tool on the basis of established risk management strategies. Its purpose is to facilitate the collection of empirical data on various risks for media pluralism given the particular economic, sociodemographic and legal situation in each Member State." (Page viii)
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