Corona and the capitalization of media

By Johannes Malmgren

As the corona pandemic emerged and spread, numerous commentators quipped that the pandemic was accompanied by an “infodemic” of misinformation, rumors, and fake news. Such fears provided a welcome pretext for governments seeking to adopt authoritarian measures towards media organizations. Another aspect of the corona crisis is the worsening economic conditions of news media around the world. Such conditions pose as far-reaching, if not always as direct, threats to media freedom as authoritarian regimes.

Media played a pivotal role during the course of the COVID pandemic crisis. As lockdowns and other restrictions on freedoms were implemented, the interest in, and dependence on, digital news reports attained unprecedented global importance. The pandemic accelerated digitalization, leading to urgent economic crises for many media outlets. At the same time, the media industry is undergoing processes of commercialization, that is, adapting and transforming itself according to commercial logic. This trend is global and entails matters such as the increased amount of advertisements in print media, longer commercial breaks on television, a blurring of the borders between commercial, entertainment, and news content in some publications, and a general direction of media organizations towardproducing content with mass appeal. As media and communications scholar Manfred Knoche has argued, the underlying cause of commercialization is capitalization, that is, the increasing integration of the entire media system into commodity and surplus-value production. The capitalization of the media industry was occurring long before the pandemic, but the pandemic has accelerated the processes in question in some directions outlined below.

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Economic crisis and ownership concentration

The corona pandemic has meant a paradox for news media of record-breaking audiences but a loss of advertising revenue and fewer sales. The rapid digital transformations brought about by the crisis have led to an economic crisis for numerous media outlets, wiping out news media outlets and causing mass layoffs of journalists in many countries. Such developments aggravate media ownership concentration. As the existence of smaller, independent news media is threatened around the world, the influence of national media oligarchies and transnational media empires grow.

The power of the Murdoch empire over news media in Australia, and to some degree other nations, is one striking example. Another is the media ownership of oligarchs in a number of Eastern European countries: a handful of individuals control 75 percent oftelevision viewership in Ukraine, according to research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency. A considerable proportion of news media in the United States is owned by a fairly small number of billionaires, among these Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch. In addition, tech billionaires are gaining a foothold in the U.S. media landscape, for instance, Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff recently bought Washington Post and Time respectively.

In October 2020, media freedom groups raised concerns against the multinational investment group PPF acquiring a majority stake in the Central European Media Enterprise (CME), thereby attaining considerable media cross-ownership in a number of Central and East European countries. The concern is that the degree of control over the media landscape by a single actor threatens media diversity and freedom.

A recent study on the media landscape of Greece, published in the Media for Democracy Monitor 2021, shows that the lockdowns and economic realities of the pandemic hit hard against Greek print media, already in a state of protracted recovery after the financial crisis in 2009. Such problems are particularly concerning as leading news media in Greece are owned by entrepreneurs from other sectors of the economy. These owners use the media they own as a means of supporting their business interests, by which they exert pressure on politicians. The authors argue that the hardening grip of a few media moguls on the media industry in Greece adversely affects journalism. Self-censorship, less investigative journalism, and a lack of representation of, and access to, minorities are among the consequences of ownership concentration and economic crisis the authors discern.

Technological crisis

As of today, the increasingly important digital environments where people consume news lack legislation and regulation. This makes digital environments inherently unstable and promising targets for hate speech, propaganda, and misinformation. The digitalization of news and other aspects of life has increased the power of two of the ten most valuable companies in the world, Google and Facebook. While ownership concentration is threatening the diversity of producers of media content, Google and Facebook are alone in providing the gateways that internet consumers and news media alike depend on. The Google- Facebook duopoly rests upon surveillance of billions of people, managing our collective attention through intimate knowledge on how to capture and keep it.

The power of these tech giants explains why the advertising revenue of print and other news media has collapsed: they simply cannot compete with the tech duopoly. While the audiences reached through legacy media outlets’ area of coverage becomes less attractive to advertisers, these outlets

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Photo by Stephan Röhl / Wikimedia Commons

are pushed towards collecting more and more personal data of their customers. The dependence of media organizations on the tech duopoly also forces content producers to compete with each other in trying to produce content adjusted to the algorithmic logic of Google and Facebook.

The tech giants and the global information order

The existence of a global information order, in which rich countries, in general, and the United States, in particular, receive prominent coverage across the world while developing countries are globally underrepresented, has been noted since at least the 1950s. The economic power of certain states, and the location of prominent international news agencies, are typically posed as explanations for this discrepancy.

While the effects of the information order with regard to media content producers may be somewhat limited by the efforts of regional and local challengers to transnational media organizations, the U.S. big tech corporations enjoy a global presence in which they are virtually unchallenged.

The Facebook Papers, internal documents from the social media giant, revealed to the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission by whistleblower Frances Haugen in autumn 2021 have put Facebook under intense scrutiny. The papers show that Facebook dropped many of its efforts at policing violent, misinforming, and hateful speech after the U.S. election, leading to a failure at hindering the organizing of the storming of the Capitol through social media. While the papers have shown that Facebook has inadequate ability to control the dissemination of far-right hate speech in the United States, they also show that Facebook moderation of non-English speaking users is dramatically worse. One of the main points Haugen is trying to raise is that Facebook through inaction allows incitement of ethnic hatred and violence in countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar. The documents show that Facebook is very aware of its destructive impact in the developing world, as the company studies the degree of hate speech it manages to moderate. Facebook nonetheless shies away from committing more than minimal resources in combating such misuse in developing countries.

As digitalization leads to virtually all media, as well as everyday life, becoming increasingly integrated on digital platforms, the problems caused by social life occurring in a non-regulated area controlled by a handful of corporations will increase. The inequalities of representation led prominent media critics and press freedom advocates to call for a New World Information Order in the 1970s. As the global importance of tech giants increases, it is perhaps time to reinvoke this call.♦

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