Pharos University In Alexandria Faculty of Mass communication International Communication Week :11 Lecture :11 B y: Dr: Zenat Abou Shawish 2013

The Effects of Media Globalization

12- Multi-national media corporations produce products which maximize their profits while decreasing the cost of production. Globalization has made it “easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world….and…easy to play off one immobile national labor force against another”

13- Jobs which might usually have been performed locally are being shipped internationally and performed at less than half the cost. Corporations are increasing profit by cutting costs and selling to an international audience. Meanwhile, the American middle class is disappearing along with the jobs.

14- Robert McChesney, in a documentary titled Orwell Rolls in His Grave, stated that the income for the wealthiest 1% of Americans has risen 141% over the past twenty years. The income for the American middle class, however, has only risen a pathetic 9%. These statistics ought to appall and frighten, yet they go largely unnoticed by the American people because they are not handed over to us by our media

15- Charles Klotzer of St Louis Journalism Review: “The top 5% is capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is clearly losing ground, and the highly touted American middle class is disappearing”. Klotzer claims that the media intentionally ignore these facts

16- The benefits of media globalization may make it difficult to see these consequences, which are often subversive. After all, why should the media inform us about the negative effects of their global dominance? To do so does not support their main interest: profit. According to Noam Chomsky, “Their first interest is profits, but broader than that. It’s to construct an audience of a particular type…One that is addicted to a certain life-style with artificial wants”

17- The wealthiest countries have the resources to produce the most media; therefore, the media delivered to the global audience will promote the culture of the wealthiest countries. And it is the wealthiest minority within these countries who defines the content of the media, thereby influencing culture around the world.

18- The multi-national media corporations are not held accountable for their actions. Only the government has the power to regulate media; in the past twenty years there has been a rising trend in decreasing regulation for the media. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. witnessed an “unprecedented historical explosion of mergers”

19- These corporations were allowed to merge at least in part due to free market principles on behalf of the government. However, one of the consequences of the mergers is they have led to “…lowered public service obligations of media organizations…as free market ideology has ironically created near monopoly business practices”

20- Not only does the oligopoly have the government’s blessing; the American media oligopoly is also subsidized by the government (Pappas, 2004). Anyone who believes in a true democratic society ought to feel outraged that tax dollars are being given to lobbyists to fund a lucrative oligopoly.