An Economic Freedom Fight

By Chanda Mfula

As business, the media is unlike any other because of its centrality to democracy and governance. Hence, media organisations must constantly sustain a healthy balance between economic imperatives and democratic responsibility, and between viewing people as consumers and viewing them as citizens. This article explores what happens when media organisations operate to make money, more so than they make money to operate. The article concludes that corporate objectives can militate against the media’s freedom and capacity to perform its critical role in a democracy.

Arguments can hardly be advanced against modern society’s reliance on the media of mass communication for information and debates required to sustain democracy. However, the fact that the media requires resources to operate means that it must couple these democratic pursuits with supporting and, at most, competing economic imperatives.

For the most part, this means that media organisations must operate on a business model which allows them to sustain their operations so that they can continue supporting democracy. The commonest media business models are based on advertising, sponsorship, subscriptions and (for print media) paid circulation. Public service and state-run media organisations such as (in Zambia) ZNBC, Times of Zambia and Zambia Daily Mail are usually funded by taxpayers or through special charges to citizens such as TV levies, or a combination of these. However, even such state-owned media entities have usually had to supplement public funding by selling advertising time or space and through copy sales. There are even times when advertising and sales have generated the larger proportion of funds because politicians and state-actors love to use but not to fund the media. Many other media entities are investments and must, therefore, produce profits to satisfy the objectives of investors and owners.

Generally, media organisations trade and get traded; they have non-current and current assets; they engage in borrowing activities for long- and short-term finance; they have relationships with banks; they have creditors, debtors, suppliers of services and customers; they pay tax, wages, pensions and other similar obligations; and they are employers. Thus, the media is implicated in economic relations and activities which place serious constraints on its functions as an institution of democracy and governance.

State media, for example, knows better than to upset the state, and so its role as mouthpiece for those who control the state is a given. Even in countries where public service media is well-established and enjoys some autonomy, managers tread carefully when engaging political authorities, who have the power to vet funding. The BBC has always depended on politicians for it to continue as sole beneficiary of TV licence fees at the time when some sections of the British society, including rival media, have raised questions about the continued relevance of public service broadcasting in an age when spectrum scarcity is no longer at issue given developments in digital, satellite and other technologies which have resulted in media plurality, diversity and increased access. Similarly, Al Jazeera has been variously criticized for its lack of editorial independence from the Qatari government, which owns and funds it.

However, government’s economic influence, especially in relation to local or national environments, extends even to independent or privately-owned media that rely on advertising revenue. This is because government has the power to pass laws and regulations that can alter the marketplace, such as impose restrictions on mergers, acquisitions, cross-ownership or certain trade practices. In addition, government itself can be a major source of business even for independent media. In a booklet entitled Press Freedom in Zambia, Chris Chirwa recalls a time when then Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda ordered the government and parastatals to stop advertising in the National Mirror, accusing the paper of publishing ‘lies’. Such actions result in media organisations seeking to maintain business relations with government to engage in self-censorship when considering content which they think may offend the state, even if it is in public interest that such information is published. Sometimes these business links may be more complex and latent. For instance, NBC could not have possibly covered the second US invasion of Iraq more objectively because it is owned by General Electric, the company that supplied the US army with military equipment for the war.

There are situations when pressure comes through corporations which are uncomfortable doing business with critical media for fear of upsetting government. Such corporate entities may use their market power to influence media content by, for instance, compelling a media outlet to censor news stories criticizing the state in exchange for advertising or sponsorship deals. However, even without the pressure from government, corporate entities can be such a huge influence on media content purely based on their own business objectives. There is a mobile network company in Zambia which is notorious for dictating terms of business with radio stations across the country. Such bloodhounds take advantage of their bargaining power fueled by a flimsy local advertising market to demand maximum positive media exposure for a song from the cash-strapped radio stations, and the deals tacitly include a blackout on any news that may portray the company negatively. Similarly, banks that lend money to media organisations or give them handsome overdraft facilities will most likely have purchased enough goodwill to receive favourable coverage or avoid bad publicity at that hour of need when scandal hits.

Furthermore, contrary to fantastic notions about ‘the free marketplace of ideas’, media freedom realised through the free market has often not resulted in the envisaged diversity and equality of access. The sameness we see in content across all media is often a result of competing media organisations converging around the same motive of seeking to maximise their audiences and profits. As such, they all tap into the same ideas, resulting in the homogeneity of their content. Like any other investor, media investors are risk-averse, so media executives are unlikely to gamble on the media’s only product, the audience. Therefore, they will not dare to innovate, but they will stick to producing tried and tested content formats. Unless they are publicly funded, they do not have the luxury of trying out new content ideas whose success with audiences cannot be guaranteed. So, they stick to soapies, telenovelas, gameshows, reality shows, phone-in programmes, etc. to which they only make carefully considered minor changes. How often do you flip through TV channels or switch radio stations only to find the same programme formats everywhere?

Moreover, in the cutthroat competition for audiences, and investor-focused quest for capital accumulation, higher share price and maximum profits, the media tends to emphasise content which will interest the public over content of public interest. Hence, the media is biased towards dramatic, entertaining and other ‘light’ content, which appear in line with audience preferences. Even when it comes to news, editors search for melodramatic stories. For example, hardball politics involving name-calling or resignations of members from one political party to the other will grab news headlines at the expense of serious issues of relevance in people’s lives such as health, sanitation and unemployment. The audiences in this case are viewed less as citizens in democratic discourse and more as consumers of media content, and also as a commodity which, arising from their content consumption, is sold to advertisers. There was a time in Zambia when every media organisation wanted to cover late president Michael Sata, who, as an opposition leader, had become an audience favourite because of his ability to enliven political discourse by adding a dose of drama. It cannot be denied that sometimes this was done at the expense of focusing coverage on more important issues.

The sameness of content can also be reinforced by the fact that the media gets concentrated in few hands through acquisitions and mergers in which various media outlets are brought under common ownership where they pursue the same corporate objectives and share or exchange resources, personnel and content. While such concentration has never really been a part of Zambia’s media setup, cross-media ownership has already arrived: the owners of Q-FM radio recently launched a television station, while The Post newspaper was in the process of expanding into broadcasting. Many people have argued that in a small market such as Zambia, such cross-media ownership is desirable for sustainability and growth of the media industry. However, the implications of these developments for democracy are not easy to predict for now, yet they constitute an important arena for media policy.

A slightly different ball game, however, can be found within some community radio stations which do not entirely rely on commercial models to sustain their operations. These have proved the difference when it comes to producing diverse, critical, cutting edge or niche content which may not necessarily attract commercial success but go far in serving public interest. Since the mid-1990s, for example, the Catholic Church has set up and funded radio stations in various parts of the country which have proved to be a popular voice of the people. Such media outlets usually craft content profiles that depart from the homogeneity that has characterised the commercially-inclined media terrain. When you tune in to Yatsani Radio in Lusaka, you will instantly recognise its unmistakable sound, not only because of its pervasive traditional Catholic Church music, but also from its grassroots-focused ‘everyday people’ content. I have often argued that such niches can, in fact, attract commercial value in ‘woke’ markets because of the way they touch base with local communities, who form a credible consumer market for certain goods and services.

As businesses, media outlets are also concerned about cutting costs to maximise profits or, in the harsh economic conditions the Zambian media operates in, to break even or stay alive. Therefore, their spending on content is severely limited. That is why local TV stations prefer to show their viewers the cheaply acquired telenovelas from Telemundo rather than to spend more on the production of local films. Of course, the net effect of this on the local culture is adverse, as this approach reinforces cultural imperialism.It also stifles the local film industry.

A more serious situation for democracy concerns news and current affairs. To keep operating costs low, most newsrooms rely on information subsidies that come in the form of press releases and soundbites from resource-rich sources including government, business corporations, NGOs and others. If you found news to be similar across all media, this could be part of the explanation. With similar objectives on costs, many media organisations end up accessing the same information subsidies. The media is reluctant to invest their scarce resources in investigative journalism, and if investigative journalism is what it takes to access the truth about an issue of public interest, the citizens lose out and the expense accrues to democracy.

I have been to newsrooms in Zambia where the news budget is zero and information subsidies, much of which is just public relations material disguised as news, constitute their main local news. They also copy and paste stories from international channels to fill up their foreign news slots.

Information subsidies have serious implications because the media finds itself unsuspectingly conscripted in the public relations strategies of business, political and government organisations, among others. You could have seen ‘top stories in the news’ talking about a telecommunications company launching a new product or service on the market. For the most part that ‘news story’ was arranged by the telecoms company, which paid for the reporter to be transported to the media event orchestrated by the company.

The company also paid for lunch plus god knows what else for the reporter, who in return produced an embellished report on the event for primetime news, all in line with the public relations objectives of the company. Plus, you must remember that average pay is ridiculously low across the media industry in Zambia and with weak or no union representation, extra income passed to journalists directly from big corporates is always appreciated.

What is creepy, however, is that these are the same journalists expected to report objectively, even on corruption. Be that as it may, this is how corporates are buying their way into news access. And that is how advertising and public relations are overthrowing journalism from what is supposed to be a sacrosanct democratic space. I could also add: that is how ‘smart’ public relations executives and their organisations are getting away with free advertising!

In Zambia, an ideologically important source of information subsidies is the Zambia News and Information Services (ZANIS), a government department that mainly collects ‘developmental’ news, and distributes it freely to all media. ZANIS is in the type of public relations which communications researcher James Grunig would classify under ‘public information’, in which they generously distribute only positive news about the government usually on development issues. By relying heavily on ZANIS news in the name of cost-saving, so called independent media organisations abdicate their freedom and related democratic responsibilities in which they should offer critical, independent and investigative information. Instead they are unwittingly implicated in the active promotion of the state and thus become part of the ideological state apparatus. Politically conscious news managers know this well enough.

The argument presented here constitutes just a minuscule contribution on the ramifications of media economics for democracy within the broader framework of political economy. It does, nevertheless, bring us to a conclusion that media systems that are wholly based on a free market model are not entirely the answer to democratic communication because free media and free market mean different and even conflicting things.

Media corporate models that are parasitic on the state for business, profit motives or sheer capitalism, as well as weak economic environments and markets are among economic issues that can impede the media’s role in a democracy. An ideal ‘mediascape’ should include publicly funded public service independent media that coexist with a well-calibrated ‘free market’ media. My considered view is that while state control of the media has never sat well with democracy anywhere in the world and should at best be avoided, media systems that are based entirely on free market ideals can overrun democracy if not adequately contained. At some level, therefore, the struggle for media freedom is an economic freedom fight.

About the author:

Fellow, One World Broadcasting; MA, Communication, Media and Public Relations (University of Leicester, UK) Areas of expertise, experience and research interest include:Media development; democratic and development communication; journalism, media and democracy; political communication; communication research and strategy; political economy of media; critical public relations; and critical research.
Twitter: @ChandaMfula