Advantages And Disadvantages Of Media Conglomeration

1.0 INTRODUCTION

What is conglomerate? A conglomerate is a combination of two or more corporations engaged in entirely different businesses together into one corporate structure, usually involving a parent company and several (or many) subsidiaries. Often, a conglomerate is a multi-industry company, often large and multinational. A media conglomerate describes company that owns large number of small companies in various mass media such as television, radio, publishing, and the Internet. A conglomerate is, by definition, a large company that consists of divisions of seemingly unrelated businesses.

What is media conglomeration and concentration of ownership? According to Murdock (1982:119), media conglomeration is the result of media mergers

These policies coupled with the economic stream policies, namely Privatisation, Malaysia Incorporated, Look East Policy and Multimedia Super Corridor project, have eventually produced benefits and drawbacks for the nation. The enactment of the Multimedia and Communication Act 1998 strategises the local broadcasting industry for a positive and competitive future. However, global phenomena such as deregulation and globalisation have particular impacts on mass media and media content. Nevertheless, the issues will be addressed from the perspective of the media conglomeration in Malaysia. The emergence of a new, large media corporation, MPB, and the impact on market influence is the focal point of this study. The political economy paradigm permits the investigation of MPB’s status as a media conglomerate, its influence and the meaning of that influence on the television content industry. The impacts are also evaluated in terms of the choices of programme that TV3, NTV7, 8TV and TV9 have offered in their programming since

Media organizations are seen as bounded organizational systems, enjoying an important degree of autonomy from the state, political parties and institutionalised pressure groups. Control of the media is said to be in the hands of an autonomous managerial élite who allow a considerable degree of flexibility to media professionals. A basic symmetry is seen to exist between media institutions and their audiences, since in McQuail 's words, the 'relationship is generally entered into voluntarily and on apparently equal terms '. Audiences are seen as capable of manipulating the media in an infinite variety of ways according to their prior needs and dispositions and as having access to what Halloran calls 'the plural values of society ' enabling them to 'conform, accommodate or