Who Owns Mass Media?

Who owns mass media?

Nowadays, the availability of information is crucial for everybody. A way to disseminate this information is through mass media; which intend to make it accessible for a large audience. This media has been owned basically by three different structures, which have different motivations, but they try to inform, entertain, educate and convince their audience. The stated owned media is governed by the state, so the information it manages is based on what it wants citizens to believe. Companies and investors control the private media; as a consequence, the information it provides is based on what it thinks people want and its main purpose is to make a lot of money. Finally, the public model is basically owned by people; because of that they have to pay a license fee for acquiring the service and they decide what they want to watch according to their judgment.

A good example of private media is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, which turns to be Televisa. Televisa has 70% of the total audience of television in Mexico and it has 4 channels that reach every demographic group and socioeconomic status. Besides it is one of the two main owners of television in Mexico. The positive part of this model is that it has complete autonomy over the programming it offers to certain kind of public. Also they can obtain resources from two areas: advertising or the service they offer to other television companies. The downside of this model is that it can become a monopoly if more privately owned enterprises associate between them creating a giant monopoly of mass media that would decide what people could watch. This could be very dangerous since they might create a negative influence on citizens, due to their interest of maintaining people entertain, instead of educate them.

State owned media controls television, newspapers, magazines, radio, and Internet. A positive point is that the service is the same for all the people including the price and the information showed. This information includes a high level of educational content. In contrast, we can find some negative points, as the use of the service revenues for paying governments debts, that not all subjects can be discussed and that the information can be manipulated in favor of the government. Some examples of countries where government has control over all mass media are China, Venezuela and Cuba, which in fact are socialist countries that limit freedom of expression.

The best example of the publicly owned media is