Culture, Society and the Media

5

Large corporations and the control of the communications industries

GRAHAM MURDOCK

INTRODUCTION

The communications industries produce peculiar commodities. At one level they are goods and services like any others: cans of fruit, automobiles or insurance. But they are also something more. By providing accounts of the contemporary world and images of the ‘good life’, they play a pivotal role in shaping social consciousness, and it is this ‘special relationship’ between economic and cultural power that has made the issue of their control a continuing focus of academic and political concern. Ever since the jointstock company or corporation emerged as the dominant form of mass media enterprise in the latter part of the last century, questions about ...