Lecture 6

The centre of this lecture is commercial media. Its name obviously presents the most important feature which is profit. However, we won’t stay surface after this deep-analyzing lecture.

As the word I wrote above, commercial media must has connection with profit. But how can this kind of media grabs money? The answer is advertisers. “Advertisers are the real customers of a commercial media organization, not its readers, viewers or listeners.” So every commercial media will pay attention on attracting more and more audiences’ eyeballs, and then they will use audience rating as bait to fish. In this way, those “delicious fat fish” (advertisers) will quickly get hooked. Commercial media is profit-driven media production which survives or fails on business success and its business is generating ‘audiences’.

The Australian major players of commercial media are news limited, APN, channel ten, Southern Cross, ‘yes’ optus and austral. The form of them is subscription, sponsored and subsidized. The function of those media is commercial, propaganda and social.

Commercial media is all round profit, so the content of news and programs will become more and more corrupt. Those companies want to catch everyone’s eyes, so what they want to do is not only what they should do, like truly news and reflect common people’s voice, but also some ‘special” stories. Those stories always cover super stars and use slapstick to attract people’s attention. However, those kinds of news have already violated the commercial media’s role.

The commercial media’s role in democratic society should be remembered:

  1. a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives  them meaning;

  2. a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism;

  3. the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;

  4. the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society;

  5. full access to the day’s intelligence.

“There was a time, not so long ago, when running a media company - be it one that specialized in newspapers, in radio, in television, or in all three - was a pretty simple job. Keep the costs within bounds, use your clout to ensure that governments didn't permit too much competition, make sure your content delivered audiences of a quality and in a quantity that your advertisers expected, and the money rolled in.”  (Jonathon Holmes “Media Watch” 2011)

Audience rating is the most important element in commercial media, so every company will try their best to improve it. In old time, rating is easy to ‘improve’, that is because we didn’t have an accurate way to measure it actually. However, nowadays the evidence is in the number of clicks that each story attracts. In this way, we can actually see how many clicks exist in every story. That is the challenge of commercial media.

an alternative view?

The future of commercial media is unseen but expecting. If it has better quality and greater content, people will actually pay for it for having high quality life.