Tag Archives: corporate concentration of ownership

Single source info and corporate concentration of ownership

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A few posts back (Feb.6, 2009) I talked about corporate concentration of ownership of media and the impact that has on information-gathering. My example was the Environment Canada nanotechnology information-gathering exercise that was announced, oddly, by the US-based Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and written about in an article by John Cotter for Canadian Press. It’s a little more complicated than just ‘corporate concentration’ but I’ll start there.

Media conglomerates own newspapers, radio and tv stations, and various internet properties and it’s usually understood that the corporate owners are going to represent their interests in the stories that are published and broadcast. Not all corporate owners have the same perspective, however with fewer owners there are fewer perspectives. When you add the cost incentive to centralize research and news gathering so that one article can be the source for newspapers and radio and tv and the internet (as per John Cotter’s article), it’s obvious that there’s another shrinkage of perspective and source for factual information.

Interestingly, Wikipedia (it’s not a corporate media conglomerate!) provides an object lesson on what happens when everyone is relying on a single source.  An article on Techdirt casts a light on a situation involving Germany’s new minister of economic affairs. He has an extraordinarily long name which was written up in an article on Wikipedia that reporters used as their source. when writing up his name. Unfortunately, someone played a trick and introduced an error into the name and the incorrect version got published in newspapers. It gets funny when Wikipedia corrects the error but someone changes the name back to the wrong version because they saw an article in the paper, which they took to be the authoritative and correct version of the name. Do read the article.

It’s tough to get the facts right but it sure helps if you understand some of the problems you can right into despite your best efforts and these things serve as good reminder to myself because it’s so easy to forget.

Meanwhile for something completely different, there’s a call for papers from Nanoethics Asia 2009 (to be held Aug. 26-28,2009 at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand)

The purpose of the Workshop is to stimulate and gather ground breaking research in all areas related to the ethical, social, cultural, and legal implications of what is broadly construed as “nanotechnology, ” especially as these implications arise from within the contexts of Asia and other non- Western regions.

You can go here for more information.

At some point in the next few weeks I will be updating things on the website. Hopefully, this will be a relatively painless process.

More about Canada’s nano information-gathering exercise

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The last few days have been devoted to the ‘announcement’ by Environment Canada via the Project for Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) which is based in Washington, DC. I think I’ve adequately covered the strangeness of hearing about our new government project from a source other than our own government in the previous postings (here and here) so I’m wrapping this up with a brief valentine (of sorts) to David Rejeski, PEN director.

Rejeski has an essay on the Nanowerk website published Feb. 5, 2009 here which explains why Canada is important. I am charmed. So often Americans forget or take Canada for granted, although I am a little concerned that he’s an expat Canadian, in which case the title of the essay and final paragraph are just tacky.(Why are they tacky if he’s an expat? Because too many Canadians go down to the US to explain why Canada is important and, frankly, I think that undercuts our case.)

Rejeski’s essay does explain the reasoning behind the recent move by Environment Canada and places it in a context that includes the US, Britain, and France. I do wish there were more details from Environment Canada but there are those restrictive communication policies that were put in place in Feb. 2008.

Final thoughts on Canadian Wire’s nanotechnology articles written by John Cotter.  The fact that a single article is used uncritically by so many media outlets points to a problem: corporate concentration of ownership. It is not new. My textbooks in the mid-1980s had data from the 1970s at least (memory fails, the trend may have started earlier) showing this trend. Since then it’s only intensified especially since the media conglomerates in Canada (don’t know about anywhere else) can have a single reporter gather info., write it up, and present content to be used in newspapers, radio. and tv. (I think that was a new policy that was adopted sometime after 2000.)

It’s hard to tell that the informatiion ia all coming for the same source (you don’t have to include the byline if it’s coming from a newswire and you’re not using the article in its entirety if it’s being published). To be honest, I never noticed it much until I made a point of chasing down the articles and saw the startling similarity in the texts. (more thoughts about corporate concentration of ownership and diversity of interests in upcoming postings)