Power and Media Industries

Curran and Seaton - 'diversity is a public interest - but modern societies suffer from collective attention deficit disorders... the public interest has to work harder to be noticed, and we need agile but resourceful media to do that.'

Key Term - Monopoly - The exclusive ownership or control of something. - Stagecoach

Conglomerate - A business that is interested in multiple industries. (All about money)

Subsidiary - A smaller company that is owned by a large corporation.

A benefit of conglomeration is that when a company is bought, the audience goes with it.

Monopoly's 'extend the range of business and political connections to increase the companies prestige. Contributes to the maintenance of public opinion in favour of private enterprise' - Curran and Seaton.

One issue with conglomerates is that it stops independent companies.
Rupert Murdoch - Upper Class Elderly Australian Right Wing Man

Allows NewsCorp to positively review their own films.

Alternatives - Independent funding - Dictatorship - Commnism

Production Context of Daily mirror and the Times


PSB - Public service broadcast

The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper founded in 1903. It is owned by parent company Trinity Mirror. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply The Mirror. It had an average daily print circulation of 716,923 in December 2016. Its Sunday sister paper is the Sunday Mirror. Unlike other major British tabloids such as The Sun and the Daily Mail, the Mirror has no separate Scottish edition - this function is performed by the Daily Record and Sunday Mail which incorporate certain stories from the Mirror that are of Scottish significance.

Originally pitched to the middle-class reader, it was transformed into a working-class newspaper after 1934, in order to reach a large, lowbrow audience. The Mirror has had a number of owners. It was founded by Alfred Harmsworth, who sold it to his brother Harold Harmsworth (from 1914 Lord Rothermere) in 1913. In 1963 a restructuring of the media interests of the Harmsworth family led to the Mirror becoming a part of International Publishing Corporation. During the mid 1960s, daily sales exceeded 5 million copies, a feat never repeated by it or any other daily (non-Sunday) British newspaper since. The Mirror was owned by Robert Maxwell between 1984 and 1991. The paper went through a protracted period of crisis after his death before merging with the regional newspaper group Trinity in 1999 to form Trinity Mirror.

The paper has consistently supported the Labour Party since the 1945 general election.

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The Times is a British daily (Monday to Saturday) national newspaper based in London, England. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register, adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, itself wholly owned by News Corp. The Times and The Sunday Times do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1967.

In 1959, the historian of journalism Allan Nevins analysed the importance of The Times in shaping the views of events of London's elite:

For much more than a century The Times has been an integral and important part of the political structure of Great Britain. Its news and its editorial comment have in general been carefully coordinated, and have at most times been handled with an earnest sense of responsibility. While the paper has admitted some trivia to its columns, its whole emphasis has been on important public affairs treated with an eye to the best interests of Britain. To guide this treatment, the editors have for long periods been in close touch with 10 Downing Street.^[3]

The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, such as The Times of India and The New York Times. In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as The London Times^{[4][5][6][7][8]} or The Times of London,^[9] although the newspaper is of national scope and distribution.

The Times is the originator of the widely used Times Roman typeface, originally developed by Stanley Morison of The Times in collaboration with the Monotype Corporation for its legibility in low-tech printing. In November 2006 The Times began printing headlines in a new font, Times Modern. The Times was printed in broadsheet format for 219 years, but switched to compact size in 2004 in an attempt to appeal more to younger readers and commuters using public transport. The Sunday Times remains a broadsheet.

The Times had an average daily circulation of 446,164 in December 2016;^[2] in the same period, The Sunday Times had an average daily circulation of 792,210.^[2] An American edition of The Times has been published since 6 June 2006.^[10] It has been heavily used by scholars and researchers because of its widespread availability in libraries and its detailed index. A complete historical file of the digitised paper, up to 2010, is online from Gale Cengage Learning.^[11][12]

Power Without Responsibility is Curran and Seaton's book.

"Basically, yeah, Curran and Seaton's  Power and Media industries Theory is that there are large companies that own a lot of smaller companies and that this is bad."