How governance affects media markets – an explainer

To understand how the media and other governance issues are intertwined, it may be helpful to link conceptually between the broader environment in which the media operate and the cycle of specific processes of the media sector business. These include: resourcing of content creation, content creation and production, aggregation and distribution of content and audience reception.

Each process in the cycle is liable to be affected by political, economic, social and cultural factors in the wider governance environment outside the media, which may distort the processes or break the link between them. The discussion of media and governance needs to tackle these negative factors in order to promote the sustainability of media outlets serving the public's information and entertainment needs.

Cycle of interdependencies: negative governance factors and media sector processes

How can wider governance issues impede free and independent media?

1. Resourcing of content creation

The first process in the cycle of media sector processes focuses attention on sources of finance (advertising, subsidy, subscription) and sources of time (e.g. individual effort devoted to blogs and social media posts). Distribution of resources in the wider economy will affect the way resources are channeled into media. In an environment where investors worry about confiscation or depreciation of their investment, or where the main investors either have leverage over government figures or vice versa, local investment in independent media will be hard to find. Foreign sources of funding are sought because mechanisms for providing local grants or venture capital for business start-ups are lacking. Meanwhile, big companies channel advertising money in ways that are politically expedient in terms of their relationship with governments and this level of corruption in the advertising sector deters small advertisers.

• Lack of security for investment
• Investors are regime cronies
• Advertising spend politically motivated and corrupt; small advertisers effectively barred
• Lack of local start-up funding

2. Content creation and production

Restrictions on this process are often not readily visible but lie in the way the labor force is prevented from operating and developing professionally. There are countries with inflexible laws that require membership of so-called unions – which are actually monopolistic government-controlled bodies that act as gatekeepers to who can do what. Creativity is further undermined by an education system centered on rote learning, which devalues individual initiative and attaches more academic prestige to attainment in natural sciences than social sciences and humanities. Government interference through enforced registration and licensing of collective or cooperative enterprises limits freedom to experiment, while government failure to protect intellectual property rights by acting against piracy deters content origination.

• Restrictive labour and union laws
• Education discourages creativity
• Humanities and social sciences undervalued
• Licensing enforced for all expressive activity
• IP unprotected

3. Aggregation and distribution of content

Combining comments, articles, features, videos, programs, films, etc. onto a platform and making the platform accessible to users – either digitally online or offline – is what the third process deals with. Platforms such as Netflix and YouTube provide this service alongside traditional media houses. In contexts where monopolies are not held in check by competition law and where those monopolies face no obligation to be transparent, obstacles to the diversity of media provision are hard to pinpoint and challenge. The situation may be compounded if laws limit ISP operations and if online credit card payment is not common or is insecure, preventing aggregators and distributors from enforcing paywalls.

• Competition law weak or non-existent; monopolies effectively allowed
• No requirement for transparency
• Laws constrain ISPs and impede online streaming
• Electronic payment methods limited or insecure

4. Audience reception

This stage of the cycle should link directly to resourcing, in the sense that audience numbers and/or satisfaction provide the rationale for the continued allocation of resources. Where people's rights as both citizens and consumers are overlooked in wider society, this has knock-on effects for the way audiences are treated. Groups lobbying on behalf of media users will face the same difficulties of registration and recognition affecting small production enterprises. Authorization may be needed for statistical surveys to be conducted, opening the way to censorship and filtered results. Members of the public, unused to being asked their opinion, may be wary about the answers they give for fear of being judged negatively by peers, family, employers or government authorities.

• Consumer rights not recognised or supported
• Statistical surveys prohibited or censored
• Survey responses unreliable

This article is part of the #mediadev series "Building coalitions for media reform" where experts from the field of media, academia and development discuss the impact and interaction of media with other governance issues - and how media can fit into the broader development agenda.