Hey everyone!! I am an exchange study from the United States studying a semester at James Cook University in Australia. At my home university, I am majoring in communications. So while I am aboard, I am taking a variety of different communication classes at JCU.
During my journalist and society class the other day, we discussed the difference between commercial media and public media. Commercial media create content and programs that are attractive to audiences in order to produce a profit from their media products. The success or fail of these media products lies in the hands of the audience because audiences are the consumer. They are the ones who subscribe to the products that commercial media outlets produce. Public media serves or engages the public. Public media isn't usually associated as taxpayer supported media. It can earn a profit as long as its ultimate goal is to serve the public. Public media weighs public value and public service ethos against market impact.
Commercial media products are owned by just a few key players that control most of the distribution. These commercial media companies create content based on what kind of media their audiences are viewing more. They need to know whether the audiences like to view hard news versus entertaining news. Before technology became so advanced it was hard to determine if there was a connection between content and sales, but now the commercial media companies can monitor their audiences based on the number on clicks a story receives.
Some argue commercial media is becoming a problem in contemporary news because people don't necessarily want the news as much as to be entertained. I don't think it's the fact that people don't want the news anymore but more that they need something to take them away from their life and problems. They need an escape away for just a minute that they would rather want to be entertained versus hearing about a murder or a child being abused. Some may also think that if it isn't happening near them that it doesn't matter enough to view because it won't affect their lives. On the other hand, people may want to be entertained rather than view the news because their are scared of what is happening in the world.
Commercial media role in society is to produce a truthful, comprehensive, intelligent account of daily events in context that gives meaning. I think on some level commercial media does produce truthful, comprehensive, intelligent accounts of daily events to the public. On the other hand, with the commercial media outlets being owned by just a few companies is it possible that the daily events they report on are decided which ones are important enough to report on and whether to frame the story one way over another? And if it isn't the companies controlling what can or can't be reported on then the government exercises indirect control by certain legislations that stipulate what can be reported to the public.
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