Examination of the cultural effects of globalisation

currently expanding in Europe and the United States. Furthermore, the cultural effetcs of globalisation will be looked at in this context.

The two media giants, KirchGruppe and Bertelsmann AG, control 90 per cent of Germany’s commercial TV stations (Schoen, 1998) and Kirch who is co-operating with its Italian counterpart Berlusconi and media mogul Rupert Murdoch (owner of BSkyB and the worldwide operating media group News Corporation, which has recently taken a stake into China Netcom) is present in almost every European t elevision market. Bertelsmann, which is one of the largest media corporations in the world (third as of 1995) (Mbcnet, 2001) is the only antagonist to this media empire. Through the merger with the British TV-group Pearson, Bertelsmann is now owning production companies and channels, among others the RTL- channelsin Germany, Channel 5 in Britain, M6 in France and Programme in Spain (Ott, 2000a).

In Germany, “Bertelskirch” how the German press likes to call the two conglomerates, have divided the TV market among each other in a cosy duopoly (Pitzer, 2000). On the one side is Bertelsmann with major investments in book, magazine, records, and music publishing, broadcasting, on-line services, and other allied entertainment and information products. It owns book clubs, Gruner+Jahr, the German publisher of such titles as Stern and GEO and Bantam Doubleday Dell, which is the second largest trade publisher in the United States. It also has major investments in the music industry, handled by Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) Entertainment, which is also owner of the labels Arista and Ariola and the second largest record club operator in the USA. Bertelsmann is owner of RTL, Germany’s most successful and profitable commercial channel, which has several spin-off channels (RTL 2, Super RTL, and Vox) and has established itself as a major player in television production. Apart from that the company holds a 5% stake in the Internet provider America Online (AOL) and has joint ventures with AOL Europe and Lycos Europe (Mbcnet, 2 001). Besides, it operates the e -commerce companies bol.com and barnesandnoble.com. At the moment the firm employs 76.000 people in 58 countries (@mey, 2001).

On the other side is the KirchGruppe, which is Germany’s biggest TV-family (Ott, 2000b). Leo Kirch who is the owner of KirchGruppe runs the ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, with its channels Pro Sieben, Sat.1 (together with Berlusconi), Kabel 1, N24 and Deutsches Sport

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Fernsehen (DSF). It also includes holdings in the Spanish Television Company Telecino and in the Italian enterprise Mediaset. In the pay-TV sector Kirch has got a monopoly in Germany with Premiere World (together with Murdoch). The company is Germany’s leading distributor of film and television programmes and its subsidiary Beta Film represents the largest non-American licensing company on the international market. The sports-rights agencies held by the KirchGruppe rank among the leading European players and offer rights of e.g. the Football World Cups in 2002 and 2006 and the German national football league. Furthermore it holds shares in Axel Springer Verlag, which publishes among others Germany’s best selling tabloid Bild Zeitung and the newspaper Die Welt ( KirchGruppe, 2001).

Other players worth mentioning on the TV market are only the public broadcasters ZDF, ARD, its local channels, and the culture channels Phoenix and Arte. The German media regulators have almost said “good bye” to the prevention of monopolies and the concentration of power in the media sector. The laws have always been amended in the way that the new constellations arranged by the companies were legal (Pitzer, 2000).

This treatment of the legislation stands in support of Andrew Marr’s opinion. He stresses that ‘we should not assume that governments would be alarmed by the emergence of the media/entertainment/commerce super company. In some ways, politicians would like them for making life simpler’, he argues, because ‘they would be easier to cut deals with and their products would be sanitised and their political views would be predictable’ (Marr, 2000). In addition to that the media critic McChesney gave two examples on a conference in Berlin in 2000. He stated that Rupert Murdoch was willing to structure the editorial work of his TVchannels in the way the Chinese government would not bar him from getting into the market. And, McChesney added that the programme of CNN and MSNBC about the last American election would have gone with every totalitarian system because the election got coverage in the media only through the commercials of the candidates (@schu, 2000). McChesney states in his book “Rich media- Poor Democracy” that television is in danger to shrink to an “infomercial”- a mixture between information and commerce. He argues that a third of the society in America plays no role anymore in the considerations of the media enterprises because of their too low spending power (McChesney, 1999). This situation is not unlike the one we find in Europe.

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Two big blocs are facing each other in Europe and between these two TV-conglomerates around Kirch and Bertelsmann is only little space left for medium-sized and small television providers and production companies. It is now almost impossible to survive in this sector unless one merges with one of the blocs (Ott, 2000a). Therefore the media landscape will get still more homogeneous and in future the audience will have to pay more and more for watching their favourite programmes. A development into this direction can already be seen today by looking at the dealing with the rights for the World Cups 2002 and 2006 (Kirch owns the broadcasting rights and plans to sell them to the highest bidder). Because great competition is not existing anymore fees can be increased as long as people are willing to pay. Information and entertainment are not accessible anymore in the way we are used to it. Broadcasting only the programmes, which are attracting the majority of the viewers, will diminish diversity in the media.

In addition, the media exerts power and control on formation of opinion in terms of specific market forces: by considering what content and meanings will be saleable, in view of the cost of production, level of competition and cost of content; and in terms of the amount of access the audience has to the media. ‘Media professionals, who are institutionalized by the norms of the media and by the universities most of them went to, control what items get what amount of coverage, with what placement and with what repetition across time and with what interpretations’ (Lye 1998). By means of monopolies on a global level the possibility of an objective formation of opinion is under serious threat. Van Miert, the EU Commissioner of Competition, states that ‘companies are becoming so powerful that if you touch them it becomes a state case’ (1998). McChesney asserts that the deregulation of the American media market has reduced and worsened the diversity of programmes and has contributed to a depoliticization of the society (@schu, 2000). Robinson goes even further in the article “Globalisation: nine theses on our epoch”. He claims,

‘With the world’s resources controlled by a few hundred global corporations, the life blood and the very fate of humanity is in the hands of transnational capital, which holds the power to make life and death decisions for millions of human beings. Such tremendous concentrations of economic power lead to tremendous concentrations of

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