DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i05.010

Pages: 1027-1033

Media ownership will continue to present numerous challenges to editorial independence. Commercialisation, deregulation, internationalisation, media concentration, convergence and other profit-oriented trends are likely to widen the gap between what can be called the political logic and the media logic. All these trends contribute to the strengthening of the power of big corporate media and enable them to distance themselves from democratic power structures. It is most likely that those trend‐setting mass media become less interested in comprehensive information on policy processes and democracy. By this development, private commercial and international mass media organisations erode their relevance to the society that they are expected to serve. Thereby, a window of opportunity opens for public service media that are less exposed to these trends than private commercial mass media. Consequently, the relevance of public service media for the democratic process and the policy discourse increases. The society’s elite end up being media owners and consequently manipulate or control what comes out of their media empires and the adage ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ manifests itself in media ownership and editorial content. Consequently, media’s role as society’s watchdog is exchanged for that of a ‘wagging dog’. This paper is an attempt to provide a roadmap to this challenge by reviewing what other scholars have done and connecting the same with theories that anchor the same arguments on the impact of media ownership, commercialization and commoditization on editorial independence.