Lecture 6

Today’s lecture focused on what is commercial media. We learnt the major players of commercial media and what they produce, including news limited, Fairfax media, APN, nine entertainment and Southern Cross broadcasting. The social responsibility of the media in a democracy involves the truthful comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context, which gives them meaning.  It also involves a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism, the protection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society and the presentation and clarification of the foals and values. I think it was interesting to discover that there is an “ethical wall” between commercial and social functions to ensure morals are kept true. As the lecture continued, we discussed the news controls on commercial media. Such controls include having a Government agency, State press subsidies and licensed journalism. Whilst this began to get very tedious and my lack on concentration dropped, my interest was picked up again when we discussed the challenges and future of commercial media. I was surprised when the lecturer mentioned that advertising media revenue for broadcast media is down and continues to drop. This suggests a cycle commercial media may follow. A loss of revenue provides low investment, therefore less money for quality production, which will in turn lose the opportunity to have more original and sought after information. Some of the questions posed for the future of commercial media includes how does commercial media continue to make profits if advertising revenue is declining and what kind of audience can it expect to get? In all, I found this lecture to be quite interesting in the end, which how commercial media will continue successfully with the drop of revenue and investment.