Introduction to the special issue: Media transformation and the challenge of property

Abstract

Despite property being a basic institution in capitalist societies it is rarely addressed directly and seldomly linked to media transformation outside of critical scholarship. This introduction gives an overview over the contributions in this special issue. The special issue is part of a revived interest in property in the social sciences and goes back to an intensive paper workshop hosted by this journal, which took place at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria on 29 September 2023. The contributions are organised in three themes: property and the transformation of media in digital capitalism, public media in the twenty-first century and their limits, and media ownership beyond the legal form.

Property is a social institution and practice that regulates power of disposal and rights of exclusion in relation to things. In capitalist societies, this institution tends to be narrowed to private property, which at the same time shields capital accumulation and its related dimensions of inequality production from social inference and provides an ideological clue by appealing to notions of individual welfare, control, meritocracy and responsibility (sometimes even care) for possessions.

Despite property being a basic institution in capitalist societies it is rarely addressed directly – in the social sciences and particularly in media and communication studies – and seldomly linked to media transformation outside of critical scholarship, for example, political economy approaches to media and communication. In principle, research could take two directions: on the one hand, it could ask questions which implications capitalist private property has for the transformation of media technology and media organisation and which alternative notions of property we would need for alternative, public, social, common media. On the other hand, property itself continuously goes through fundamental transformations. For instance, the notion of what is property undergoes transformation in light of media production, distribution and consumption becoming ever more digital, new legal types of media organisations and more network-like media concentration trends, which often imply an increasing unbundling of rights (and duties) typically associated with private ownership and the expansion and diversification of chains of control. Against this background, we can ask what implications the (locally or historically) identified structural transformation of property has for the organisation of media and the democratic quality of the public sphere.

This special issue brings together contributions that ask questions from both directions and thereby strengthen and advance existing scholarship within and beyond the political economy of media and communication. This is timely given a number of recent advances within social sciences on issues of ownership, economic inequality and the transformation of societies along the lines of neoliberal economic policies but also within media industries, for example, multiple financing crises or (digital) media capture (Sevignani et al. 2024). The contributions offer innovative research in the area of media concentration and ownership on the regional, national and global level, investigate issues of influence of media owners on media content, discuss property in the context of global internet and platform corporations, and evaluate trajectories, potentials and challenge of alternative forms of or to media property (such as charity, public service, cooperative or citizen media). Together, the special issue offers a strong collection that re-poses the property question for media and communications studies and will explicitly address the link between (different forms of) property and media (system) transformation – empirically, conceptually and/or ethically.

The special issue is part of a revived interest in property in the social sciences (see for instance the collaborative research centre on the structural transformation of property based at the universities of Jena and Erfurt: https://sfb294-eigentum.de/en/) and in media and communication studies more specifically (Sevignani and Theine 2024; Theine et al. 2024; Sjøvaag and Ohlsson 2019). The contributions in this special issue go back to a conference on media, ownership and the public sphere organised by the German-language Network for Critical Communication Studies at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria from 12 to 14 May 2022, which resulted in an edited volume on the same topic (Güney et al. 2023). An intensive paper workshop hosted by this journal, which forms the basis of the special issue, also took place at the same location on 29 September 2023. The contributions to this EJC issue are organised in three themes.

Property and the transformation of media in digital capitalism

The editors Sebastian Sevignani and Hendrik Theine open the special issue with a concise overview of various strands of media property research within the field of communication and media arguing that as far as it concerns the ‘the inner working of property’ the field has widely neglected this topic. What should take centre stage for analysing the current transformations of digital media capitalism are ownership practices and functional equivalents to capitalist private property. They argue in favour of new directions of research in media ownership concentration, elaborating on the implication of intellectual monopolisation tendencies for the public sphere, identifying corresponding emergent forms of media power, and for discourse and content analyses tracking intellectual monopolisation in the media industries.

Paško Bilić and Mislav Žitko also trace transformation of media in digital capitalism focusing on data as its key resource, which is peculiarly not eligible for ownership anywhere. Among other things, they refer to the Marxist tradition of analysing the value form to argue how personal data enters into capitalist value creation. A crucial step here is the abstraction processes that turn the lifeworld activities of internet users into machine-readable data that can then be treated as ‘de facto property’, ready for capitalist strategies of assetisation and monopolisation.

Ciara Graham and Henry Silke deal with a different but similar important aspect of digital media capitalism by focussing on the tax avoidance behaviour of large technology corporations with a lens on ownership issues. Not only do large shares of so-called immaterial goods enable the mobility and flexibility necessary for the avoidance of tax payments, the authors also look at the interest-led construction services of the corporations in this sense, what is considered property and what is not. Here, the order of justification of the ‘Californian ideology’ proves to be functional insofar as it absolves property both from its social ties and its private accumulation from the necessary communal preconditions.

Public media in the twenty-first century and their limits

Public (service) media are frequently discussed and practiced in many European countries as an alternative to private media ownership. Barbara Thomass defends this alternative against the backdrop of intensifyed attacks on the legitimacy and functionality of the public service model. Based on the economic theory of goods, according to which media and social communication as a whole also have common good properties, Thomass criticises the exclusive organisation of media as private property. In communal ownership structures, public media can and should be a counterweight to the concentration tendencies of the private sector. In order to maintain this balance, public service models should also be extended to the Internet, as called for in the Public Service Media and Public Service Manifesto, which Thomass supports.

Des Freedman provides a more pessimistic assessment of public media arguing for neither private property nor public service media, which can be understood in many regards as a critical rejoinder to Thomass’ piece. He argues that public service media cannot provide a counterweight to private media because they cannot effectively escape both state and market influence. In the rare cases public service media does succeed to some extent, they typically still culturally support existing power relations instead of questioning them. He uses the notion of a ‘public that acts in its own right’ as a yardstick from which the property and organisation structure as well as the content of alternative media should be defined and refers to practices of commoning the media. On this path, holding on to and defending the real existing public media would prove to be more of an obstacle.

Marko Milosavljević and Melita Poler also engage with public media by discussing the various forms that the state can play as a news media owner – some of which are rather far from catering to the democratic publics. They refer to critical theories of state capitalism, which sensitise people to possible authoritarian tendencies and swings at any time. For the authors, state media differ from public media in terms of the question or ownership function of accountability. The regulations already in place for this should also be applied to state media, although this would run counter to current media policy developments in the EU – the authors cite examples from Hungary and the Czech Republic, among others.

Media ownership beyond the legal form

Tales Tomaz deals with the conceptual, methodological and practical challenges of media ownership and concentration research using the example of the Euromedia Ownership Monitor. At the core of his argument is that the research conducted for the Euromedia Ownership Monitor is to detach the measurement of media concentration from the legal ownership structure and to differentiate it categorically (‘ownership structure’, ‘management’, ‘economic control’, ‘relations’, ‘distribution’ and ‘public policy’) in order to get an effective overview of ownership structures. While the legal ownership structures are relatively easy to understand, at least in the EU, this is much more challenging for the other dimensions of ownership.

Mandy Tröger, finally, presents a historical case study analysis of a press system in transition and the role of ownership therein. She looks at early battles over press ownership fought by West German publishing houses in socialist East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on archive documents, she states that in this historical context practical, in particular contractually agreed, ownership preceded the legal form of private ownership of media. This was supported by economic power imbalances, such as privileged access to means of distribution and infrastructures. In this case, a semi-public organisation (the ‘Treuhand’) played the decisive mediating role of media system transformation towards a private press. Beyond the specific case, Tröger consistently argues that the aspect of ‘doing property’ should be given greater consideration in research on privatisation.