Curran and Seaton- Power without responsibility

'Power without responsibility' is a book written by James Curran and Jean Seaton. It was originally published in 1981 however it has now been translated into several languages and is on its seventh edition. The title is a quote of former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.


Their views on monopoly (the exclusive ownership or control of something):
'It [extends] their range of business and political connections, [increases] their corporation’s prestige and, through judicious editorial appointments, [contributes] to the maintenance of public opinion favourable to private enterprise’.

Conglomerates are mostly driven by the logic of money and power. A conglomerate is a large company that also consists of smaller companies. Having ownership and control over the smaller companies means that the conglomerates have power in multiple industries. If their focus is on profit, which is primarily is, conglomerates will rarely take risks on projects and will focus on media products that they know will gain them a profit. This results in a limited variety of content.

To avoid this Curran and Seaton suggest:

‘Media policy should seek[…] to create the conditions of greatest possible competition, thus enabling consumers to exercise sovereign control. This produces media that people want, a wide range of choice, and media independence from government’.

Public service broadcasting is broadcasting that instead of serving commercial interests benefits the public. Curran and Seaton said:

‘British broadcasting was started as a public service, and this proved as creative commercially as it was innovative culturally.’ 

An example of public service broadcasting is the BBC. The BBC is a government owned and is paid for with taxes. It was set up in 1922 with the intentions to 'inform, educate and entertain.'

Public service broadcasters create content without the pure intention of profit, this results in more variation in content.

A independent producer is a producer free from outside control, for example Channel 4. Independent producers can offer something different to conglomerates as they don't have someone controlling what they can do.  Channel 4 have said they aim to 'reflect the diversity of Britain; culturally and geographically. We will reflect the energy of our multicultural society[…] We will reflect the complexity of Britain back to itself[…]'.

Independent producers produce different content which contributes to the creativity and variety we see on television.

Between public service broadcasters and independent producers we receive a variation in content.

'Diversity is in the public interest – but modern societies suffer from collective attention deficit disorders[…] the public interest has to work harder to be noticed, and we need agile but resourceful media to do that’- James Curran and Jean Seaton.


So basically, yeah, Curran and Seaton's Power and Media Industries theory is...
That each different media producer has different rules as to what it can make. If the media producer is paid for by the government it must remain unbiased. If it sets out for profit it will not create content that contains risks. If it is independent and has free control over what they produce they will be more likely to produce riskier content. Overall, the public receive a range of content from each media producer and if we were only to watch one our content wouldn't be very varied.