The ubiquitous bottom line is ever-more mainline these days in the mass media. Whatever the labeling, this trend escalates preoccupation with balance sheets and profits and seemingly ever-expanding yet not surprising "big business journalism"-news and opinion and entertainment packaged to give priorities to revenues and costs at the expense of more traditional professional values, such as public service.
And emphasizes decision-making that tends to blur and tilt typically time-honored separation and balancing between news-editorial and business roles.
Without lapsing into an exercise in economics (such as obvious corporate size advantages through economies of scale and technology-driven efficiencies), large media have simply taken over many avenues of print and broadcasting and other means of transmission such as the telephone, cable and Internet.
Main information and entertainment highways, despite some diversity and increased options, are ever-more controlled by a powerful few. The means of messaging and the message itself are seldom totally separated during this decade or so of media mania, redesigning and mergers.
The small-town world of a Los Altos Town Crier is far less the universe focused on here. Instead, try such as our cable company, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI). As the Bay Area's near-monopoly and the nation's second largest cable company with 14 million subscribers, TCI appears in the final stages of being bought up by AT&T's estimated $31.8 billion.
Big enough business for us? Certainly most cable content is controlled by such so-called communication producers as CNN (Time Warner with Turner Broadcasting), NBC (owned by General Electric), ABC (owned by Disney), plus other bigger Foxes and CBSs and littler Bay Area locals, Channels 2, 4, 5, 7-11.
But TCI also decides which of these and other channels, with what priorities and kinds of service and monthly fees, we will get. As with fast-evolving utilities, cable is also literally atop one throne of new communication powers.
Parts of these industries are conspicuously consuming us along with omnipresent standby advertising that provides the bulk of the financial energy to fuel nearly all primary and secondary mass communication engines.
Among recent statistics, mixed in with impeachment viewership and February's TV ratings/sweeps month, is the latest Super Bowl national standard bearer (and barrier) of a 30-second commercial priced at up to $1.6 million.
For Fox Television that meant approximately $100 million revenue for roughly 130 million tuned-in-and-out viewers to the game and its sometimes as manic commercials.
Or perhaps in various ways equally as awakening, three days earlier was a jury's initial award of $8.3 million to a Hartford, Conn. TV anchorwoman in a 1993-triggered age and sex discrimination suit.
Even medium-sized local news can sometimes add up to and convey mighty big communication industry messages.
David L. Grey, Ph.D, is professor emeritus ofjournalism at San Jose State University where for 24 years he taught and did research on media law and ethics. He is a Mountain View resident.