Commercialization refers to structural and content changes in the media sphere brought about by the influence of information market factors. In journalism focused on commercial success, it is common to believe that the journalist and the press serve a certain market, while representatives of other sociocultural models of journalism declare their appeal to the citizen, public opinion, or the personality of the reader.
Under market conditions, newspaper and magazine publishing and broadcasting are increasingly becoming branches of the information industry, subject to the requirements and patterns of production “tied” to the needs of the market and to the standards of effective management and marketing.
“The American news industry is a business,” declares the American Center for Foreign Journalists2.
In “Greater Europe,” the media are also increasingly referred to as the “media industry” and journalistic works as “media products,” treating them as commodity products and journalists and the media as suppliers of goods and services to the information market.
Under the conditions of the growing commercialization of journalism and the reduction of state regulation of the media, the economic regulation of the activities of journalists and the media, carried out mainly through the market mechanism, is of crucial importance. Market pressure largely determines the priorities and “rules of the game” for the media and journalists operating in a competitive environment: they are either forced to reckon with market conditions, with the rules of marketing in order to ensure their survival and commercial success, or to build their activities entirely on the commercial exploitation of these conditions.
In a market environment with strictly competitive relations, the media and those journalistic works that can attract the attention of the greatest number of people, ensure a high rating, which is the guarantee of commercial success, stability of income from advertising publications and the measure of advertising services cost, come to the fore.
With editors and journalists gripped by a “ratings frenzy,” market demands take on the force of law. The desire to constantly achieve high ratings and maximum market coverage translates into a kind of shadow censorship – an unspoken but effective restrictive system that forces journalists to refuse to cover complex, controversial, “uncomfortable” issues simply because such publications and broadcasts are unable to attract a wide audience. This system “completely or partially covers topics and works that do not meet the expectations of the audience.
The expectations of the majority of the audience, formed by the commercial media, do not extend beyond lightweight but outwardly attractive materials oriented to the “average” consumer of information with his mediocre tastes and narrow interests, usually not beyond the problems of crime, health, sports, life of celebrities, business and entertainment. American researcher L. Bennett found that in the 1990s, the amount of criminal news in the U.S. media has increased seven-fold, although during this period crime in the country has decreased significantly. Research by T. Patterson (Harvard University), conducted since 1980, found that over the past two decades the share of news about crime, disasters, celebrities and natural anomalies in the American press and on TV has increased from 35 to 50%4. In the 1990s, statistics about the specialization of U.S. newspapers showed that 19 percent of them specialized in reporting on sports, 8 percent in crime and court cases, and 7 percent in business (by comparison, only 4 percent specialized in covering social issues, 4 percent in education and 13 percent in politics).
Critics of commercially oriented journalism, adjusted to the studied expectations and demands of the consumer, note that such adjustment eventually leads to the restriction and suppression of cognitive activity and the intellectual outlook of the audience. As a result, “unpopular” topics and layers of information that are unfamiliar to the public remain unclaimed – that is, extremely useful ideas and information that equip people with fundamentally new knowledge, expand the scope of their usual view of problems or fundamentally change their attitude to them. Such a setup significantly undermines the developmental, educational potential of mass communications, keeping the audience in a worn-out rut of standard ideas, perceptions, myths, suppressing their creative abilities, spiritual independence – that is, the qualities vital for conscious and active citizens of a democratic society.