Sociology of Mass Communication: Theses on Media Deregulation - Book Report/Review Example

The author’s concern for the public’s right is obvious; yet, it is indeed evident that McChesney’s perspective on the issue appears to be on the more ideal side of the spectrum and rather living in the traditional part of the history. According to McChesney, any form of market regulation is highly-dependent on government laws and policies. He also mentioned furthermore that public policy is established first before the construction of media system and this is what he calls regulation. On the other hand, he argues that the deregulation is an unacknowledged regulation done by the government on behalf of powerful self-interested private parties.

This, according to him, lessens the democratic public’s involvement in policy making. This argument further leads into his certain bias on the ideal ways of how things work. It implies the author’s belief in maintaining the government’s main purpose, that is, to serve the majority of the public and not the private sector. More so, “the problem lies less with evil owners than with the failure of democratic policy-making”. . Moreover, he still sees the media as a traditional tool to educate, inform and create awareness on the emerging public issues among the majority public.

This further represents the communication model of transmission. On the other hand, “indeed, in many media markets, the primary audience is not the general public, but advertisers. This changes the nature of the media market considerably” (McChesney). More so, he contests using the media as a modern tool to publicize and market products and services by private companies. This function of media to catch and hold the public’s attention in order to gain revenue is represented as the publicity model of communication.

McChesney also sees the using of media for publicity as having a negative implication in the ideal essence of journalism. He further argues that “if the market generates a lousy journalism that keeps the citizens poorly informed, the entire society suffers – not just the consumers of particular media – because the resulting political governance will be shoddy”. Thus, poor usage media utilization or using media for the wrong purpose creates a domino effect ranging from the political governance up to the public’s obeying of the law.

The author’s purpose appears to be just to explain the negative effects of media deregulation through presenting arguments and historical background of the law. However, as the end of the paper approaches he provided arguments that somehow call to action on not patronizing the act of deregulation. This is indeed a topic worth discussing but the attention still leads and points to his subjective view on the ideal objectives of every sector in the society, that is, media and government. Moreover,