Media Ownership, Aydin Dogan And Tayyip Erdogan Conflict

This paper investigates the question, who should control the media in order to prevent negative production externalities produced both by companies and by the media itself. The reason the problem evolves is explained in the introduction. Than in the literature review and different opinions are reviewed in order to understand the topic from general topics such as liberalist ideology to Marxist ideology, monopolization of industries and the affects of the private ownership on the society and opinions on who should own the media. Then, conflict that evolved in Turkey between Aydin Dogan and the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reviewed in order to understand the affects of media ownership by private capital owners and involvement of government in media. Finally, in the conclusion section, the paper results with that the media should be owned privately, however, the owners should not involve in other businesses. Moreover, the monopolization of the media should be prevented to avoid centralization of power on the hands of private capital owners.

Introduction

The negative effects of production of goods on third parties, i.e. negative production externalities, becomes a more important issue as the world have started to feel the effects of global warming and climate change over the last ten years. However, the reaction of regulations and government cannot always be enough to eliminate or restrict production of goods with negative externalities as fast as the change of humankind. Legal change evolves as a reaction to appropriate cases arising in a court that can affect change (Keenan & Riches, 2007). Moreover, other approaches of governments for bringing the level of social costs and social benefits in equilibrium is not the ideal approach to eliminate the problems that affect the world sincerely in the long term.

Hence, the real solution for the elimination of negative production externalities that come directly as a result of self-interest for cutting costs at the expense of harming the society can only be solved by creating a inverse linear relationship between profitability of companies with the amount of negative externalities they produce. In this process, media as an industry that has the power to communicate information to masses and that holds the power to let pressure groups to give voice to their claims could play the main role in this process. However, under different controlling systems such as private ownership, government control, the power of the media is used in different ways.