Market, Organizational, and Strategic Factors Affecting Media Entrepreneurs in Emerging Economies

Since the late 1980s, major changes have taken place in the global political economy. As a result of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the end of the Cold War, the expansion of global trade, and other factors, numerous countries have begun moving towards more open political and economic systems. Accompanying these political and economic changes has been a corresponding liberalization of national media systems. Many nations, such as those in Eastern Europe, that have undergone transitions to democratic political systems, have abandoned government ownership of the media. They have moved, instead, to new media systems based on private ownership. Others, such as the People’s Republic of China have slowly eased prohibitions against private ownership of some media even while maintaining more authoritarian political systems and some government control over media. Among nations using a more mixed approach to liberalization, the opening of the media to more private investment and competition reflects, at least in part, the recognition that access to information is a critical issue for nations wishing to compete successfully in the global economy. Among Western policy makers, media professionals and mass communication scholars, these changes have been largely celebrated. A central tenet of the Libertarian political philosophy that underpins most Western political systems is that media that operate free from government control are a necessary condition for the functioning of democracy -although scholars now recognize that in nations undergoing major socio-political transitions, the relationship between independent media and democracy is complex and potentially fraught with hazards (McConnell & Becker, 2002). Similarly, media have come to be recognized as a critical infrastructure industry for economic development efforts. Economists have demonstrated that asymmetric access to information places the have-nots at a measurable disadvantage in economic competition (Vikery, 1961; Mirrlees, 1990). Also, over the past few decades, the economy of developed nations increasingly has been driven by innovation, which is an information-dependent process (Hollifield, Vlad & Becker, 2003). Media play a central role in distributing information in the marketplace and providing timely access to information necessary to innovation processes. Finally, copyright industries have themselves become a growth industry worldwide, generating jobs, tax revenues and export