The paper argues that transformations in global media industry practices can be usefully indexed to the on-going trend to consolidation by ?big media?. This trend was influentially first described by Bagdikian who noted that 50 corporations in the US ?controlled more than half of all broadcast media, newspapers, magazines, video, radio, music, publishing and film?(1983). Other commentators have continued to track the trend, finding that by 1990 the number of corporations having similar levels of control had shrunk to 23 (Herman and McChesney, 1997; Chomsky and Herman, 1999; Wellstone, 2000; Champlin and Knoedler, 2002; Hesmondhalgh, 2003). A series of large-scale mergers during the 1990s saw this number further reduced to less than 10 major companies. While the overall trend to concentration is clear, the ?consumer outcomes? of conglomeration are far from certain, and complexity characterises convergent cultural industry processes. However, in terms of governance, a more certain outcome of changing industry practices is the resurgence in supply-side media provision rhetorics. The paper argues that increasingly in neo-liberal economies, deregulationist policies authorising traditional media to expand are being conflated with discourses of ICT ?enablement?. Two weeks after Australia?s Federal election in October 2004, when the conservative coalition parties established that they would be in a position to control the Senate from July 2005, the fate of the cross-media rules (that prevent control of TV, radio and newspapers in the same licence area), and foreign ownership rules, was largely predetermined. Media corporations began fine-tuning and rehearsing their consolidation plays. By way of examples that illustrate reconfiguring of media production value chains, the paper concludes that media consolidation by big media will continue relentlessly with both predictable and unpredictable alignments between industry sectors and players. This process serves to further integrate these corporations globally, with their new media interventions being primarily guided by strategies that, in Lessig?s view (2004), ultimately aim to ?lock down culture and control creativity?.
