On Competition, Access and Diversity in Media, Old and New

This article deals with access and diversity as central concepts of modern communications policy. Access may be sought at different layers of the communications system (Section 2), each presupposing a specific elaboration of communications policy questions (Table 1). Diversity, that is media diversity, refers to media content (Section 3). Media diversity has two faces: reflection of population preferences and openness, equal, uniform media access for divergent population preferences. These two faces have a dialectic relationship: usually for media systems it is not possible to produce full reflection and full openness at the same time. In Section 4 it is argued that, due to Hotelling's Law, media markets are often better at reflection than at openness. In Section 5 the relationships between media competition and media diversity are further explored within the framework of media and democracy. Three hypotheses on these relationships are being developed. In Section 6 a plea is made for the main objective of modern communications policy to be free and equal access to a social communications system that diversely provides for the information and communication needs in society.