The impact of ownership and mass media mission

The key purpose and mission of mass media is to be the channel of information serving the society, and it presupposes the most important principles and values of media. The law of mass media, ethic code of journalists and publishers, theorists and critics of journalism claim that the primary values of media are freedom of speech, creativity, and conscience, pluralism, independence, objectivity, accuracy, information comprehensiveness and correctness, honesty, respect for an individual and society, personal responsibility, self-regulation, tolerance, and variety of opinions. Such an idealistic view to mass media should be given credit and become the reason of the very existence of media. Media market is a business field needed of particular regulation because mass media not only exists in the economic level but performs a certain mission within the society as well. General legal acts regulating the competition do not cover all the aspects of media. Some legal acts being only of recommendatory base cannot ensure neither the independence and pluralism of media nor successful existence of public media. In a democratic country mass media providing public information must reveal to the public certain data about the owners of public information providers and spreaders, their commercial interests, political orientation, and etc. These provisions requiring publicity and transparency are necessary in order to ensure pluralism of opinions and prevent monopolism and manipulations in the field of public information. Information about the owners of mass media has to be known as it guarantees transparency of the market while the lack of such documents brings into one and the same the mission of media and interests of the owners, misleads the society, and decreases confidence in media. However, provisions of media transparency in legal acts are not effective and inefficient control mechanism is partly to be blamed. The theorists of journalism, critics, and public figures constantly emphasize the significance and necessity of media’s mission and the role of public media in the existence of a democratic society. Legal acts are used to ensure the pluralism of media, its fair and competitive market. Unfortunately, despite the mission of media and regulation of the market media gives priority to business over publicity and realization of the mission in the society. Media of entertainment, „infotainment,“ and „new news“ media which springs up in such context gains the highest ratings and editions at the same time superseding public media from the means of mass media. The spread of information which has been the main reason of media existence since the very first newspapers is losing to the interests of media ownership in uneven battle