The Medium Is The Message'. Media control is generally agreed to be either authoritarian, paternal, commercial or democratic. Authoritarian control is a monopoly of communication channels and therefore control of what messages are sent. Raymond Williams, in Communications , describes the second type, paternal media, as 'authoritarianism with a conscience'. The BBC in the UK, for example, might be classed as maintaining a 'paternal' control over its operations.
Commercial control is that exerted by market interests.
The fourth category, democratic control, is the rarest. Decision-making must be the joint task of all those involved in the production and distribution of its messages. Ideally the recipients of those messages should also be able to feed back their response into the system, and so influence its output. The general development of media control has been one of a cross-media concentration of corporate ownership. Spinning off from these activities are such things as magazines, posters, T-shirts and television interviews.