Until the 1980s most media were domestically owned and regulated. Then, following the increased emphasis on free trade, national deregulation and privatization, pushed for by institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, drastic changes within the world of media occurred.
While throughout the 1990s media were still primarily organized on a national or local level, with the further rise of neoliberalism and the implementation of free movement of labor, goods, services and capital between countries the importance of national boundaries has diminished. Today the whole world participates in one global market system. Just as many other industries also commercial media have followed the trend towards globalization, resulting in an increasing number of transnational corporations (TNCs), which maintain subsidies in several countries and operate and invest on the basis of a multi-country perspective.
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Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is the leading scholar of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1929. The Frankfurt School is best known for its program of developing a "critical theory of society". Habermas was a student of Adorno, becoming his assistant in 1956. He first taught philosophy at Heidelberg before becoming a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt. In 1972, he moved to the Max-Planck Institute in Starnberg, but in the mid-1980s, he returned to his post at Frankfurt.