Media Reform Information Center — This is interesting.
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote “in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media” — controlling almost all of America’s newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time.
And apparently he was dead wrong. It turned out to be five owners of most media, not six!
Are you counting CBS and Viacom as one entity, John?
I don’t know if it is scary, or just depressing, that AOL has 20% of subscribers…
http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/usa.html
One day all our news of the world will come from one place. Father, Uncle, Brother or somebody. Now now not because of you are thinking but because it makes good business sense to.
The sky is falling the sky is falling. Jees who cares how many news outlets there are, other than the people who work for them?
If they did anything except talk to one another and accept new releases from “news makers” it might be significant.
Have you ever noticed how many television news items are a day or two behind something that was in a national publication?
If the media was half as great at doing its job as they seem to think they are I’d be twice as concerned as I am. I still wouldn’t be too concerned but it would be an increase.
and they’re evil to boot! Especially Disney…
#2 Mike Voice –
That cloud has a silver lining:
AOL had 18.6 million U.S. subscribers as of March 31, a drop of 835,000 from the previous quarter and down from a peak of 26.7 million in September 2002.
That’s a loss of 30% in less than 4 years. They are in free-fall.
James, the problem ends up being the number of reporters. If there are only 5 major news outlets, then there will be far fewer questions being asked then if there was 50 outlets. While TV news has passed print news, it is much more phony. TV news is based on the sound bite and the handsome / pretty reporter. I don’t think of this as censorship as much as a degradation in quality.
You make a good point that the internet has leveled the playing field. The only problem is with the number of Blogs purporting to write the “truth”, how do we know what is the truth? Damn, as you point out, Ken Lay is dead yet does the conspiracy have any validity? That it is even up for discussion suggests there is too much fiction floating around as fact.
My hope is that the news blogs sort themselves out so we may separate the garbage from the good stuff.
I wonder what these guys have in common:
Time Warner – Gerald Levin
Disnet – Michael Eisner
Murdoch News Corp – Peter Chernin
Bertelsmann – David Sarnoff
Viacom – Sumner Redstone
prolly ‘nuttin
This is mainly because the companies started buying the individual newspapers and stations. Perhaps if they didn’t have an estate tax, some of them would have stayed family-owned.
For 40 years, the news organizations did not make money, but brought customers to the network’s profit programming.
The problem comes with the Population of SAID truth.
If you hear something ENOUGH, and what MAY be believed as truth. It is accepted.
If enough people tell the same story, you believe it.
If it comes from MOSt scources, you believe it.
Hunting alternatives can be confusing, BUT until you compare, 1/2 truths, you cant tell WHERE TRUTH is.
The problems with this, is haveing 20 scources… and 2 may have something Different.. What can you believe? when the 2 are even different from each other.
Tather to believe in NOTHING, then to believe a lye.