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This is my problem with the Libertarian party, and you've summed it up nicely. They understand what's right and what's wrong, but they're so misguided by anti-government rhetoric that they blind themselves to any possibility that a greedy, money-making machine, might be as big a problem as an oppressive government. Corporations are made up of people with rights like you and I, but the 'fascist government' you despise gave the corporation itself, the rights of an individual. A soulless machine with profit as it's only priority, has the same constitutional rights as a person with morals and ethics. These 'benefits' are bought and paid for, but despite the fact that they're sold by a corrupt government (that I imagine you agree is a problem), liberals can't see beyond a starry-eyed dream of 'capitalism in a free market'. At least, not long enough to admit that Corporate America is just as problematic. The founding fathers wrote corporate law for a reason, and it became unenforceable when corporations won the rights of a person. We can't restrict people from owning more than one home or business, we can't restrict their free speech, or their right to support an elected official with their hard-earned money. So now we can't Viacom/Infinity from owning half the radio stations in the country; now laws that regulate how many they can own are being misconstrued and shot down as 'unconstitutional'. We can't keep corporations from burying our government in bribes, because the money they spend is protected by the freaking 1st amendment! And when they use their mass-media ownership to give the entire country breaking news on crib safety instead of corporate welfare, there's nothing we can do but pile up on the couch and kiss democracy good-bye -- because corporate america is the American dream! A pristine ideal of profit in the free world! Besides, who cares about a little plutocaracy? If we don't watch dateline tonight our babies might die!!

/vent

I don't see how a capitalist news media can lean right or left; they lean towards whatever is profitable. Writers aren't going to spontaneously conspire to lean towards anything, but the higher-ups that ultimately decide what goes in and what stays out are driven by greed. I wouldn't consider any of the corporate media to be reputable. But anyway, the Post is owned by News Corp and the Fox Entertainment Group, which most people seem to think is inherently untrustworthy.

I don't doubt the validity of this story, but people should pay closer attention to the news sources they put so much trust in. Coincidentally, the advert for tonights local news in Charlotte NC is an investigative report on possible UFO visits.

Should've added that the FCC has their own page on the act, which is more informative and less boring than reading the full text of the act itself. CJR's archives also have a 1997 article reviewing year one of the '96 act.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a comprehensive list of the handful of corporation that control most of the news media in the United States and the rest of the world. There are a few expected faces such as AOL Time Warner, Viacom and Disney with a few surprises (General Electric, AT & T).

Where was the FCC when a handful of corporations slowly took over the media?

--

The money should come either solely from the public, or yes, even from taxes. As it's been said, PBS is important to American citizens. Our taxes pay for this, when they should be paying for this. What could PBS do with $150,000,000,000 a year, I wonder? I can't tell you whether corporate sponsorship is an influence on PBS or not, but when it comes to MSNBC and other stations of that ilk, you'd have to be a fool to think it doesn't -- it most certainly does. And it will most certainly do the same, to PBS sooner or later, as it has before.

What news outlets do we even have left that aren't touched by some corporate influence? Not many, it seems. C-Span, I guess.

Well I agree whole-heartedly, but most people probably think I'm a little to extreme in my reasons. See, personally, I find it appalling that businesses are even allowed to take this sort of aggressive stance. It ticks me off just to see commercials that are directly targetting children in a manipulative 'buy-me-to-fit-in-at-school' sort of way. I don't believe that corporations are people, and I don't believe they have rights that people have. The people who comprise those companies, of course, have every right that anyone else does. Even the founding fathers understood this. Before the early 1900's, and before commercialization became the norm, it was illegal for corporations to give any money to politicians. I don't have a quote offhand, but all the way back to the 1700's Benjamin Franklin himself would talk about how restrictions on money, and restrictions on ownership of media (that existed before the Telecommunications Act of 1996), were paramount to preserving a democracy. Otherwise a business like his own newspaper could manipulate the government and monopolize the only medium through which people could ever hear about it.

But that's what what we have now, and it got that way through compromise after compromise, supposedly in the name of freedom and capitalism. The problem is that the public can't compete with the mechanized efficiency of big business. Microsoft lobbyists are formed up on capitol hill pushing UCITA while most Americans are at home watching MicroSoft NBC's latest incitefull coverage of some tear-jerking tale of loss and eventual triumph over something or other.

Enough already. These multinational corporations do business in places where the constitution means nothing, and human rights are non-existent. They're not our friends, they're not human beings with common sense, or even morals. Obviously they've proven my point; a business is operated by individuals, but it has no conscience, it acts as a machine would to achieve maximum efficiency. Anyone who's familiar with the term 'soft money' or 'corporate welfare' should understand what we're dealing with these days. The 'American People' and 'Corporate America' can't exist as equals, when the second of the two is dominant in it's very nature. Corporate America has to take the subserviant role, and not because the bill of rights is subjective -- but because when they don't, the rights of the public and the rights of the same people at the helm of Corporate America, get squelched.


/vent

If you want a list of holdings, Columbia Journalism Review has them for both AOL and Time Warner. Wow. While AOL's list isn't so long, Time Warner's is very disturbing.

If you want a list of holdings, Columbia Journalism Review has them for both AOL and Time Warner. Wow. While AOL's list isn't so long, Time Warner's is very disturbing.

If you want a list of holdings, Columbia Journalism Review has them for both AOL and Time Warner. Wow. While AOL's list isn't so long, Time Warner's is very disturbing.

If you want a list of holdings, Columbia Journalism Review has them for both AOL and Time Warner. Wow. While AOL's list isn't so long, Time Warner's is very disturbing.

In early January I emailed Washington Post, amongst many others, about big businesses control of Internet:

"if you believe in free speech why don't you try having the domain name AOLtimewarner.com to complain about the monopoly they are holding and then see what happens."

Time Warner own all these.

The European Commission originally opposed the merger of AOL and Time-Warner, on grounds they would be too powerful. On November 10, 2000 the U.S. anti-trust regulators voted unanimously to delay their decision on the $127 billion union.

It looks like they caved in to Big Businesses Big Money. They obviously have no concept of what a monoploy is - they are imbeciles.

WIPO.org.uk - nothing to do with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO.ORG)

And what if they use these powers to persecute political enemies, blackmail innocent people, or subvert the processes of the political system? Nah, couldn't ever happen...

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

To get an idea of just how much Time/Warner media you consume every day of your life, take a look at this list of Time Warner assets.

Here is the Columbia Journalism Review Media Ownership list.

Regardless of how you feel about the legality of DeCSS itself, prohibiting linking to sites containing DeCSS is pretty much the same thing as prohibiting a movie about an elaborately planned murder. We allow movie makers to portray this every day, often in enough detail so that we now know how to do illegal things, or where to find illegal things.

I also find it funny that media outlets are scared... the majority of television and radio outlets, the source of the news for many people in the U.S. (where this case matters), are owned by the same people that own the motion picture studios... it's sort of funny. Check out Who Owns What at the Columbia Journalism Review site to see exactly how much media is controlled by a few large entities.

Sujal

Sony - Electronics and Communications

Products include:

compact disk players

mini disc players

Walkman

WEB TV

Digital Video Discs (DVD)

camcorders

televisions

radios

video cassette recorder (VCR)

phones

Digital Satellite Systems (DSS)

Computers

digital imaging

CD-ROM

CD-ROM storage products

business communication systems

audio and video tapes

data storage

batteries

Wireless Telecommunications

JumboTron

Sony - Movies & Theaters

Columbia Tri-Star

Columbia Pictures

Tri-Star Pictures

Jim Henson Productions (partial interest)

Mandalay Entertainment (partial interest)

Phoenix Pictures (partial interest)

Sony Pictures Classics

Sony Pictures Entertainment

Columbia-Tri Star Home Video

Theaters

Sony/Lowes Theaters

Sony - IMAX Theater

Magic Johnson Theaters

Loews - Star Theaters

• Metreon

Sony - Merchandise & Finance

Merchandise

Sony Signatures - (entertainment related clothes and merchandise)

Insurance and Financing

Sony Life Insurance Company

Sony Finance International

Sony - Games & Interactive

Games

Sony Play Station - machine and games

Psygnosis Limited - video game developer

Interactive

Sony Online

TheStation@sony.com - online entertainment network

Jeopardy Online, Wheel of Fortune Online

Columbia - Tri-Star Interactive

Sony - Music

Labels

Sony Music

Legacy

Sony Music Nashville

Sony Wonder (children's music)

Sony Music Products (promotional music for business)

Sony Music Soundtrak

Tri-Star Music

WORK

Crave

57 Records

550 Music

Columbia Records

Epic Records

Epic Soundtrak

Shotput Records

Relatively Entertainment

RED Distribution

Relatively Records

Harmony Records

Sony Music International

Soho Square

Dance Pool

Mambo

Rubenstein

Squatt

Sony Classical

Arc of Light

Masterworks

Sony Broadway

SEON

Vivarte

Sony Music Publishing (copyright owners, joint venture with Michael Jackson)

Columbia House (50% venture with Time - Warner)

Music Choice (with Time - Warner, EMI, General Instrument - digital stereo for cable TV)

Music Choice Europe

Sony - Television

Production & Distribution

Columbia -Tri Star Television (programming)

Columbia -Tri Star Television Distribution

Columbia -Tri Star Television International Television

The Game Show Network

International Television Ventures

Cinemax Latin America

E! - Latin America

HBO Ole

HBO Brasil

Mundo Ole

Warner Channel - Latin America

Showtime - Australia

Encore - Australia

TVI - Australia

Channel V - Asia

Cinemax Asia

HBO Asia

Beijing Television Arts Center

Viva 1 - Germany

Viva 2 - Germany

Carlton Productions (U.K.)

Golden Square Productions (U.K.)

Frensch Productions (Germany)

HBO Poland

Sony has licensing arrangements and interest in:

Kirch Group (Germany)

FORTA (Spain)

BSkyB (U.K.)

JSkyB (Japan)

Telemundo Group Inc. (formed venture with Apollo Management, Bastion Capital Fund, and Liberty Media. Sony is managing partner of group and will oversee programming and marketing.)

According to this Nasa Document, the cost ,at the time, amounted to around $25 Billion -- or around $95 Billion in 1990 dollars.

According to this link, $95 is around $112 in 1998 dollars. Assuming 2% inflation for the last two years, that would put the cost around $116 Billion dollars.

Point of comparison, the Defense Department budget for 2000 is around $290 Billion.

For an example of the difference between "real" journalism in the old fashioned sense, and the coordinated corporate propaganda called "news", compare this presentation and what the TV told you about the WTO "riots" in Seattle.

Of course, if a comglomerate happens to operate a national ISP, it's not difficult at all to block out such sites. Just block out the ip's at the router.

This could be done to any site that carries alternative news, or any site that expresses an optinion that is negative toward whoever owns an ISP.

I wonder how long before you can't reach Slashdot from say, AT&T@Home or Roadrunner?

First of all, as a Canadian I am vividly aware of the lack of corporate press in America. For example, how many of you American readers are aware of or have ever heard of the MAI (now dead) which would have destroyed investment barriers between nations. Canadians (and others) shot it down but *activists* I know in the states hadn't even heard of it.

My point is that awareness of corporate control is at a stunningly low ebb, no matter whether you support or hate it, in the US.

Jon Katz's predictions of a dire future remind me of Wired's future scenarios a few years back. They gave three possibilities, dominated to various degrees by dictator-like corporations.

Here's a bit of media education for those who didn't get it in school (and I bet that's most of us): The larger the corporation the more profitable it can be. But there's a severe downside when media companies join with others. It's a fact that they can't cover their own dealings with impartiality. Do expect MSNBC to cover the Microsoft trial impartially? They will either cover their own news with a biased slant or not cover it at all (almost as bad). And the more one company owns the less you're going to hear about.

Here's a page with information on which media companies own what as well as some good analysis.

What Wired didn't see at the time was the power of open-source. I think it's a powerful weapon against corporate control because we can use big business' best weapon, the law, against their domination of our culture. Let's face it, that's how open-source got started, against Microsoft and other software corporation monopolies that were putting out crappy software.

Well, now we've pissed off the big boys and we have to learn to play as dirty as they do.

That means learning how to use lawyers and money and learning how the media game works.

The holdings of the combined companies will be, (assuming that nothing is sold off):
Time-Warner + AOL

What I find to be the more worrying is that Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, chairman of Bertelsmann AG (the company who wants to bring you a self "self-regulating" internet), sits on the board of AOL. Further, Bertelsmann is a major minority owner of AOL. This means that they will have a significant say in the direction of AOL-Time-Warner. So although they may not hold all the keys to all the media outlets in the US, the combined Bertelsmann-AOL-Time-Warner will hold enough of the outlets in in Hungary and elsewhere that they have the potential to set policy. Further, Bertelsmann will have more of a platform to launch its net censorship policies from ( wait for Time magazine to write "How the evil internet is poisining our youth and what we can do about").

The holdings of the combined companies will be, (assuming that nothing is sold off):
Time-Warner + AOL

What I find to be the more worrying is that Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, chairman of Bertelsmann AG (the company who wants to bring you a self "self-regulating" internet), sits on the board of AOL. Further, Bertelsmann is a major minority owner of AOL. This means that they will have a significant say in the direction of AOL-Time-Warner. So although they may not hold all the keys to all the media outlets in the US, the combined Bertelsmann-AOL-Time-Warner will hold enough of the outlets in in Hungary and elsewhere that they have the potential to set policy. Further, Bertelsmann will have more of a platform to launch its net censorship policies from ( wait for Time magazine to write "How the evil internet is poisining our youth and what we can do about").