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Does Mega Media Control 90% of Content?
smitty777 writes "FastCo has an intriguing article on the vast control of our media by the mega corporations. In the article, Cliff Kuang disputes such claims by the the Frugal Dad that the revenue for the Big Six was over $275.9 billion, and that these companies are in cahoots to control our viewing. Just how much do these companies control?"
He disputes that there is some big agenda. He admits that a few companies have consolidated almost all media outlets, but like most people, doesn't think there's some agenda to pour out crappy media. Those companies do it just fine independently.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Fugal should be Frugal and should not link to an advertisement for a Dell laptop coupon.
Anyone who doesn't believe it, try youtubing from a company other than one of the majors. Moving recently to Germany has highlighted just how little there is that isn't claimed by the big 4. Seriously, 7/10 videos I click through to display "Unfortunately, this -music-content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.". In this case, it was UMG. Surprise surprise. On of all things, a Rammstein video. What?!
not disputing it. By asserting that profit margins are thin (so the incentive to take risks is lower), that media companies are messy businesses (apparently, he believes organized media output is a myth), and that the corporations listed are so large that controlling all departments is a tall order, he doesn't seem to think the consolidation is anything to worry about. His fact checking is minimal, mostly constrained to making fun of some math gone wrong and telling everyone that his bullshit detector is going off. The infographic itself is pretty neat, but the post criticizing is hardly worth reading, much less linking.
Let's think about how business works - if there are 10 companies doing a particular thing, at any given time, 1 or more will decide that they want to do more of the particular thing. They will then use leverage/bribery/corporate espionage/collusion/etc to acquire 1 or more of the others. Over time, this will continue until the original 10 are consolidated to the lowest number possible to avoid anti-trust/monopoly actions. And, during all of this time, they will continue to produce whatever thing that the general public will most readily consume. This usually entails things of medium to low quality (high quality is expensive and, in the case of tangible products, has a low replacement rate), dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator and mass marketed with loud, brightly colored advertising. This has been the way of things for many years, this will be the way of things for many years to come. There are a few different models that have managed to squeak by briefly, but theyre rare and often not much better.
You control that TV.
You can turn it off.
Online news can be so refreshing.
The title is misleading, and so is the article. The problem is that (what 90% of people see) is different from (90% of what people see).
To answer the question (why is it a question? The article states as a fact), yes big media controls 90% of what is actualy distributed as old style media. That is different from saying that it owns 90% of the content, and much nearer to saying that a huge proportion of the people will only see what big media shows them.
That is still a problem, but a different problem.
Rethinking email
I have no way to get solid numbers, but going by the standard rule of thumb for Canada/USA comparisons (10% of US numbers for Canada), we are in a similar boat on media, except that here there are only three major media corporations, and they also control 90% of Internet access as well. The CRTC (Canadian version of the FCC) has been in bed with these three under the guise of "protecting Canadian content" for over 40 years. And Bell Canada along with Rogers Communications own 90% of the Canadian Cell network and just got together to purchase the most lucrative sports franchise in the world, the Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey Club (worth almost double what the Yankees are worth at 1.3 billion for 75% of the Franchise. So weep not, my American friends, you have it good down there...
"If the only tool that you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Donny Rumsfeld
Just another corporate apologist trying to convince us that everything is fine and that we should just go on with our lives.
It is not that these companies are conspiring to make our entertainment crappy just for some lulz. They want to convey a particular message and manipulate the population in a particular way. The major media companies refused to air a commercial that encouraged people not to buy anything for just one day -- even though they were being offered the standard rate for airing commercials. The popular shows are just the cheapest possible way to mold everyone's minds, from preschool through adulthood.
The conspiracy is this: condition everyone to believe that they should buy as many things as possible, and that the ultimate goal in their lives should be to make enough money to do so. Popular entertainment exists to convey that message, with a few hints about what to buy (MacDonald's, diamonds, cars, video games, etc.).
Palm trees and 8
I refuse to watch TV channels with commercials.
Simple obvious fact one: The larger company will have a larger market share.
Simple obvious fact two: The smaller company will have less market share.
So if some companies are bigger then they will have more Market Share and control then the others.
So if the top 6 companies (assume they are all equal) own 90% share then each one only has 15% market share. Which is big but no means a monopoly.
Percentages are a way of summarizing real data. However by grouping and summarizing the summary. And clustering data in a particular way you can prove anything you want.
Think the 99%ers vs. the 53%ers they both choose different measurements and summarize and group values differently to prove their point.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If I could, I would turn it all off. (Being a developer, it's a bit hard.) I got sent overseas 30 years ago for a year. (Pre-Internet! lol) We usually got all non-ridiculous news in 3 - 4 days. So, I kicked my news habit. (There was no English TV either, so I also quite accidentally kicked my TV habit.) So, really, how much does this "news" really affect your life? No much, really. Have a nice day. Cheers!
It's all very well owning The Sun, the largest newspaper in Europe (or whatever was claimed) but you could fill that whole damned rag with ads and pictures of kittens; as long as you had one story about a football (soccer) scandal and one story about a soap opera, everyone would go about their lives as normal.
With the internet in its current state, we can rely on educated people to find their own sources of information, check their reliability and make their own conclusions. Yes it would be nice to have the Sun readers thinking for themselves, but it's not about to happen. Let them have their crappy media, as long as they're happy with it. We still have plenty of room to go out and find the information we need. Just because 90% of published media is crap about X Factor doesn't mean I'm spending my 90% of my time reading crap about X Factor, that's for sure.
Well, many of us don't like the MSM, and are now getting our news raw and unfiltered.
Provided they have the time to sit in front of a computer desk. A lot of people have trouble giving up the MSM for video because they don't want to buy another PC for the HDTV or worse yet both buy a PC and replace the SDTV in the living room with an HDTV. Other people have trouble giving up the MSM for music because only smartphones can play Internet radio in the car or on the bus, and they aren't willing to pay for smartphone service.
I don't care that the MSM controls 90% of the content, because it is the same old crappy content they've always controlled. With the internet, there is a whole new world of content waiting to be discovered.
Until the MSM starts suing Internet artists on trumped-up charges of plagiarism.
The 90% of the people can't really appreciate the finer nuanced artistic works, let them have the MSM.
Are you sure that we'd want that? If 90 percent have the MSM, then 90 percent are letting the MSM tell them for whom to vote and on which issues to choose a candidate. For example, which MSM source has thoroughly covered opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act?
Here's the problem in a nutshell. We have access to information and analysis from gazillions of people, but most of us pay attention only to those who are presented as the default choices. Those who are presented as the default choices inevitably represent the opinions of those who own them.
This is the herding mentality responsible for financial bubbles -- people follow those who are perceived as successful regardless of the lead cow's intelligence and common sense or lack thereof. (Goldman Sachs. QED.)
The challenge is to restore diversity in what is heard, not just diversity in what is available to be heard. That, unfortunately, is a distributed problem, and cannot be solved by just adding a few voices.
the real problem is the news. Almost every news outlet is regurgitating the exact same story handed down from some corporate office. There is no more journalism, because journalists aren't allowed to think for themselves. Their opinions have already been written for them and entered into the teleprompter. If you'd like a laugh, google "conan o'brien push the envelope" and you can watch newscasters from across the country reading the exact same dialogue. Every corporation has an agenda. Be it product placements or rigging elections, those who control the media will use it to their advantage.
Actually they can. They can have mandatory prescreening of all comments and prevent the first post from being posted.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
The only uncontrolled content at the moment can be found on blogs. These will eventually be subverted too, but at the moment, many blogs are not. Zerohedge.com, for all it's sensationalism, does report on real economic events, as does nakedcapitalism.com. Yahoo and MSNBC, of course, are happy-talk propaganda rags designed only to keep consumers/voters distracted from real events and buying stocks and schlock.
I suggest that anyone who doubts this review these two wiki entries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
Bottom line? The same people who own Goldman Sacks and the banks also own the major media outlets, and the messages are tightly controlled. Subtle propaganda is inserted into popular programs (e.g In a recent "House"episode, a man was determined to be mentally ill because he was preparing for social disorder. House calls him an idiot who thinks the world is going to end.) OWS protesters are subtly presented as fools, without ever showing a real discussion. The fact that ousting them from all encampments at the same time required coordination at a national scale is never mentioned. There are endless examples, if you can stop eating cheetos and ignore "Dancing with the stars."
The only idiots I see are people who believe anything they see on TV or mainstream media news, where truth is merely coincidental.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It's only logical that the media outlets will protect their parents' interests. One example, years ago I was watching John McEnroe's defunct news show on CNBC (?) where he interviewed Robert Kennedy, Jr., a big environmentalist. The conversation took an unexpected turn and RKJr dropped a note about GE, NBC's parent corporation and their poor environmental practices. McEnroe shushed him and the show immediately cut to commercial. When they came back from the break, RKJr was nowhere to be seen.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Indeed. Going by the logic of the people who generally put forward the notion that the MSM is liberal, the MSM should actually be wholly conservative. After all, they are owned by profit-making corporations, and therefore should be staunchly for standard conservative platforms: lower taxes, less social welfare, corporate personhood, less regulation, more for the "job-creators", foreign imperialism funded by deficit-spending... but we don't hear that.
Alternatively, there's the argument that the MSM is not interested in the truth, but just in giving the people what they want. If the MSM is indeed liberal, that means that the majority of Americans are liberal.
Either way, conservatives are falling over their own logic if they claim the MSM is liberal.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The fact of the matter is that those six (actually five) corporations which control the majority of the American media are so financially interlocked with the top banks and each other that for all intents and purposes it is really just one monolithic corporation in control.
Sure, they have their individual and internecine squabbles, but overall everyone tows the line in their psywarfare perpetrated on the rest of us, which was why many of us gave up on the US myth-media long ago (for me, sometime back in the '90s). Turn on Fox, CNN or NPR and you hear the same wannabe stenographers from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, the trashy NY Times, the same astro-turf outfits erroneously called "think tanks" who give us the future shills to be our Treasury Secretary, etc., etc., etc. and why ANYONE would ever watch the bottom tier propaganda clown acts of ABC and CBS is beyond a sane person's purview.