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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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
[R]efuse it for long enough, and given the entitled "media should be free" attitude of the last 20 years.. Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions.
That's just not valid. People have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to pay for content. What they object to is DRM'ed, broken, zone-locked, un-saveable, unusable-on-any-other-device content. So, when the best (or only) alternative is bittorrent, that's what they use. But as soon as reputable players start offering a convenient, easy-to-use service (like Amazon, the App Store or iTunes), they flock to it en masse.
People hate commercials. People hate DRM. People hate being treated like criminals. People hate anything that stands between them and their enjoyment. But none of those statements mean that people do not ascribe value to the things that entertain them.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.