Media Ownership
It is very telling that mass media today is often referred to as a "media industry." This term implies that mass media is no longer concerned with merely relaying information to the general public. Instead, media is engaged in producing a product, akin to industries such as manufacturing.
This paper examines the media industry from the production perspective. It looks at how news coverage is itself a manufactured product, a result of specific corporate interests. While "mass media" itself is a broad term, this paper focuses specifically on broadcast and print news coverage, a part of media that is supposed to be tailored to the public interests.
The first part of this paper looks at the concentration of media interests. In a democracy, the competing individual news outfits are supposed to act as independent checks and balances. However, the concentration of media ownership into a few corporate giants has significant effects on which information gets investigated and disseminated to the public.
The next part of the paper then looks at the results of this media concentration, in terms of homogenized and generic news. It argues that the influence of corporate media over news has resulted in gatekeeping and censorship. As a result, news that is favorable to parent companies gets priority over more important events. In many cases, news that conflicts with the interests of corporate owners does not get covered at all.
Media concentration and ownership
Sociologists have argues that the ownership of media is getting more and more "centralized." This means that through corporate mergers and acquisitions, individual media companies are growing into conglomerates, and becoming increasingly allied with the corporate interests of their parent companies.
Viacom, for example, is one of the largest global media empires. According to the Columbia Journalism review, the Viacom dynasty includes CBS network, cable television outfits such as MTV, movie studios like Paramount Pictures and publishers like Simon & Schuster ("Who owns what"). This wide swatch ensures profitability for the Viacom conglomerate, since the media giant is able to pull in a television, movie and reader crowd of different ages.
Another example is General Electric, a company that does not immediately evoke the media. However, GE owns 80% of NBC Universal, the Spanish Telemundo television stations,...
Media Ownership Concentration The author of this report is asked to do a Marxist analysis of a media conglomerate and what does or tends to happen when a single corporate structure owns multiple publications and how the forcing out or limiting of other publications can lead to a stunted and incomplete view of reality due to an artificially limited marketplace. The company used as an example in this report is Time
Conglomerates / Media Ownership Media mergers that started in earnest in the mid-1980s have continued non-stop ever since. The result is that in 1984, fifty firms controlled the majority of market share in daily newspapers, magazines, television, radio, books, and motion pictures -- today, six firms control the majority of market share in these media. (Ben Bagdikian) Such concentration of the major information sources in a handful of large media conglomerates
The name of the town also changed from Bytown to Ottawa about fifty years later. The future of the town permanently changed when Queen Victoria decided to change the capital to the city in 1857 for the entire United Province of Canada. Then came the fires and "The Great Fire of 1900 started in Hull, turned into an inferno at the lumber mills and crossed the river into Ottawa."
We should not confuse 'multiple' choices with 'independent' choices. For example, we now have 'multiple' sources of news and information offered by NBC -- the national broadcast network, CNBC, and MSNBC -- which is all to the good. However, by contrast, 'independent' choices are available to viewers by the emergence of competitors to CNN -- MSNBC and Fox News (as cited in Ann, 2003)." While, on the other hand, Commissioner
" (2001) Kalathil states that the state has been both "empowered and weakened..." By the recent information and communication advances and as well these have created great difficulty for the effective hoarding of control information resources by the government. (2001) As the government in China has lost its monopoly on information, Internet-based media in the country "have capitalized on the opportunities made possible by new technology. By making available a wide
Thus, they set off a great deal of protest. Americans did not appreciate the fact that a small group of powerful corporations are given more control of the most important element of our democracy: our access to information. They are right to feel this way. The media monopoly allows a small amount of companies power over media outlets (independent and corporate alike, including on the Web). This is far
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