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 Incorporated, a subsidiary of Time Warner, that owns a number of publications numbering nearly twelve dozen including magazines in the fashion, television, entertainment and sports spheres. The three magazines that will be used for analysis will be People, InStyle and Marie Claire, as these magazines are owned by the same conglomerate and are used to push an image and a lifestyle in the name of making money. However, this is done at great expense to society and the media sphere given the message that is being presented and how dominant it is in the market place.
Questions Answered
The three magazines in question are quite different from one to the other but the three have one thing in common. They all push celebrity and fashion in the name of enriching the magazine's owners (Time Inc.) and the companies that sell and market products in the magazines. Depending on the magazine and the article, these products include makeup, clothes, movie, television shows and so forth. The latter two of that list is especially delicate and interesting given that Time Warner is also heavily involved in the television and movie business given their ownership of Time Warner Cable as well as other entertainment venues and avenues (Time, 2013).
The concentration of ownership and the diversification of a fashion magazine (Marie Claire), Entertainment Weekly (a TV/movie publication) and InStyle (which features elements of both of the prior magazines) allows Time Warner to hit the style and entertainment industry on three different fronts. If Time Warner was in no way involved in the entertainment and/or fashion industries, there would still be cause for concern due to the homogenous ownership between the three firms but the fact that they do have a very massive involvement in the entertainment and style industry means that they have a huge conflict of interest as it pertains to who they shill, who they shill for and why (Sorkin, 2005).
Profit maximization is clearly on the mind of the owners and operators of the magazines as well as the people they partner with. However, much like the interweaving of Comcast and NBC, there is a lot of murmuring about whether they are giving a fair shot to actresses or fashion nameplates that deserve it and/or whether they are force-feeding certain message (including political) fashion trends and entertainment options in the name of enriching the other bastions of the Time Warner label as well as the cronies and friends of the same.
To take this a bit further, it is quite interesting how a convicted woman-batterer like Chris Brown is still showing up in movies and putting out music that is marketed while more wholesome and virginal acts like Taylor Swift are being pilloried and mocked. Obviously, if Chris Brown was not selling movie tickets and music, he would not be marketed, but it is clear that these publications are putting dollars over decency. On top of that, the body image and sex appeal message that are propagated by these magazines put immense pressure on young girls of compromised self-esteems who get the perverted message that they are not worth anything unless they are skinny as a rail. This never-stopping barrage of imagery and content can lead to self-alienation or alienation with social cliques, along the line of Marxist belief, where people in ancillary and non-traditional groups are treated like dogs and outcasts because they cannot or will not mesh with the "in" crowd and what they like, with magazines like People, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly making sure people understand what they should like and what they should not (Pearson, 2013).
Between the body image thing and people being unfairly and unjustly pimped or pounced on is just unseemly and sometimes immoral. Profit dollars alone should not be the endgame and huge conglomerates with the hands in too many cookie jars can lead to a domination and filtering of what is seen by the public sphere and what is not. It is not quite as bad as...
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