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"Everybody wants to rule the world," sang Tears for Fears in the '80s. Now, according to the media critic Ben Bagdikian, someone actually does: the captains of post-industry, who control the global media. In 1983, when Bagdikian published the first edition of "The Media Monopoly," his sobering announcement that media ownership was concentrated in the hands of a mere 50 transnational conglomerates shocked many readers. Skeptics dismissed the book as "alarmist."
Now, after the frenzy of mergers and acquisitions in the '80s and '90s, a Planet Media run by 50 firms looks almost democratic. Today, the number of transnational firms who dominate the global media system has dwindled to nine. Ranked according to size, they are: Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corporation, TCI, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony (owner of Columbia and TriStar Pictures and major recording interests), and Seagram (owner of Universal film and music interests).
Why should we care? Because, according to some critics, these global media giants are sacrificing journalistic quality and ethics on the altar of shareholder returns. MBAs with no experience in---and little love for---journalism are downsizing news divisions and upping the fluff-to-fiber ratio in order to boost profits. Ominously, some corporate parents are meddling in the newsroom, slipping product placement into news shows and censoring investigative reports that bite the hand that feeds. In the name of greater market share, they're fencing out diverse or dissenting voices, creating a bland media monoculture. They're privatizing the airwaves, blockading our right-of-way to the public sphere.
Most worrisome, some critics say, is the bottom-line agenda of global corporate media: profoundly anti-democratic, dedicated to advancing the interests of the power élite and keeping the rabble entertained and docile. Media moguls and the powers they serve want happy shoppers, not freethinking citizens, the argument goes.
Regardless of whether you agree, there's no denying that, in the Information Age, "media power is political power," as Bagdikian writes in "The Media Monopoly." When a handful of companies control much of what we watch, read, and listen to, it's time for us to take a long, hard look at the private powers who own our media windows on the world.
- Mark Dery (editor@mediachannel.org), "Ownership" editor
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Foreground: AOL Time Warner—Size Matters
The American cult of gigantism—monster SUVs, humongous houses, huge platform shoes—reaches its absurdist apogee in the megamerger of new-media AOL and old-media Time Warner. "It's what the future is," a chief executive who oversees theme parks and a movie studio told The Washington Post. "It sure feels like you need to be bigger—bigger yet." The Media Channel has aggregated a big page of informative resources and provocative commentary on the marriage of the media monoliths. From The Media Channel, January 15 2000
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Controlling Interests
In "The Global Media Giants: The Nine Firms That Dominate The World," media critic Robert W. McChesney trains his crosshairs on the corporate
media monopoly, "a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or long-run corporate interests."
He buttresses his critique with a mountain of evidence in the form of a detailed
list of corporate profiles at the end of the article. From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, November 1 1997
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Foreground: The CBS-Viacom Merger
The 1999 merger
between
CBS and Viacom was the "biggest media deal ever." According to the
progressive watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting),
however,
coverage of the history-making merger as a business story was woefully
inadequate from a public-interest perspective.
From FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), September 10 1999
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Background: A Prehistory Of Media Consolidation
Media consolidation didn't begin with the Walt Disney Company's
acquisition
of ABC. In "Long History, Short Memories: ABC Was Born Out of Fear of
Media
Consolidation," Jim Naureckas uses the evolution of ABC as a prism to
refract
the history of media mergers and monopolization, from the golden age of
radio
to the wired world we live in. From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, May 1 1995
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Background: The 1996 Telecommunications Act
Much ballyhooed but little analyzed, the 1996 Telecom Act rearranged
the
media landscape. In "So Big: The Telecommunications Act at Year One," Columbia Journalism Review
contributor Neil Hickey contrasts the euphoric coverage of the passage
of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, celebrated as a cornucopia of job creation
and consumer choice, with the law's effects, on the ground: the giveaway of
a broad swatch of the public spectrum and an "unprecedented torrent of
mergers,
consolidations, buyouts, Affiliateships, and joint ventures that has
changed
the face of Big Media in America." From Columbia Journalism Review, January 1 1997
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Background: Antitrust Law---A Paper Tiger?
Contrary to popular belief, American antitrust law is largely toothless, a
situation that is partly the result of the fact that the fox is in
charge
of the henhouse: in the United States, antitrust regulations are under the jurisdiction of the
corporate-friendly Federal Trade Commission. At a 1998 conference
convened
by the Cultural Environment Movement, lawyers, scholars, and activists
debated the usefulness (or lack thereof) of current U.S.
Antitrust
Laws when applied to the consolidation of media power. From Cultural Environment Movement, October 1 1998
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Global Perspectives: The WTO's "Liberalization" Pact
In 1997, delegates from 69 countries signed a "liberalization" pact at
the
World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva. This "Media Briefing" about
the
pact balances the so-called developing world's need to gain a foothold
in the
Internet-based "new economy" with obvious concerns about telecom
imperialism---the transnational dominance of a few, "first world"-based
megaconglomerates in the age of borderless commerce. From Panos Institute, April 1 1997
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Dissenting Voices: "Does Big Mean Bad?"
The fragmentation of the mass market and growing access to the
many-to-many
medium of the Internet are facts of media life, these days. Don't such
developments belie Orwellian visions of a global media octopus, its
tentacles
choking off diversity and dissent? Tom Goldstein, Dean of the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism, wonders if "the specter of a
vast,
monolithic, all-pervading media" hasn't been "wildly overdrawn." From Columbia Journalism Review, September 1 1998
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Dissenting Voices: "Enough Of The 'Culture Of Complaint'"
Speaking to the latest wave of postmodern theory jocks and
self-employed
digital nomads, media critic Geert Lovink condemns theories of media
control
as obsolete in the age of social atomization and do-it-yourself media.
"People no longer [believe] in the conspiracy theory of the media as the
propaganda tool of capitalism," he writes. Marxist doomsaying about
"economic
power, ideological manipulation and exclusion" must be weighed, he
contends,
against the sweetness and light of the "open, decentralized, democratic
potentialities" of the new media. From Rhizome.org, December 3 1997
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Global Perspectives: Media Consolidation in Turkey
In Turkey, the consolidation of media power into powerful corporate
empires fueled by public and private funding has resulted in the
marginalization of independent voices and Machiavellian machinations
such as
the cover-up of ex-Prime Minister Tansu Cillers's alleged collaboration
with
the Mafia.
From Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1 1997
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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