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The Media Cartel
The half-dozen media conglomerates on which the majority of Americans depend or their news, views and entertainment, behave more like a cartel than independent competitors, says media critic Ben Bagdikian.

Ben H. Bagdikian is the author of "In the Midst of Plenty: The Poor in America" (Beacon Press, 1963), "The Media Monopoly" (Amazon; Powells; BookSense), and many other books. He is the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

Indy: As the author of "The Media Monopoly," you've watched as the number of media conglomerates that control most of the news we consume has shrunk dramatically. How has the media consolidation harmed us as individual news consumers?

Ben Bagdikian: Competitive, independent news sources have always been the best way for a community to see a wide array of news, general information, and commentary. Media concentration has produced 99.9 percent of cities that have daily papers [that] are newspaper monopolies in their own cities. Most papers of any size no longer circulate solely in the city of their location. They now emphasize regional, advertising retail trade zones that cover surrounding cities and towns. A metro paper covering several communities seldom covers each of those communities with any breadth or depth – almost systematic coverage of all the important civic boards, city councils of the communities in which they sell papers. Nevertheless, despite growth of other media, such as radio, TV, and the Internet, the basic sources of news in any significant detail and background are newspapers. Few TV news staffs, for example, do not start the day by looking at the printed news media. What they do with this varies enormously, but the printed news has a far deeper impact than their numbers would indicate. There are not many financial reporters on the air or Internet, for example, that do not first look at the Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times. All-news TV like CNN, for example, looks at the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other papers every day. But because of the growth of large media conglomerates, daily news properties they own constitute only a small part of the empire in a large table of organization. The top executives who control budgets and policies are distant from the locale of their news organizations. And while, contrary to owners' constant complaints, newspapers continue to be profitable. The problem is that the conglomerate may own a newspaper that makes 20 or 25 percent profit (three years ago Gannett, the biggest newspaper chain instructed its local managers to shoot for profits in the mid-thirties). But local radio stations make from 30 to 60 percent profits, so this is where the conglomerate pays the most attention and development. Pride of ownership and quality mean very little for an executive in New York or Chicago whose newspapers are scattered in distant places and are seen seldom, or not at all by the top policy makers. The result of all this has been a steady deterioration in the quality and reliability of all the popular media.

Some have argued that cable and the Internet changes the equation of the media monopoly, because we can find almost any news we want to. Does the information on the Internet make the media monopoly less of a concern?

There is no question that the Internet is an important entry into the media scene. But it is a vast collection of information, rumor, scholarship, psychopathic sites, and news, all buried in the huge pile of undifferentiated items. The Internet has had public impact, some positive and some not but still an impact because within its mass there is freedom of individual groups to communicate with like-minded people. This has often outflanked traditional information sources in the introduction of new ideas, calls for public action good and bad, but provides the user with individual expression. The tradition and professional history of other media is deeper than those qualities in the Internet, so each site on the Internet demands of the serious user a greater demand of discretion and sophistication in order to separate the sense from the nonsense, the relevant from the irrelevant.

You recently did a complete revision of your book as "The New Media Monopoly" (2004), rather than updating older editions. Do you think there is something fundamentally different about the power of today's media monopoly compared to earlier decades?

There is a profound difference in the new media conglomeration and the media in past decades. The new conglomerates are very large and powerful (the ones that dominate the field are all Fortune 500 corporations) and because media power is political power, they have been major factors in the change of government agencies like the FCC, SEC, FDA, and the committees of the Congress. Furthermore, the retreat of government from anti-trust actions in cases of firms that dominate their fields and inhibit entry of new firms has meant that the public has minimal power over the agencies that are supposed to concentrate on serving the public interest. In addition, the half-dozen media conglomerates on which the majority of Americans depend or their news, views and entertainment, behave more like a cartel than independent competitors. The conglomerates do compete around the edges (fractional differences in Nielson and Arbitron ratings, for example), but they have so many joint ventures in which they share ownership that it inhibits true competition and rewards collusion and true all-out competition. Huge firms seldom take risks. Risk-taking and true variety occurs almost always in the small, local retail firms like restaurants, hardware stores, etc. As the cartelization of the media conglomerates and inaction by government to put public service secondary to adoption of giantism in corporate life, the problem for civic needs has become more desperate. That is why I felt new editions of my book were needed.