Part 5 Media Monopolies

Who Owns the Media?

Massive corporations dominate the U.S. media landscape. Through a history of mergers and acquisitions, these companies have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these companies control everything from initial production to final distribution.

Broadcasters make billions in profits while using the public airwaves for free. In return, they are supposed to provide programming that fulfills community needs. Instead, lobbyists have successfully fought to make it easier for broadcast companies to gobble up even more free airspace while doing less to serve the public.

Top owner: Comcast: 2011 Revenue: $55.8 billion. Company Overview: In 2011, the Federal Communications Commission approved Comcast’s takeover of a majority share of NBCUniversal from General Electric. This merger combines the nation's largest cable company and residential Internet service provider and one of the world's biggest producers of TV shows and motion pictures. Comcast’s media holdings now reach almost every home in America. It serves customers in 39 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to its vast NBCUniversal holdings, Comcast has 23.6 million cable subscribers, 18 million digital cable subscribers, 15.9 million high-speed Internet customers and 7.6 million voice customers. Comcast recently entered into a partnership with Verizon in which each company will market and sell the other's services.

Access to high-speed Internet service — also known as broadband — has become a basic public necessity, just like water or electricity. Top Owner: Comcast - again. Yet despite its importance, broadband access in the United States is far from universal. Millions of Americans still stand on the wrong side of the "digital divide," unable to tap into the political, economic and social resources of the Web. Meanwhile, cable and phone companies — which hold virtual monopolies over the infrastructure of the Internet — often refuse to build out high-speed broadband to regions that need it most, and actively seek to block communities from seeking their own broadband solution

Consolidation has contributed to tough times for the newspaper industry. When the industry was swimming in profits in the 1990s, big media companies used 14–27 percent profit margins to buy up other properties rather than invest in the quality of their existing products or innovate for the future. Now they want to make it possible for a given company to own a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same market. Top Owner: NewsCorp (Fox): 2011 Revenue: $33.4 billion

Company Overview: News Corp’s media holdings include the FOX Broadcasting Company; television and cable networks such as Fox, Fox Business Channel, National Geographic and FX; print publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and TV Guide; the magazines Barron’s and SmartMoney; book publisher HarperCollins; film production companies 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Blue Sky Studios; numerous websites including MarketWatch.com; and non-media holdings including the National Rugby League.

Giant companies like Apple, Facebook and Google are slowly reconstituting the Internet's walled gardens of old [Pre -1995.] . As these companies try to steer us to their increasingly closed versions of the Internet — and to marketers who benefit from mining our personal information — we must fight for policies that protect our rights as Internet users. Top owners: Apple, Google and Microsoft. 2011 revenue $200 billion (combined) ...

http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart