The six current media conglomerates are Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann, and General Electric. These companies together own more than 90% of the media market.
Ownership of the media market can be measured in different ways. The biggest variable probably being what you consider to be media. Even a half dozen companies is far from a monopoly and these companies do not operate as a cartel or a monolithic block. In fact even within a particular company's media many different viewpoints get aired. The companies care more about money than advancing a coherent political ideology. Beyond the big media outlets there are countless smaller ones. Viewpoints and ideas can not effecitvely be stifled by the "big six" even if they where actually trying to do so, and I see no evidence that such attempts at stifling are there standard mode of operation.
Ben Compaine makes the case better than I can -
reason.com
The whole article is worth reading but for those that don't want to bother I'll make a couple of quotes -
"Overall, the media industry -- including broadcasters, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, music labels, cable networks, film and television producers, Internet-based information providers, and so on -- is not substantially more concentrated than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Even after a period of mild deregulation and high-profile mergers, the top 10 U.S. media companies own only a slightly bigger piece of the overall media pie than the top 10 of two decades ago. In my book Who Owns the Media?, I compiled data showing that the top 10 media companies accounted for 38 percent of total revenue in the mid-1980s, and 41 percent in the late 1990s. As important, the lists are not filled with the same companies. Meanwhile, the rest of the media universe has continued to expand and diversify: There are more magazine and book publishers than ever, and new categories of vibrant media that were inconceivable just a decade or two ago.
The general assumption is that fewer and larger companies are controlling more and more of what we see, hear, and read. Certainly a casual scanning of the headlines lends evidence: Time merges with Warner, buys CNN, and then combines with America Online. But the incremental growth of smaller companies from the bottom up does not attract the same attention. Break-ups and divestitures do not generally get front-page treatment, nor does the arrival of new players or the shrinkage of old ones.
Right now, the 50 largest media companies account for little more of total U.S. media revenue than they did in 1986. Back then, for example, CBS was the largest media company in the country, with sizable interests in broadcasting, magazines, and book publishing. In the following decade it sold off its magazines, divested its book publishing, and was not even among the 10 largest American media companies by the time it agreed to be acquired by Viacom in 1999. Conversely, Bertelsmann, though a major player in Germany in 1986, was barely visible in the United States. Ten years later, it was the third-largest media company in America. Upstarts such as Amazon.com, Books-A-Million, Comcast, and C-Net were nowhere to be found on a list of the largest media companies in 1986. Others, such as Allied Artists, Macmillan, and Playboy Enterprises, either folded or grew so slowly they fell out of the top ranks. It is a dynamic industry.
In 1986, I employed a widely-used measure of economic concentration called the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (HHI), to assess the 50 largest American media industry players. In the HHI a score of 10,000 means a total monopoly. Anything above 1,800 indicates a highly concentrated market; 1,000 represents the bottom range of oligopolistic tendencies (meaning the major companies have some capability to limit price competition and perhaps indirectly constrain the range of content diversity), while any score under 1,000 reveals a competitive market. In 1997, the index for media companies stood at 268. This was up some from 206 in 1986, but hardly what you’d expect given fears of concentration. Skeptics would point out that 1997 was before AOL and Time Warner or CBS and Viacom merged, but it was also before magazine publisher Ziff-Davis broke itself up or Thomson, once the owner of more newspapers than any other company in North America, sold off most of its holdings to several established as well as newer players. Competitiveness in media compares favorably to other industries: The 1997 HHI for American motor vehicles was 2,506; for semiconductors, 1,080; and for pharmaceuticals, 446."
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"Walter Lippmann once wrote, "The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." I have never heard a convincing argument that any individual in the United States in 2003 cannot easily and inexpensively have access to a huge variety of news, information, opinion, culture, and entertainment, whether from 10, 50, or 3,000 sources. If that is what passes for media concentration, we should consider ourselves pretty lucky."
reason.com |
