We Won't Be Fooled Again

A remarkably large amount of the information the public receives is controlled by a very small number of media sources. Freedom House records that within states, out of 187 governments, 92 have complete ownership of the television broadcasting structure, while 67 have part ownership.[15] Ownership of the world's media sources is similarly increasingly concentrated in a few giant corporations. Thousands of other sources do exist, but in comparison their influence is negligible. The leading American media analyst Ben Bagdikan, noting that despite more than 25,000 media entities in the US only "23 corporations control most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures", concludes that this endows corporations with the extensive power to exercise influence over "news, information, public ideas, popular culture, and political attitudes".[16]

The result today is that about twelve corporations dominate the world's mass media. In his study of corporate leverage over the media, Megamedia, Dr. Dean Alger - who was fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the press, politics and public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government - lists this 'dominant dozen' as follows in order of power: Disney - Capital Cities - ABC; Time Warner - Turner; News Corporation; Bertelsmann; Tele-Communications (TCI) - AT&T General Electric - NBC; CBS Inc.; Newshouse/Advance Publications; Viacom; Microsoft; Matra - Hachette - Filipacchi; Gannet. Alger quotes journalist and former top editor of the Chicago Tribunal, James Squires, concerning the escalating patterns of concentration of media-ownership in profit-orientated corporations:

"In its struggle for relevance and financial security in the modern information age, the press as an institution appears ready to trade its tradition and its public responsibility for whatever will make a buck. In the starkest terms, the news media of the 1990s are a celebrity-oriented, Wall-Street dominated, profit-driven entertainment enterprise dedicated foremost to delivering advertising images to targeted groups of consumers."

Richard Clurman, who was for years a leading figure in Time magazine, has similarly observed:

"As the news media became bigger and bigger business, the innovative traditions led by creative editorial dominance began to erode... The media had grown from a nicely profitable, creative business into a gigantic investment opportunity. It was becoming harder to think of them as different from any other business in free enterprise America."

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