japantoday > commentary
U.S. media: Pervasive or not?
Benjamin Compaine
Big media barons are routinely accused of dominating markets, dumbing down the news to plump up the bottom line, and forcing U.S. content on world audiences. But these companies are not as big, bad, dominant, or American as critics claim. And company size is largely irrelevant to many of the problems facing today's Fourth Estate.
Much of the debate on media structure is too black-and-white. A merger of Time Inc with Warner Communications and then with America Online dominates headlines, but the incremental growth of smaller companies from the bottom does not. Breakups and divestitures do not generally receive front-page treatment, nor do the arrival and rapid growth of new players or the shrinkage of once influential players.
In the United States, today's top 50 largest media companies account for little more of total media revenue than did the companies that made up the top 50 in 1986. CBS Inc, for example, was then the largest media company in the United States. In the 1990s, it sold off its magazines, divested its book publishing, and was not even among the 10 largest U.S. media companies by the time it agreed to be acquired by Viacom, which was a second tier player in 1986.
Conversely, Bertelsmann, though a major player in Germany in 1986, was barely visible in the United States. By 1997, it was the third largest player in the United States, where it owns book publisher Random House. Companies 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 1980. Others, such as Allied Artists, Macmillan, and Playboy Enterprises, either folded or grew so slowly as to fall out of the top ranks.
Indeed, media merger activity is more like rearranging the furniture: In the past 15 years, MCA with its Universal Pictures was sold by its U.S. owners to Matsushita (Japan), who sold to Seagram's (Canada), who sold to Vivendi (France). Vivendi has already announced that it will divest some major media assets, including textbook publisher Houghton-Mifflin. Bertelsmann also has had difficulty maintaining all the parts of its global enterprise: It recently fired its top executive and is planning to shed its online bookstore. There is an ebb as well as a flow among even the largest media companies.
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