>As I understand media analysts like McChesney, the "media concentration"
>line consists of two parts:
>
>1. The ownership of media outlets is becoming increasingly concentrated in
>the hands of a few major media conglomerates (Time-Warner, Disney, etc).
>
>2. This concentrated ownership leads to less diversity in media content
>and tends to filer out or marginalize content that challenges the status
>quo (Chomsky and Herman).
>
>The evidence for #1 is strong; is #2 what you're questioning? Or is there
>another component to the argument?
1 is mostly true (though with the web, geography and physical distribution aren't what they used to be), but I don't make the leap to 2. When did American media ever challenge the status quo?
The problem isn't concentration, it's media under the discipline of profit maximization. Concentration is a byproduct of competition, and, as Bourdieu argued, competition doesn't produce diversity, it impels producers towards received widsom, common sense, and sometimes cheap sensation (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with cheap sensation). Anything against the grain slows the flow, and advertisers don't like that.
Doug