How Concentrated Is The Media? By Matthew Yglesias | bio
Media concentration is, I'm afraid, one of those progressive causes I've never been able to get unduly worked up about. Whenever this comes up, I think back to years and years ago when I was living at home and my parents subscribed to The Nation. They printed this big chart showing how concentrated the media was in the hands of a few corporations. Or, at least, that's what it was supposed to show. I recall having thought that the chart actually showed Big Media to be relatively diffuse, all things considered. Well, that turns out to have been exactly ten years ago, and their latest issue has a followup chart and a tenth anniversary editorial.
The editorial is actually a bit odd:
The issue featured a centerfold chart depicting the tentacles of four colossal conglomerates that were increasingly responsible for determining how Americans got their news--Time Warner, General Electric, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse. And essays by Norman Lear, Walter Cronkite and Mark Crispin Miller, among others, looked ahead to a period of no-holds-barred consolidation green-lighted by the new legislation. Today, after a decade of strategic mergers, impulsive couplings and messy divorces--not to mention the birth of "new media" as well as a vigorous media reform movement--the landscape is considerably more complex, though it still bears the oversized footprints of a few giants.
As they're saying-but-not-saying here, the media's become less concentrated. They're up to six giants from just four -- General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that's six.
Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.
What's more, the curious thing about these six media monopolists is that between them they control zero of America's most-influential newspapers. Nobody, I hope, will deny that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are important elements of the media. And yet, they're owned by three separate companies, each of them apart from the Big Six. Beyond the Big Six electronic media companies and the Big Three newspapers, there's also Gannett which owns the high-circulation USA Today along with a boatload of smaller newspapers. And then there's Tribune Media with The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other papers.
On top of all that, you need to consider the existence of NPR and PBS. Neither of them are especially large enterprises, but they have extraordinary reach -- virtually everywhere in the country one can get one NPR affiliate and one PBS affiliate and most places you can get more than one. Consequently, even if not that many people watch NewsHour or the BBC World News or listen to NPR to get their news, it's very credible that the audience might defect to those outlets (all they'd have to do is change the channel) so the five or so big corporate broadcast news outlets need to worry.
On top of all this, the Internet is greatly enhancing peoples' range of options. Actual "new media" -- blogs, etc. -- play a relatively small role in this. The main thing is that, unlike it past eras, it's now really, really easy for somebody living in St. Louis to read The Los Angeles Times or The Boston Globe or, for that matter, The Guardian or The Independent if they're interested in a different perspective on world or national affairs. In the more strictly entertainment sectors of the media, thanks to the iTunes Music Store and EMusic and Netflix and digital cable, it's never been easier -- especially for people living outside major cultural centers -- to find an independent album or movie.
This is getting very longwinded. But suffice it to say that while I have major -- major -- complaints with the reality of most media content, I don't find it especially plausible to attribute these problems to overconcentration. The media business doesn't seem especially concentrated and it's becoming less rather than more concentrated.
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