Learning Pack Preview: Who Owns the Media?

In 1996, The Nation published a special issue on the National Entertainment State. 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. 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. This is reflected not only in a detailed National Entertainment State chart, but in the range of contributions to the discussion in our July 3, 2006, issue.

The chart is an invitation to step back from the outrage of the moment — be it over Rush Limbaugh's addled ranting, Bill O'Reilly's spin or the White House press corps's inability to distinguish between journalism and stenography — and see the big picture in gruesome detail. It reminds us that while we might hate the rigid recitation of conservative talking points on Fox News programs and love the Internet frontier reached via MySpace.com, both Fox and MySpace (and now you can add the Wall Street Journal) are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. It tells us that when we are wondering whether we should trust an NBC Nightly News report on the greening of nuclear power, it is important to keep in mind that NBC's owner, General Electric, has a more than passing interest in the development and operation of nuclear power plants. And the chart also reminds us that GE owns Universal Pictures and Universal Studios, making it a major player in the creation of the culture — the TV shows and movies — that goes so far to define what Americans think and do.

It is the power that a handful of corporations continue to wield over the media we consume — even the new media of a supposedly liberating Internet — that ought to concern us as citizens. It is not enough to hope that the Internet will set us free. Yes, the World Wide Web is evolving in ways that few anticipated a decade ago, but it is a good bet, however, that that new-media companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft will in relatively short order either displace some of the old-media companies on the chart or acquire or merge with them. In addition, the vast frontiers of new media are being colonized by big players of old media, which won round one in the fight over "net neutrality" with the House's passage of the COPE Act, legislation that would allow commercial sites to dominate the net. With the FCC preparing another attempt to strike down rules that guard against local media monopolies, we are entering a period of intense struggle over the fundamental questions for both old and new media: Who will own what, and will the rules regulating ownership be written to benefit the owners or the rest of us? The powerhouses of today's National Entertainment State stand ready to answer those questions as they always have, by using all their might to make sure that the new boss is the same as the old boss.