My first impression as I started reading this article was “whoa Ben – tell us how you really feel”! The excerpt from his book, The Media Monopoly (published 1997), gives us Bagdikian’s warnings of the dangers posed by monopolistic control of newspapers, television, movies, magazines, radio and books by a few major corporations. I wanted to understand the media landscape today compared to his predictions in 1997, when the reading was published, as so much evolution has occurred in the world of communications. Begdikian states in his book The Media Monopoly, that in 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. For example, in January 2011, Comcast completed taking control of NBC Universal, cementing one of the largest media mergers in recent history. With this lessening competition comes control, and with control has come the blurring of entertainment and information.
Taking this perspective in the context of current events, let’s look at the current oil crisis and the role the media has had in gas prices going up and down. According to the website www.mediamatters.com, a non-profit, progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media, “Conservative media (e.g. Fox Networks) claim that recent proposals to repeal tax breaks for the five largest oil companies will make gasoline more expensive. However, energy experts say that cutting the tax incentives will have little to no effect on prices at the pump.” (Media Matters, 2011). Journalistic malpractice seems to be everywhere on this issue and we get to a point where we don’t know what to believe. We’ve become increasingly skeptical of our government and the media outlets that support them.
But are we, as media consumers, doing anything about it? What is our role in driving media reform? Are we to also blame?
In a time where reality stars are considered presidential candidates (pick you poison: Trump or Palin), we also need to look at ourselves and understand how we, as media consumers, allow this to happen. Have our minds become so numb, and our attitudes so apathetic that we don’t care enough to fight back through our media consumer habits? We let ourselves get caught up in the merchandising and don’t really think about being robbed of knowledge. We do have choices. Cable television provides us with alternatives in which independent points of view can be heard. We have access to these cable channels, which accordingly to Cowan in his excerpt from A Social History of American Technology, “the social control that the networks and their advertisers had once exercised over the content of broadcasts had ended”. (Cowan, 1997) However, we seem to like the entertainment that the networks provide and we seek it out through our viewing habits, as demonstrated by the high Nielson ratings of the reality shows during sweeps week. With the large broadcast networks, we do have a right to something better, but we seem to think this is just the way it is. As a media consuming society, I believe it is going to take an understanding, and in turn a grassroots action movement from the people to make media reform something to pay attention to. Like the recent attempts at reform of our financial institutions, we must also seek out this kind of action with the media monopoly.
…If it is important to us.
- What role will the internet potentially have in instigating change in media?
- What must the government do to truly uphold the laws in place, like the Telecommunications Act of 1996? What will the impact be if they did so?
- What types of disruptive events need to occur to bring this issue to the surface as something to pay attention to now?
Media Matters. (2011, May 13). Conservative Media Defend Tax Breaks For Big Oil With False Claim About Gas Prices. Retrieved from Media Matters for America: Research: http://mediamatters.org/research/201105100015?lid=1166354&rid=60959842
Cowan, R. S. (1997). Communications Technologies and Social Control. In R. S. Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (p. 292). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
