Reflection #3: The Media Monopoly

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.

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