-Caveat Lector- from: http://cjr.org/owners/ <A HREF="http://cjr.org/owners/">CJR - Who Owns What, by Aaron Moore</A> ----- media search: newspapers magazines owners search for a media property: Who Owns What Media companies continue to grow, and a shrinking number of them shape what we view and read. What does that mean for journalists -- and for the nation? Here are some tools for thinking about that. First, an essay on media concentration by Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Then WHO OWNS WHAT, CJR's Web guide to what the major media companies own. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ New entries (as of 5/17/99) �CNHI �E.W. Scripps �A.H. Belo �McClatchy Company �Washington Post Company �Advance �Bertelsmann �Cablevision �CBS �Comcast �Cox Communications �Disney �Dow-Jones & Company �Gannett �General Electric �Hearst Corporation �Hollinger �Knight Ridder �MediaOne �News Corporation �New York Times Company �Reed Elsevier �Seagram �Sony �Times Mirror, Inc. �Time-Warner �Tribune Company �Viacom Last updated 5/10/99 We will continue to add more companies to the guide, and to keep it updated as the corporations change their operations. The resource guide is maintained by Aaron Moore, a Temple University graduate student who is also a correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Please send comments or corrections to him at [EMAIL PROTECTED], and/or to the editors at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ====== from: http://cjr.org/year/98/5/goldstein.asp <A HREF="http://cjr.org/year/98/5/goldstein.asp">CJR, Sept/Oct 98 - Does Big Mean Bad?, by Tom G </A> ----- September/October 1998 | Contents Conglomerates Does Big Mean Bad? As the Century Winds Down, Media Power Continues to Concentrate. Here Are Some Tools for Thinking About That. by Tom Goldstein Goldstein is the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. This essay is a companion piece to CJR's guide to media ownership. The journalist's fear of the concentrated power of the big media companies is almost instinctual. Yet what do we fear exactly? Is it the potential for misuse of journalistic properties to benefit other arms of a corporation? Is it the undercurrent of corporate values that we think we sense flowing through and shaping some news? Or do we fear mere phantoms, the anti-monopoly sentiments of a century that is passing into history? By way of addressing such questions, CJR has done two things. First we have put on our Web site -- www.cjr.org -- a new resource guide, titled "Who Owns What." It is a detailed road map for journalists, researchers, and others to find which corporations are financially connected with which products and media outlets. We begin with fifteen of the largest and most influential companies, from Advance Publications, Bertelsmann, Cablevision, and Disney to Sony, Time Warner, and Viacom. This fall we will add seven others. "Who Owns What" will be expanded and updated regularly by its creator, Aaron Moore ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). It includes a search engine. CJR also asked Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, to explain why this kind of information is important and to examine the evolving debates about the continuing concentration of media ownership. Here is his essay: In my last incarnation, as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, I once lobbied a top recruiter for a major newspaper chain to hire students from the school. The recruiter then explained why her company had not interviewed anyone from Berkeley for many years. The reason was simple: "Bagdikian." I protested. Ben Bagdikian, the media critic and my predecessor there as dean, is a self-effacing giant in the field. I was missing the point, the recruiter told me. She was convinced that we drilled our students with Ben's anti-chain views, that like some kind of witch doctor he was initiating students into the dark arts of skepticism toward media power. (In fact, in no course did we assign Ben's influential book, The Media Monopoly. Shame on us.) Ultimately, the recruiter shed her remarkably thin skin and began hiring Berkeley students. In the honorable ideological tradition of Will Irwin, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I. F. Stone, Bagdikian contends that no commercial power should dominate the news -- just as no state power should. The media giants make up, in the haunting phrase he coined, a "private ministry of information." In the first edition of Media Monopoly, in 1984, Bagdikian bemoaned that just fifty corporations controlled more than half of the media outlets in this country. He was writing when CNN was in its infancy, when most journalists still used typewriters, and long before the Internet. By 1997, in the book's fifth edition, Bagdikian pegged the "number of media corporations with dominant power in society" at closer to ten. The "new communications cartel," he wrote, has the power to "surround almost every man, woman, and child in the country with controlled images and words." With that power comes the "ability to exert influence that in many ways is greater than that of schools, religion, parents and even government itself." Bagdikian's role as a media gadfly is gradually being taken over by a new generation, including Mark Crispin Miller, a forceful and original thinker now teaching at New York University. At a duPont-Columbia University Forum called "Is This News?" earlier this year, Miller pointed to "increasing evidence of direct and conscious manipulation of the news process by higher corporate powers and by advertisers generally." Worse, said Miller, is "a system in which the mere fact of ratings anxiety and declining news budgets and the scramble for promotions, simple careerism inside the news business -- all these things combine to help produce a kind of seamless trivial spectacle that really doesn't tell us anything." Miller's words are potent, but they are not the last on the subject of the effects of media concentration. Nor are Bagdikian's. The financial markets have certainly spoken. They have richly rewarded some media-company mergers and made stockholders -- including journalists -- happy folks. Walk into the lobby of a big newspaper these days and you might be confronted with the latest stock price of the paper's parent company. While few have written compellingly in favor of media giants gobbling up other media giants, some thoughtful observers have made arguments that question the validity of the traditional way of looking at media concentration. In a recent issue of Newsweek, columnist Robert Samuelson mulled a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press documenting the shrinking audience for the television networks' nightly news programs. That survey, combined with the success that his brother, an innkeeper, reaped from advertising on his own Web site, led Samuelson to rethink some basic assumptions. "The notion of a media elite, if ever valid, requires that people get news and entertainment from a few sources dominated by a handful of executives, editors, anchors, reporters, and columnists." Samuelson wrote. "As media multiply, the elite becomes less exclusive. Smaller audiences give them less prominence and market power (i.e. salaries)." Writing two years ago in the extraordinary issue of The Nation that contained a spider-like chart illustrating the holdings of the four dominant members of "the national entertainment state," Michael Arlen, an uncommonly astute commentator, argued that the specter of a vast, monolithic, all-pervading media has been wildly overdrawn. George Orwell's vision of Big Brother in 1984 was a resoundingly false prophecy. "How disappointing it would have been to Orwell to observe the actual play-out of this romantic drama," Arlen wrote. As proof, he pointed to "the emergence over the past several decades of a startling cacophony of market-crazed citizens all over the world, with their insistence on two-way communication and their appetite for fragmentation of broadcast authority." These competing views of media power (and there are many, many more) do not cancel each other out. They just underscore that we have no unitary explanation of the extent and impact of media concentration. If journalism is just another business, then the primary scorecard of success is justifiably the verdict of the financial markets. Because of the First Amendment protection it enjoys, journalism is more than another business. Still, we need to know more about what differentiates media concentration from consolidation in other commercial enterprises. We see consolidation among the airlines, military suppliers, banks, brokerage firms, and telephone companies. Look at accounting firms. For years there was the Big Eight. Then, the Big Six. And now, the Big Four. Why do efficiencies of scale work for some businesses and not, say, for journalistic enterprises? With big media ownership in fewer hands, what barriers to entry actually have been erected? (It has been quite a while since anyone tried to start a major metropolitan newspaper. Many have tried recently to start new television networks, but these latter-day broadcasting pioneers are among the very behemoths that so trouble Bagdikian and Miller.) Why is the much-touted buzzword of the early 1990s -- synergy -- now viewed with such distrust by journalists? Having moved from an age of media scarcity to one of media babble, what new ways do we need to analyze media concentration? For all the Matt Drudges churning away in small rooms, there are signs that the Internet may come to be dominated by big media. In June, Disney agreed to buy a large portion of the search engine company Infoseek. NBC purchased a share of CNET and its online search engine, Snap! These new investments, wrote Matt Welch in the Online Journalism Review (www.ojr. org), "further confused the already byzantine web of ownership, business alliances, and competition among the parent companies of the biz/tech sites." In the Internet Age, media concentration bears even closer watching. Ownership needs to be demystified. Customers are entitled to know what corporate entity is responsible for bringing them their news. And this is now getting harder to know, with the emergence of a crop of big media companies not normally associated with journalism. In the next century, will Softbank dominate? Or Vulcan? Or Zapata? Or Intel? Too often, commentary on media concentration has been fragmentary or anecdotal. We need to recast the debate, which shows signs of stagnating. We need to add new perspectives. That is why we should welcome fresh efforts at understanding media concentration. Two recent efforts are noteworthy. One is Mark Crispin Miller's Project on Media Ownership, now affiliated with New York University, which will detail interlocking ownership. And "Who Owns What" (described above) will appear on the cjr Web site, at www.cjr.org. With hard data and hard analysis will come answers to the vital questions that need to be asked about media concentration. Kimberly Brown, class of 1998, helped with research on this article. To join in the discussion of media conglomerates, visit the CJR Forum. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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