Does Mega Media Control 90% of Content? 231
smitty777 writes "FastCo has an intriguing article on the vast control of our media by the mega corporations. In the article, Cliff Kuang disputes such claims by the the Frugal Dad that the revenue for the Big Six was over $275.9 billion, and that these companies are in cahoots to control our viewing. Just how much do these companies control?"
This doesnt surprise anyone, does it? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why (Score:3, Interesting)
Numbers never lie... But they do mislead. (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple obvious fact two: The smaller company will have less market share.
So if some companies are bigger then they will have more Market Share and control then the others.
So if the top 6 companies (assume they are all equal) own 90% share then each one only has 15% market share. Which is big but no means a monopoly.
Percentages are a way of summarizing real data. However by grouping and summarizing the summary. And clustering data in a particular way you can prove anything you want.
Think the 99%ers vs. the 53%ers they both choose different measurements and summarize and group values differently to prove their point.
Re:No he doesn't (Score:5, Interesting)
With only five competetitors, and all of them producing dreck, there's no need to produce anything BUT dreck.
You make it sound as bad as domestic car companies. Or banks. Or fast food "restaurants". Hmm. I think we're on to a pattern here...
Re:No he doesn't (Score:4, Interesting)
I know, I'm very happy to be in my mid-twenties during the age where the Internet is really exploding and realizing its power. There's are some *fantastic* people who create entertainment on their own and it comes out way better and more interesting than a lot of the crap on the telly. freddiew [youtube.com] and Monty Oum [deviantart.com] come to mind as a couple of standout examples. Then there's there's loads of fun projects like SMBC Theater [smbc-theater.com] and 5 second films [5secondfilms.com]. There's even more "Mainstream" stuff (Internet-wise) like CrackedTV, CollegeHumor, and FunnyOrDie making original videos. I think in 5 years we'll really be at the point where the stuff on the Internet is as good as (if not more interesting than) the stuff on television.
The only barrier that needs to be broken is the duration of videos. Most of these places will put out 1-10 minutes of content a week. There's very little cohesive shows (like sitcoms or dramas) that I've found that can consistantly produce 20+ 22-minute episodes once a year.
Last recommendation: Next Time on Lonny [youtube.com].
If anyone else knows of any good shows, dramas, whatever hosted online (I'm particularly fond of stuff like Penny Arcade Television as well), please post them here in a reply. I'd love to check out some new stuff. I've almost entirely phased television out of my life.
Trumped-up charges of plagiarism (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, many of us don't like the MSM, and are now getting our news raw and unfiltered.
Provided they have the time to sit in front of a computer desk. A lot of people have trouble giving up the MSM for video because they don't want to buy another PC for the HDTV or worse yet both buy a PC and replace the SDTV in the living room with an HDTV. Other people have trouble giving up the MSM for music because only smartphones can play Internet radio in the car or on the bus, and they aren't willing to pay for smartphone service.
I don't care that the MSM controls 90% of the content, because it is the same old crappy content they've always controlled. With the internet, there is a whole new world of content waiting to be discovered.
Until the MSM starts suing Internet artists on trumped-up charges of plagiarism.
The 90% of the people can't really appreciate the finer nuanced artistic works, let them have the MSM.
Are you sure that we'd want that? If 90 percent have the MSM, then 90 percent are letting the MSM tell them for whom to vote [pineight.com] and on which issues to choose a candidate. For example, which MSM source has thoroughly covered opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act?
Big Biz is the Default, and We Keep the Default (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the problem in a nutshell. We have access to information and analysis from gazillions of people, but most of us pay attention only to those who are presented as the default choices. Those who are presented as the default choices inevitably represent the opinions of those who own them.
This is the herding mentality responsible for financial bubbles -- people follow those who are perceived as successful regardless of the lead cow's intelligence and common sense or lack thereof. (Goldman Sachs. QED.)
The challenge is to restore diversity in what is heard, not just diversity in what is available to be heard. That, unfortunately, is a distributed problem, and cannot be solved by just adding a few voices.
Re:No he doesn't (Score:5, Interesting)
The quote from Jobs pretty much sums it up well.
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs, Interview in WIRED magazine (February 1996)
Re:"Cahoots", not "cohorts" (Score:2, Interesting)
Small wonder big media, via the representatives they own in Washington continue to wage war against public broadcasting. Not satisfied with 90% of the market, they want that last morsel, too.
Not sure why they would care. NPR is compromised and caters to their corporate sponsors just as much as the rest of the main stream media. They've even started inserting ads in the middle of their stories, just like the other stations. The only real difference is that the Federal government is also a sponsor, so they have to cater to them, too.
Re:No he doesn't (Score:5, Interesting)
Even with the price of HDTV cameras plummeting, I don't see the price of competent writing, directing, acting, sets, and the like plummeting.
Not to mention the cost for a commercial MPEG license [dylanreeve.com], required for anything you film with that HD camera.
Re:Liberal media bias, my foot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. Going by the logic of the people who generally put forward the notion that the MSM is liberal, the MSM should actually be wholly conservative. After all, they are owned by profit-making corporations, and therefore should be staunchly for standard conservative platforms: lower taxes, less social welfare, corporate personhood, less regulation, more for the "job-creators", foreign imperialism funded by deficit-spending... but we don't hear that.
Alternatively, there's the argument that the MSM is not interested in the truth, but just in giving the people what they want. If the MSM is indeed liberal, that means that the majority of Americans are liberal.
Either way, conservatives are falling over their own logic if they claim the MSM is liberal.