from the stick-to-civil-liberties dept
I've
said before that I have trouble understanding what all the fuss is about with media consolidation. At a time when there's an unprecedented explosion of new voices on the Internet, it's difficult to get worked up about rule changes that would allow
very slight concentration of newspapers and broadcast television, two industries that are declining in importance. Radley Balko
notes that
the ACLU is jumping into the debate. I don't understand how lobbying for more restrictive media regulations promotes civil liberties. Even worse, the organization -- whose work I normally support and admire -- seems really clueless about the state of the media marketplace. For example, their Washington legislative director says: "Six major companies control most of the media in the country, including the most popular sites on the Internet."
She doesn't say who the six companies are, but I'm going to guess it's the "big six" of Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, GE, Bertelsman, and News Corp. There's just no way you can argue that these six companies own "the most popular sites on the Internet." According to Alexa, most of the top 10 sites are owned by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, all independent companies. Only MySpace, recently acquired by News Corp., is in the top 10. But maybe she meant the top 10 media companies? Well, a good source for the sites most discussed in the blogosphere is the Memeorandum Leaderboard. Three of the top 10 are controlled by the "Big Six": CNN at #3, the Wall Street Journal at #9 and MSNBC at #10. Four others -- the Associated Press, New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, -- are mainstream media outlets not controlled by the "Big Six." The final three slots are held by the Huffington Post and the Politico (twice), pure Internet publications not owned by the "Big Six."
Indeed, the whole idea that "six major companies" are gaining monopolistic control over the media marketplace doesn't make sense. There are, in fact, a ton of independent media companies. In addition to the New York Times and Washington Post companies, there are other big, independent newspaper chains like the Tribune Company (owner of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune) and Gannett (owner of USA Today and numerous other papers). There are foreign outlets like the BBC and the Guardian. There are magazine publishers like Conde Nast, book publishers like Pearson, and music publishers like EMI. The "Big Six" own a lot of media outlets, to be sure, but it's a big world, and there is no shortage of prominent media outlets that aren't controlled by these major players. And as media critic Ben Compaine has documented, the media marketplace has barely gotten more concentrated at all in the last couple of decades. For example, between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, the market share of the top ten media companies increased from 38 percent to just 41 percent. More importantly, there's been a lot of turnover. The list of top media companies in 1988 would look very different from today's top ten list. In short, there's no real problem here. Given how many actual civil liberties problems there are in the US, I wish the ACLU would stick to what it knows best.
Filed Under: aclu, media ownership
Companies: aclu
