Six corporations control 90% of America media
techstartups.com
techstartups.com
As Neil Postman pointed out, it's less Orwell and more Huxley.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.""
Also in the end we didn't need eugenics, the lack of social mobility has achieved that stratification it set out to achieve.
This point comes up so often when discussing Orwell/1984 it's almost meta in itself. 1984 seems more scary to us for some reason, perhaps because it's more foreign/further from our reality than Huxley's fears/Brave New World?
Everybody wants to be entertained.
In a democracy, this is a recipe for mediocrity, because reaching consensus and buy-in is so difficult, it is easier to ignore hard problems than to solve them.
Pretending there is no bound leads to a big trap.
Its like telling second graders they can solve tenth grade problems. They cant no matter what they are entertained by, how well they built od consensus or how hard they work. All that it archives is make them feel useless or angry and plants the seeds for pointless blame games.
Huxley and Orwell are irrelevant as they focus on things beyond the bound. Naturally they have no workable solutions out of the trap.
Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems. Thats how the ants thrive.
Climate change is a simple problem, reducible to just one number - the percentage of C02 in Earth's atmosphere.
What is difficult is not the technical challenge of how to reduce C02 emissions. We have known that for thousands of years, and all societies practised it until recently. They went about their business without burning fossil fuels.
What is difficult is to get people to walk back from convenience. Once you've driven on the freeway to the beach in 30 minutes, stopping by the supermarket on the way to pick up a bbq chicken and a can of asparagus imported from Argentina for $1.50, nothing will convince you to go back to the old way of living.
Most people would say the pursuit of convenience is at the core of their definition of rationality. If that's the case, we aren't limited by an upper bound on rationality so much as condemned by our perpetual desire to exceed it.
Child prodigies exist.
Jay Leno spent years showing us clueless Californians who couldn't tell us why the 4th of July is a holiday. These types would seem to confirm Huxley's suspicions, but they don't make up the entire country.
For people who aren't controlled by their base desires, where soma and orgy porgy failed, today, deplatforming and "fact checkers" are stepping in to finish the job.
It's clear that not everyone will be so easy to control like some kind of oversexed zombie. But most don't have the fortitude to continue questioning when challenged by a determined opposition.
But entertainment, drugs and distraction are even cheaper to produce than apolitical news, and once we started to clamour for the creativity-free, trope-laden SFX trollop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I suppose it was just a matter of time.
It’s been decades since I read brave new world but I think it’s time to read it again.
The six they list doesn't include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc where a huge amount of media is consumed.
And would they count YouTube as "one" outlet? I would argue I have greater choice of amongst YouTube creators than I ever did compared to, say ABC, in 1983.
The analysis also seems flawed in that they evaluate movies based on box office sales. Which excludes giants like Netflix?
There may be issues here, but this article wasn't very good.
None of whom are major producers of their own content. They're just floating user-generated content and content from the corporations mentioned in the OP.
Without picking a side or making an argument, it's basically a repeatable factoid that gets people wondering how much collaboration, and potential illicit collusion, is really being applied to the stream of messages they are exposed to on a daily basis.
Personally, I think it's naive to blame some exact set of companies... but in reality I never would've thought about it until someone pointed out how severe the consolidating was, and in plain sight.
And let's not forget iHeartMedia which owns around 850 US radio stations. Their stations reach nearly 100 million listeners a week, and nearly 250 million every month.
YouTube has editorial control over which videos are allowed to stay up, which videos are eligible to get monetized, and which videos are actively promoted. It's not just a web server with an index and a movie player.
Sure CNN and MSNBC viewing numbers might not be as high as PewDiePie, but the type of people that watch it will be more valuable to influence.
Old media used to plough the money into investigative journalism and local news. New media doesn't do that, which is why our current crop of "leaders" in politics are drawn from celebrity culture and thrive on ignorance.
Corporate media sets the agenda or talking point of the day in a way that people then go on to discuss these talking points on podcasts and social media.
When considering situations that require “access” like daily press conferences with political figures ask yourself how many of those asking questions are independent reporters vs corporate media.
While social media does influence corporate media normally it’s just filler content or celebrity gossip that ends up getting talked about in traditional media.
I guess to summarise most people are getting their news from these six corporations either first hand or second hand via social media/podcasts.
This is how I felt weeding through all of it: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MealyDishonestBadger-small.gif
I'd love to see which company is the most shared ones. Fringe ideas always seem the loudest/most shared, so that to me, would be a better measure of 'marketshare of reach'.
At which point NYTimes likely falls really far.
Okay, but as you say, Netflix isn't in their six either
https://www.newsweek.com/netflix-shows-viewing-figures-most-...
Jim Morrison Born: December 8, 1943. Died:July 3, 1971.
It is difficult for me to take an article seriously when there are glaringly obvious mistakes.
If it isn't GPT-3, then it's writing at a high school level at best and shouldn't be on the front page.
To believe that there is some dictate about how a story is covered or why that comes from the top is to believe that we are way more organized than reality. Yes, some corporate-synergy exists to cross-promote, especially on morning shows, but when it comes to news, we are usually pushing so close to deadline there's no way to even allow for corporate control.
That said, there is a need to meet an ever decreasing budget. That's the parent co's real bias; to be cheap.
I'm pretty sure there are smoking gun memos and insider reports of dictates from the top at News Corp. or at least within Fox News, which they own. Is News Corp. / Fox just a special case?
The other news channels know their viewers, and don’t want them to change the channel so will avoid topics those viewers might find off-putting, but there aren’t the same top-down “here is how we’ll present this story” dictats from above.
It has continued after Ailes, iirc.
> Murdoch has a hands-off approach with News Corp — his politics are, if you can believe it, to the left of most Fox News viewers
Can you support that? All his outlets have the same politics, including the WSJ (especially their editorial page) and afaik his UK outlets.
But it's less "here's today's memo saying how to bamboozle people" and more "person X does Y, the bosses like Y, person X gets promoted/a show/a better timeslot" feedback loop. And the top bosses are selected by the owners. I assume you believe corporate culture can come from the top. Some of this (don't make up stories and sources) is undeniably good. But there is a subtler strain that encourages you to seek out and publish stories you know your bosses will approve of. If, for instance, you started publishing stories about how the KKK was releasing studies that had some really good points you would (rightly) be fired.
I'm not saying you or your coworkers are bad or biased. I'm saying the system you are working within is.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
And yet exactly this happens[1].
The turn of the century was probably the rock-bottom as far as choice in media is concerned. It has been getting better over the past 20 years.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, and it’s currently home to over two million users. This was the first open platform to get serious traction, and has been growing steadily since its debut.
While Mastodon retains a similar user experience to Twitter, there is one major difference — it is a federated platform. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, there are many Mastodon servers that all talk to each other to create the Mastodon network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.
Mastodon is built around an open standard allowing other platforms to integrate with it. This led to a number of open platforms being created and joining the network. Collectively these platforms are referred to as the Fediverse. One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Facebook. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions. Some of the other platforms of interest are Pixelfed, PeerTube, Plume, and Lemmy.
Pixelfed is an alternative to Instagram that caters to artists and photographers. PeerTube is a YouTube alternative, Plume is a blogging platform akin to Medium, and Lemmy is a news aggregator forum inspired by Reddit.
All these platforms are developed in the open, and the developers themselves are often left-wing activists (as is the case with Mastodon and Lemmy). These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.
Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.
On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.
Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.
No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.
That's an inaccurate and disgusting characterization of fediverse users. Many of these users are members of the free software community who do not fit your description:
It's like the depressing version the "Lucky 10,000" XKCD.
Where's the evidence for the 90% number here?
Every media mentioned is legacy media. People now spend more time consuming digital media than legacy media.[0] So I don't see how this claim can be true.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/565628/time-spent-digita...
Things are more controlled in the digital world.
Soon Apple will buy one of the major legacy companies, followed by Amazon, Microsoft which will allow Google to do the same.
I could start a media company tomorrow and everyone could watch/read/listen to it. Creating content has never been easier than it is today. Distributing content has never been easier than it is today. Creating a big audience has never been easier than it is today. The idea that these companies have "control" is laughable.
note I'm not suggesting creating great content or building an audience is easy per se. I'm just saying it's never been easier for a random person. About the only people for who the media business has become more difficult is... existing large media companies who used to control distribution via cable, tv licenses etc.
Kidding. This isn't the 90's. The only people who worry about an axis of collaboration between corporations and government to create a surveillance distopia are conspiracy theorists pushing misinformation now. Plus, big tech is finally being responsible and working on the right side of history, so we can all get aligned on fighting climate change, and finally force the assholes to pay everyone back for their empty status symbols like all the air they polluted with their SUVs, unpaid emotional labor, meat, and tax breaks they took from us, and finally give it to people who deserve it. We can even replace small thinking regional governments with better international collaboration and cooperation so that everyone will be equal no matter where they live, and we can end the privileged western lifestyle once and for all.
Kidding, not kidding. We should really look at what these companies are pushing.
what does that even mean?
There is a name for government-corporate collaboration. Even if you think it's going well "for now", it probably isn't.
Until you find yourselves on the other side, by definition..
It hasn't been a good long-term strategy historically speaking. But you can definitely get your way for quite a while.
What we want to look out for is not corporate cooperation with government, which is natural and proper. Rather we need to be on guard for corporate control of government, and I think America with it's energy, media and banking firms comes close to crossing the line. That line between corporates cooperating in a natural and necessary regulatory order on the one side, and corporates controlling the government's regulatory and legal order.
You may even be able to argue that the line was crossed a while ago. There's a reason we have everything from private prisons, to corporates that are "too big to fail", to wars for oil, to regulatory bodies so corrupted that our word can no longer be safely relied upon to certify an airliner.
My own opinion is we're holding the line in some places, and in others, clearly the dam has already broken.
The president of the United States proudly admitted to alerting Facebook to "problematic" accounts just last week. Maybe that's justified, or isn't in service of a "surveillance dystopia", but the best light is "collaboration" between the largest corporations and the government. It's certainly going on, and that's not a conspiracy theory.
Also, corporations are government - they quite literally are often the same people, having their hands in government agencies and institutions before cashing out in the private sector. Practically everyone at one point or another is thinking about their next job, so it's hard to argue the folks in the highest positions in society aren't.
> Kidding, not kidding. We should really look at what these companies are pushing.
Now you're confusing me a bit - but if this is your actual position, I agree.
For crying out loud, I oppose a surveillance dystopia as much as anyone and far more than most. But it's not a surveillance dystopia for the things you publicly say and have your name attached to as you publish it to be brought to the attention of the publisher.
If you wanna talk about censorship, we can talk. But that's a different concept often related.
Yes but by whom, and are they being held to the same standards of accountability?
If corporations collude in favor of the state against its political opponents in order to secure their place in a new regime's cabinet and no one is around to hear the president order it, is it still fascism?
It’s as if the X-Files never ended and is still relevant. So many people, when grappling with why things are the way they are, simply reach in the toolbox for the easy Cynicism and Conspiracy tools. It’s always “shadowy elite” in media, in tech companies, in government, conspiring to make us all buy SUVs because… uh…, well they are conspiring to make everyone wear masks so they can… uhh… do something. No, actually the elites are conspiring to bring on climate change and space travel so they can build their own Elysium space station and then… um… profit in some way we can’t figure out yet.
That’s the great thing about conspiracy theories: you can just spout the first few steps and fail to explain the end game because there’s always another conspiracy theorist building on it and imagining what the next steps might be.
I'm certain China thinks suppressing the Uyghurs is the right side of history too.
Your comment is literally the most dangerous thing you can ever say. Literally that someone else is a better arbiter of truth than yourself.
According to WRI calculator, in 2018 world GHC emissions totaled 47.6 Gt. Paris accord 1.5C target is 25 Gt. Population in 2050 projected at 10 billion people. Back of the envelope calculation gives per capita target of 2.5 CO2e t. As of 2020, even countries with green electrical energy production (nuclear & renewables) like Sweden, Switzerland or France are still at 4.5, 4.7 and respectively 6.3 CO2e t/capita emissions.
As of 2021, there is no country with a western lifestyle and 2.5 CO2e t/capita emissions, closest being Sweden with 4.5 and Switzerland with 4.7. Perhaps a ray of hope, both these countries started at 8 CO2e t/capita 30 years ago in 1990.
(#) 'western' roughly includes Western Europe, North America, East Asia, Australia and Arabian Peninsula.
https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...
https://unepdtu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/un-egr19-es-4...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fo...
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Cuba (2.68), Tunisia (2.60), Ecuador (2.43), Egypt (2.32), Brazil (2.25), Vietnam (2.20)?
They're pushing their bottom line, same as ever, but now with a legitimating rhetoric appropriated from humanities academia, the nonprofit and advocacy/NGO sector, and various protest movements.
Furthermore, as a Jewish person myself something else jumped out at me: there is a long, long, long history of the word "elites" being associated with control over the media as an antisemitic dogwhistle. Any Jewish person will read this, see "the media is controlled by elites", and immediately understand that this is a restatement of antisemitic conspiracy theories that are over a century old. This article is wildly irresponsible.
But is the article false?
As someone else who worked at one of these companies stated, that these companies are just pedaling propaganda to serve elites or oligarchs needs much more evidence to substantiate such claims.
Most of these are public companies whose primary motives are just to make a profit.
These companies have millions of employees with diverse opinions and diverse sources of content production.
So, I think the article oversteps its claims that the mdeia in this country just serves the interest of some set of elites.
When I see other sources like OANN, or the disinformation being peddled from some corners, I am not sure what is a better alternative.
These media companies also employ a large number of people with diverse opinions. To suggest that a small group of elites are controlling the output of these companies is far fetched.
For some reason, a certain segment of Americans, have lost trust in these institutions that have been there all along. I fear the alternative.
Oh no they don't. If you work in media, you either bow to leftist orthodoxy, or you get fired. See Bari Weiss, etc.
ESPN fired Jemele Hill for calling Trump a white supremacist.
If you want to claim that the NY Times is left-leaning than I would agree. It's a newspaper in one of the most liberal cities in the country. Its ethos are probably more reflective of that than any elite orthodoxy.
Every media organization sacrificed their credibility wholesale over the past five years.
The federal government accomplished the same for themselves over 2020.
Americans now live in a world where the institutions underpinning public life have lost all of their credibility with the public itself, outside of Blue enclaves.
We don't know where this goes. We really don't. Historically, nowhere good.
But I think the problem is too much of media is written by journalists who by and large are really bad at math, logic, and science so all to often what they end up writing isn’t much better than the alternative.
Witness the random hysteria around covid and vaccines. It almost seems like every article is concluding something different and the only consistent theme is that they really have no clue.
When was the last time you read a well reasoned argument based on per capita hospitalizations ordered by state and vaccine rates? Never, and I’ve looked. Journalists are incapable of reasoning about these problems because they lack basic math skills.
All they can say is vaccine good and anti vaccine bad. Since they can’t coherently say why that is true, too many people just dismiss them.
Unless you choose principle, high-quality journalism, you won't get it. For example, who wrote this report? Why do you trust them?
The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems slip through your fingers.
Edit: As in owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns Fox. "is" for the purposes of number of corps who control media. Murdoch is the poster child for influencing media he owns to get deals out of politicians generating outsized returns. For masthead newspapers they don't even need to make a profit. I believe the Australian newspaper never has in decades of history while Murdoch made a ton of money in Australia. It seems Bezos watched, learned and bought the wapo.
Maybe the claim was true in like the 90s... but it's certainly not true anymore and the article is irresponsible for repeating out of date information.
0. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/10/social-medi...
The average person might rely on 2 or 3 sources of news. But it's a different world when they have to choose those sources from 6 that are running the same line, compared to a world in which hundreds of diverse viewpoints are ready and waiting to shine a light on any issue.
Also I am significantly more afraid of crazy shit that people don't call crazy than crazy shit everyone calls crazy.
And this one I'm not sure if it's just good PR by Amazon or laziness by media outlets or both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6U2Un5kEdI
I try not to get angry about "the bottom 20% eats 90% of the cheeseburgers" stats until I have a reasonable benchmark, or I have a really deep understanding of the "why" and "how" of a given disparity.
Two children raised in the same house with the same parents never have equal outcomes - I don't expect it anywhere else either (as a default assumption).
The super sad and disheartening part of this is even in a ‘free market’, capitalistic environment, in the long run this state of propaganda is still what we are reduced to.
How could you have a functioning democracy with only 50 companies controlling the media?
American antitrust and monopoly enforcement is at a comical all time low.
So in HN, the readers will do the job of censoring info if they are very out of line with the mainstream narrative.
Look at this submission of mine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941820
It was flagged promptly and removed from view in a little while..
Although, I ll have to admit that this site holds up better than most similar places, and that is probably because it is not very well known...
But on the otherside, you can buy a high karma HN account on some sites, so everything is in place to poison this site as well. I think it's just a matter of getting upto some threshold of popularity..
The media will have a totally different tint: glorifying leader/ideology in the case of dictatorship/communism. What about our profit-oriented media? Remember how it beats the drums of war every single time? Who knows what interests they represent or whose agenda they are working for.
The consequences are the same: the media is used to enrich the rich and empower the powerful.
From the article itself: "Of note, this infographic is dated and does not reflect the current media owners of some of the news outlets."
This is a writer who found something controversial and refreshed the topic, but added a disclaimer that it's based on older pieces of information.
All that said, I'd be wondering if it's a placement piece for YouTube's NowThisWorld user/channel. Or if it's young editors at the website just stirring things up for traffic and/or relevant content for their audience.