WHO OWNS THE U.S. CORPORATE MEDIA?

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. 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. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.





2006 revenues: $163.4 billion
General Electric media-related holdings include television networks NBC and Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, 26 television stations in the United States, and cable networks MSNBC, Bravo and the Sci Fi Channel.



2006 revenues: $44.2 billion
Time Warner is the largest media conglomerate in the world, with holdings including: CNN, the CW (a joint venture with CBS), HBO, Cinemax, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT, America Online, MapQuest, Moviefone, Netscape, Warner Bros. Pictures, Castle Rock, and New Line Cinema, over 150 magazines such as Time, Cooking Light, Marie Claire and People.

Time Warner services 17.9% of all cable subscribers, gaining 3.5 million subscribers from its joint aquisition of Adelphia with Comcast. Time Warner now has 14.4 million cable customers (plus 1.5 million held in partnership with Comcast).



2006 revenues: $34.3 billion
The Walt Disney Company owns the ABC Television Network, cable networks including ESPN, the Disney Channel, SOAPnet, A&E and Lifetime, 227 radio stations, music and book publishing companies, production companies Touchstone, Miramax and Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios, the cellular service Disney Mobile, and theme parks around the world.



2006 revenues: $25.3 billion
News Corporation’s media holdings include: the Fox Broadcasting Company, television and cable networks such as Fox, Fox Business Channel, National Geographic and FX, 35 television stations, print publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and TVGuide, book publisher HarperCollins, film production companies 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Blue Sky Studios, and the National Rugby League.



2006 revenues: $14.3 billion
CBS Corporation owns the CBS Television Network, CBS Television Distribution Group, the CW (a joint venture with Time Warner), Showtime, book publisher Simon & Schuster, 27 television stations, and CBS Radio, Inc, which has 140 stations. CBS is now the leading supplier of video to Google’s new Video Marketplace.



2006 revenues: $11.5 billion
Viacom holdings include: Music Television, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Home Entertainment, Atom Entertainment, publishing company Famous Music and music game developer Harmonix. Viacom 18 is a joint venture with the Indian media company Global Broadcast news.

Please tell me. What percent of media is hers?

Between the name of her network and her pushing of obvious corporatist Barack Obama, I trust that woman less and less and less.

Warning: Oprah wants to OWN YOU! :scared:


:tinfoilhat:

...I've been saying for months that "It's the economy stupid" will shange this cycle to "It's the media stupid"...

The Global Media Giants
We are the world

By Robert McChesney

A specter now haunts the world: a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of superpowerful, mostly U.S.-based transnational media corporations. It is a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or long-run corporate interests. It is a disaster for anything but the most superficial notion of democracy--a democracy where, to paraphrase John Jay's maxim, those who own the world ought to govern it.

The global commercial system is a very recent development. Until the 1980s, media systems were generally national in scope. While there have been imports of books, films, music and TV shows for decades, the basic broadcasting systems and newspaper industries were domestically owned and regulated. Beginning in the 1980s, pressure from the IMF, World Bank and U.S. government to deregulate and privatize media and communication systems coincided with new satellite and digital technologies, resulting in the rise of transnational media giants.

How quickly has the global media system emerged? The two largest media firms in the world, Time Warner and Disney, generated around 15 percent of their income outside of the United States in 1990. By 1997, that figure was in the 30 percent-35 percent range. Both firms expect to do a majority of their business abroad at some point in the next decade.

The global media system is now dominated by a first tier of nine giant firms. The five largest are Time Warner (1997 sales: $24 billion), Disney ($22 billion), Bertelsmann ($15 billion), Viacom ($13 billion), and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation ($11 billion). Besides needing global scope to compete, the rules of thumb for global media giants are twofold: First, get bigger so you dominate markets and your competition can't buy you out. Firms like Disney and Time Warner have almost tripled in size this decade.

....

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1406

Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America
by Peter Phillips

Mainstream media is the term often used to describe the collective group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States. Mainstream implies that the news being produced is for the benefit and enlightenment of the mainstream population-the majority of people living in the US. Mainstream media include a number of communication mediums that carry almost all the news and information on world affairs that most Americans receive. The word media is plural, implying a diversity of news sources.

However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population-nor should we consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular tense-as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news giants.

A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests. The following are but a few of the corporate board interlocks for the big ten media giants in the US:

New York Times: Caryle Group, Eli Lilly, Ford, Johnson and Johnson, Hallmark, Lehman Brothers, Staples, Pepsi

Washington Post: Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Gillette, G.E. Investments, J.P. Morgan, Moody's

Knight-Ridder: Adobe Systems, Echelon, H&R Block, Kimberly-Clark, Starwood Hotels

The Tribune (Chicago & LA Times): 3M, Allstate, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Kraft, McDonalds, Pepsi, Quaker Oats, Shering Plough, Wells Fargo

News Corp (Fox): British Airways, Rothschild Investments

GE (NBC): Anheuser-Busch, Avon, Bechtel, Chevron/Texaco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM, Home Depot, Kellogg, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble

Disney (ABC): Boeing, Northwest Airlines, Clorox, Estee Lauder, FedEx, Gillette, Halliburton, Kmart, McKesson, Staples, Yahoo

Viacom (CBS): American Express, Consolidated Edison, Oracle, Lafarge North America

Gannett: AP, Lockheed-Martin, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Target, Pepsi

AOL-Time Warner (CNN): Citigroup, Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton

Can we trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin defense contract over-runs? Or can we assuredly believe that ABC will conduct critical investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq? If we believe the corporate media give us the full un-censored truth about key issues inside the special interests of American capitalism, then we might feel that they are meeting the democratic needs of mainstream America. However if we believe - as increasingly more Americans do- that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead of those of the people, than we can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead we need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that we the mainstream people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for our news and information.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0624-25.htm

...to help us break the stranglehold big corporations have on our government and our media.

HINT: John Edwards

There will be no significant progress on NO OTHER ISSUE unless this one is taken care of. And Edwards knows it.

It's pathetic and sick that corporate media should have their black, filthy nails dug deeply into our election system.

About Edwards lack of air time. He asked why I thought so then said it was because Hillary and Obama won IA & NH.
I can take this chart back to him and show him how the media is now controlled by so few.

Thanks

The claim is that the number of corporations controlling a majority of the media has declined. Well, its indisputable that there is more concentration today, but a couple of things don't make sense about the chart/numbers. It talks about newspapers, but apart from News Corp., which owns the NY Post and just bought Dow Jones (WSJ), none of the other companies listed are notable owners of newspapers. The list of newspaper owners in the US is not as long as it was, but its not as if they've disappeared or been swallowed up by the companies listed. AMong the top newspaper companies in the US not listed:

Belo, Cox, Donrey, Gannett, Hearst, Knight Ridder, Media General, NY Times, Tribune, Scripps, Washington Post.

And it mentions magazines. Well, Time Warner is the largest magazine publisher in the US and News Corp. has a pretty big magazine in TV Guide. But in terms of circulation, the top ten magazines are generally unrepresented on that list: AARP's magazine (which is number one), Readers Digest, Better Homes and Garden and Ladies Home JOurnal (owned by Meredith), Nat Geo, Family Circle, Women's Day, and Good Housekeeping.

As for the companies listed, one thing that needs to be considered is that while there is more concentration, a lot of the properties listed didn't exist in the past, making comparisons over time a bit odd. If you go back in time just three decades, you find yourself in an era in which there were only three broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC.These companies controlled much of what any one could watch and there were only three choices. The networks owned a limited number of stations themselves, but they had affiliates that carried their news and entertainment programming coast to coast. And these were fairly diversified companies. Take CBS: it started out with a few radio stations, became the dominant force in radio in the 30s and 40s, bought a record company, bought television stations, ended up the dominant television network and by the 60s and 70s had its finger in a bunch of pies -- musical instruments (fender guitars), sports franchises (NY Yankees), magazines, home video, film studios, even a toy manufacturer. And while this era seems to be viewed by some as a golden age -- remember that while it was the era in which a network dared to put on the Smothers Brothers despite their open opposition to the vietnam war, it also was the era in which the SMothers Brothers show was pulled off the air and replaced with Hee Haw.

I'm not saying things today are as they should be, but I am saying that simplistic comparisons between the media of the past and today's "corporate" media don't always paint the most accurate picture. Its complicated and only when people recognize that will it be possible to formulate, and hopefully implement, workable reforms.

According to mondonewspapers.com, the top 100 newspapers in America by circulation have 41 different owners. Those with the most holdings are Gannett (12 of the 100), McClatchy (10), Newhouse (9), Tribune Publishing (9), MediaNews (7) and Hearst (5).

Gannett owns 128 daily and non-daily newspapers in the U.S. McClatchy, since its purchase of Knight-Ridder in 2006, is second with 32 dailies and 50 non-dailies (which, incidentally, are usually regarded as the best in the business).

There are approximately 1,400 daily newspapers in the U.S.

http://www.mondonewspapers.com/usa/owners.html

YES, THIS IS THE INFORMATION AGE, AND THEY OWN IT ALL.

Fuck them all to the wall.

it is time to go all out ma bell on these conglomerates

passes legislation moving in the opposite direction--allowing any one company to own a larger percentage of the market.

and will always be subject to the whims of their owners.

William Randolph Hearst controlled the content of his newspapers from top to bottom.

Yes, consolidation isn't a great thing, but then neither is consolidation in ANY industry. However, to say that this immediately leads to an owner's (corporation's) agenda in the news is not pointing out anything new historically.

There is a much LARGER situation at play here.

Social concerns regulate corporations all the time. Just because they are privately owned doesn't mean that corporations get to do whatever they want. If you make pharmaceutical drugs, you can't just sell any poison and lie to the people about its effectiveness or the FDA will put the corporate executives in prison. If you build a car, you have to satisfy the government and the people who elect the government that the car is safe and meets certain environmental standards. If you run a power plant, build a housing development, or erect a skyscraper, you have to meet many government regulations that exist to protect society. Unfortunately, under Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, corporate media has been more and more deregulated and the FCC has more and more abandoned its role as the people's watchdog and caretaker and instead given free rein to whatever the CEOs of giant corporations want to do. It doesn't have to be that way under a new President and I hope that whoever assumes office will declare war on the giant media enterprises through the FCC. It has already been determined that the FCC can decide how much ownership one corporation can have in any medium. The rules used to be much stricter but were opened wide under Reagan and Bush. I know that cracking down by the FCC on the mega-owners would be hard to do, as the media would make the life of the President who did that very tough. Fortunately, there's the Internet.

so I know if it's from a reliable source, and the date it issued (so I know how current it is).

We've seen the results under George Bush, the FCC, and Michael Powell where broadcasters could now own up to 45% of the stations in a medium, all across America and also own up to 3 stations in any major city. It has resulted in consolidation across the board and the decision as to what we see and what is broadcast placed in the hands of fewer and fewer giant companies and their business executives.

Ronald Reagan's FCC in 1983 amended rule 315 to allow commercial broadcasters to start sponsoring political debates. Before that, they were required to offer fair and equal access to all candidates because a debate was considered a news event. The result was that they didn't sponsor any debates and debates were sponsored by non-broadcast entities like the League of Women voters, with the networks only covering them as news. And we all know how the removal of the Fairness Doctrine has affected what we see and hear in the commercial broadcasting landscape. Stations that lie and deceive on a constant basis like Fox News could not operate under the Fairness Doctrine.

The airwaves and their frequencies belong to the people and the networks only use them with the consent of the people. Unfortunately, our society seems to have forgotten that.

I have felt for some time that there are many politicians with all the double talk, and claiming to speak for the people, but their actions in Congress show who is their master. Analyze many votes on major social legislation, and you see how our members of the Democratic party support bill killing amendments, or outright votes against legislation. They depend on this media to 'not' report those votes, knowing most Americans don't investigate, or want to know. My biggest hope has been this internet thing, which does allow us to fling ideas at one another, although it does get pretty rough at times. At least if the idea gets there, some people may try to understand, instead of taking in the constant 'misinformation' being fed by the corporatists.

it's his god damn, fucking signature on the "Telecommunications Act of 1996" that opened up the floodgates and flooded the farm.

It's desperately needed.

Edwards never did a damn thing when he was a Senator. What makes you think he'll do something now? Rhetoric? Give me a fucking break.

from November 2007....

Despite pledging to stop corporate lobbyists and playing herself off as the defender of the common man, Hillary's contributors speak for themselves. Several internet sites can be found that disclose public donations, and Hillary's is a laundry list of corporate bankers and media barons. Sure, Hillary's got her fair share of rock stars and movie celebs supporting her, but she's also got major money coming in from different business sectors. There's nothing illegal about it, but it highlights just how fused our two-party system has become, and just which wheels are being greased behind the scenes. Hillary Clinton publicly espouses populist messages and promises to repeal corporate welfare and subsidies, yet is being bankrolled by the very corporations that she pledges to fight. As the old saying goes, 'Money talks'...

Just a few of her corporate sponsors.

Jack Abernethy, CEO of FOX TV
Chris Albrecht, HBO chairman
Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder
Lloyd Blankenfein, Goldman Sachs chairman
Warren Buffett, Berkshire-Hathaway, billionaire
Ron Burkle, Supermarket magnate
August Busch III, Anheuser-Busch chairman
John Catsimatidis, Supermarket mogul
Peter Chernin, News corps. COO
Donny Deutsch, Adverstising exec
Barry Diller, media mogul
Tom Freston, former Viacom president
Brad Grey, Paramount pictures chairman
Vernon Jordan, Washington power broker
Jeff Kindler, Pfizer CEO
Norman Lear, TV producer
John Mack, Morgan Stanley chairman
Rupert Murdoch, News corps. chairman
Ronald Perelman, billionaire investor
Sumner Redstone, Viacom chairman
Brian Roberts, Comcast chairman
Hilary Rosen, lobbyist, former RIAA CEO
Haim Saban, media mogul
Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon chairman
Terry Semel, former Yahoo CEO
Ben Silverman, NBC chairman
Sy Sternberg, NY Life insurance chairman
Howard Stringer, Sony CEO
Richard Thalheimer, Sharper image chairman
Sandy Weill, Citigroup chairman
Robert Wright, former NBC chairman


So we have Peter Chernin, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch, all big wigs at the 'right wing' FOX news corps, all donating and publicly supporting Hillary Clinton. And of course it even came out in the mainstream news that back in May Rupert Murdoch held a fundraiser for Hillary's campaign.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/09/politics/main1600694.shtml

Mrs. Clinton has brought in $304,000 in PAC money from the business sector, which makes up for a total of 56% of the total PAC money she has netted. She has also received over $500,000 from lobbyists, $935,000 from banks, $269,000 from pharmaceuticals, $4.7 million from securities, and $2.2 million from the TV and movie industry.

Millionaires and billionaires from all sectors: business and marketing, real estate, media and television, movie studios, pharmaceutical cos, energy, all donating to candidates... even the ones like Hillary Clinton who offer to stop corporate welfare and turn back the influence of lobbyists in Washington. The picture is clear. The power elite in Washington are simply a group of incestuous cronies and demagogues, and have only one interest in mind: self interest. The business and corporate sectors know that the economy is tanking, and are doing everything in their power to maintain success during the consolidation period. And there's one candidate they know who will not expose their operations, and who will continue the status quo of the great raping of our land, and that candidate is Hillary Clinton.

More complete list

http://www.roguegovernment.com/news.php?id=5026

DUers need to see this daily.

her deadly complicity with Corporations and the MIC. :(

United States. The other parts are the Dept of State, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

Wish I could take credit, but I do take pride!

Thanks for the thread, Orwellian_Ghost.

Spectator Democracy

...Walter Lippman, who was the dean of American journalists, a major foreign and domestic policy critic and also a major theorist of liberal democracy...argued that what he called a "revolution in the art of democracy," could be used to "manufacture consent," that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda....

...He argued that in a properly-functioning democracy there are classes of citizens. There is first of all the class of citizens who have to take some active role in running general affairs. That's the specialized class. They are the people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic, and ideological systems. That's a small percentage of the population... Those others, who are out of the small group, the big majority of the population, they are what Lippman called "the bewildered herd." We have to protect ourselves from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd...

...So we need something to tame the bewildered herd, and that something is this new revolution in the art of democracy: the "manufacture of consent." The media, the schools, and popular culture have to be divided. For the political class and the decision makers have to give them some tolerable sense of reality, although they also have to instill the proper beliefs. Just remember, there is an unstated premise here. The unstated premise -- and even the responsible men have to disguise this from themselves -- has to do with the question of how they get into the position where they have the authority to make decisions. The way they do that, of course, is by serving people with real power. The people with real power are the ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the specialized class can come along and say, I can serve your interests, then they'll be part of the executive group. You've got to keep that quiet. That means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they can master that skill, they're not part of the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of private power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. If they can get through that, then they can be part of the specialized class. The rest of the bewildered herd just have to be basically distracted. Turn their attention to something else....

...In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state, then a military state, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear. Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state....

...

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9103-media-control.html

Here's to the people's media which starts with you.

:toast:

"The logic is clear. Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state...."

I believe as the Internet has grown in power and influence with the resultant loss in propaganda power by the corporate media, the current powers that be, whether governmental or corporate have increasingly turned to authoritarian answers as the solution.

The American People's own shrinking sphere of privacy is under continuous assault in one form or another while simultaneously those specialized classes only assert privilege and non-accountability to the people, they pretend to serve or represent.

Cheers to you as well.:toast:

Ben Bagdikian was a prophet. I read his book on '93 and I'll be damned-- his entire premise came to be current fact.

He was part and parcel of my political awakening.

...

The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of that.

What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.

What about their institutional setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other major power centers—the government, other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities. Say you are a reporter writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa, or something like that. You’re supposed to go over to the big university and find an expert who will tell you what to write, or else go to one of the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American Enterprise Institute and they will give you the words to say. These outside institutions are very similar to the media.

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

...

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9710-mainstream-media.html

Will keep this bookmarked.

Actually seeing the numbers and the connections is worse than I thought.....but explains a whole lot.



DR

showing what percentage of contributions these media giants spent on dems and how much on republicans. Pugs win of course. Dems got good money too, but it was interesting to see the difference.

Now...I'm thinking that dems are getting a lot of money, not because corporations have changed tactics but because politics have shifted right. Also because it is likely that a dem will win in 2008.

I've been looking for a concise list (to terrorize people with) for ages. This definitely fits the bill.

Are you paying attention Congresscritters? This is the shit Teddy Roosevelt and other far-sighted thinkers have been warning of forever. It's time to go on a monopoly-busting rampage, and don't even think of ignoring the military-industrial complex, Big Oil or utilities either.

The fact that many of the largest companies are also foreign owned or controlled by entities that should not be allowed to exert influence in U.S. markets or the political process should raise a few red flags as well.

Media concentration is a real issue that needs to be addressed. But much of the information in the OP (and in the source cited by the OP, I presume) is misleading and distorted. I've pointed out some of these distortions in an earlier post (#8), particularly as they relate to newspaper and magazines.

I'd also point out that the claim that one in four Internet users "now log on with AOL Time Warner" also doesn't bear up to close scrutiny and/or is misleading. First, without bothering to look it up, I'd bet that the percentage of internet users getting service through AOL or Road Runner is less as a percentage of the total Internet universe than it was several years ago. The growth of DSL generally, and Verizon's FIOS and ATT's U-verse services, together with preciptious subscriber losses by AOL, make me fairly confident of this fact.

It is true that when you combine AOL's numbers with Road Runner's, you get the largest ISP: according to third quarter 2007 data, the two services combined for 18.6 percent of the market (18.4 million subs). That's a sizable number, but its not one in four. And its closely followed by, and being challenged by, ATT, which has 17.5% of the market all by itself (17.4 million subs). And while Road Runner is growing somewhat faster than ATT, this growth advantage is more than offset by AOL's continuing steep losses in subscribership. A couple of charts illustrate the above:

http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/2007/usa_history_q22007.html
http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/2007/usa_insight_q22007.html

Again, I'm not downplaying the fact that there are real issues with respect to media consolidation, particularly with regard to radio and also with respect to the growing dominance of the broadcast television networks in the field of cable programming, which crowds out the opportunities for independent voices. But its important to have a solid case based on accurate facts if we are to have any hope of actually getting reform measures considered.

That's easy - we do. Or at least they operate only on our sufferance. Now we just need some elected officials who will *enforce* that....