Domination fantasies: does Rupert Murdoch control the media? Does anyone?

Reason, Jan, 2004 by Ben Compaine

Much of the best-known merger activity has been more like rearranging the industry furniture: In the last 15 years, the American owners of MCA and its Universal Pictures subsidiary sold out to the Japanese firm Matsushita, who then sold Universal to Seagram's (Canada), who sold it to Vivendi (France), which is selling parts of it to General Electric's NBC. But at the same time Vivendi sold textbook publisher Houghton-Mifflin to a private investment group, and it did not include its Universal Music Group in the NBC sale. There is an ebb as well as flow, even among the largest media companies.

With all this fluidity, it is strange to read in the 1992 edition of Ben Bagdikian's influential book The Media Monopoly that our primary concern should be about "concentrated control" by "fifty corporations." Monopoly means exclusive control by one company. An oligopoly could involve two or three or four. In a 2001 online debate with me, academic critic and anti-consolidation activist Robert McChesney wrote that a top tier of seven "transnational giants--AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal, Sony, Viacom and News Corporation--... together own all the major film studios and music companies, most of the cable and satellite TV systems and stations, the U.S. television networks, much of global book publishing and much, much, more." Of course, he wrote this in 2001, before Comcast became the largest cable company. So now it's the top eight? McChesney continues that the media cabal "is rounded out by a second tier of 60-80 firms," including many based in Asia and Latin America.

It is hard to contend that such a large and diverse group of companies has anything like "monopoly power" certainly in the economic sense. Indeed, any industry with 60 or more major players (who frequently change positions, appear out of nowhere, and disappear altogether) seems the very definition of a strong, competitive market.

How Deregulation Saved Television

If the charge of media monopoly is patently false, there is a set of seemingly more plausible, yet vaguer anxieties about the control of content. The basic argument here is that consolidation of the media into fewer hands results in less diversity of substance, both in terms of political views and cultural richness. Media moguls, goes this line of thinking, can and do exert substantial political clout on issues affecting their own economic interests. Like any other interest group, they push for policies that secure or improve their positions and make it more difficult for new players to enter their field. Vertically integrated media companies will favor their own in-house production over "independent" producers. The result in each case is a supposedly diminished marketplace of ideas and cultural offerings. As Bagdikian puts it, "The American audience, having been exposed to a narrowing range of ideas over the decades, often assumes that what it sees and hears in the major media is all there is. It is no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say that it is no way to maintain a democracy."