Media Monopolies

It's kind of a funny thing that people never question (or maybe they just don't seem to care) much about what goes on with the media.

It seems that everyone is content so long as they get to watch their weekly episodes of whatever tv show they might watch.

I actually lightly breezed over this topic in high school for an assignment in my synthesis class. The bulk of the research I did all stemmed out from a single website that's actually quite interesting to look at even though you may not be doing an assignment.

Anyway, after reading Big Media: Who Owns the News?, I felt a bit stunned. I mean, I knew that the media wasn't all that it was supposed to be--with bias, corrupt owners, etc. The first thing that really caught my attention was when McChesney and Alterman made a point that, "our media system is the result of a wide range of explicit government policies, regulations, and subsidies." I never would have thought that the media needed any support from the government, but then it got me thinking that maybe that support was for other reasons.

The reading named that, "the 20 or so giant media firms that dominate the entirety of our media system is the recipient of massive government largesse...corporate welfare." I immediately began to make the connection between this reading and the previous article Dictatorship.com by Joshua Kurlantzick.

As I read on, the authors brought a few well known myths to light. I found that the third myth about how the population controls the media to be the most interesting. I thought it was strange that it would be brought up as being a myth, so I definitely wanted to read on. I was always under the slight impression that, especially nowdays, the media is just putting out what seems to be entertaining to the public; it seems that news is becoming less and less focused on "important" issues than they are with pleasing audiences and creating profits. The authors took neither a conservative nor liberal stance when they ended that myth by stating that, "supply creates demand as much as demand creates supply." If things weren't complex in this manner, we would have figured out our entire economic system by now.

The big step in 2003 was necessary in finally changing the face of media. With access to unhindered radio, tv, internet, and any other form of media, democracy will definitely thrive. Not trying to be harsh, but with the way Bush has been enroaching on our constitutional rights in the name of democracy, it seems like we really need to decentralize the media a bit and allow for more public interaction to help balance this out.