Edwin Baker (2005) wrote, “The key goal, the key value, served by ownership dispersal is that it directly embodies a fairer, more democratic allocation of communicative power” (p.735). Critics of media concentration say it threatens 'broad choice' of media, facilitates censorshipįirst Amendment expert C. ![]() Bagdikian’s 2004 analysis indicates that Americans are served by 1,468 daily newspapers, 6,000 assorted magazines, 10,000 radio stations, 2,700 television and cable stations, and 2,600 book publishers that are under the aegis of five major multinational corporations (16). (Image via Wikimedia Commons, fair use rationale) Media began to consolidate after World War IIĪfter World War II and particularly through the 1960s and 1970s, local newspapers began to close or merge as readership declined and audiences gravitated to television news as a result, ownership of newspapers consolidated.Ī study by media analyst Ben Bagdikian has charted this consolidation over a 30-year period. Bagdikian maintains that the increasing concentration of control of information is a major threat to a nation’s desire to give its citizens a “broad choice” of media. Media analyst and University of California professor Ben Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly in 1983 about the growing concentration of ownership of news organizations. And it was not until the widespread availability of radio and then television in the twentieth century that national broadcast networks emerged alongside national newspapers and news services. It was not until the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that national newspapers emerged. The press referenced in the First Amendment consisted of pamphleteers and locally-owned newspapers. When the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (1787), and the Bill of Rights (1789) were written, the mass media did not exist. Critics of this trend contend that media concentration threatens the marketplace of ideas and poses a threat to First Amendment freedoms. ![]() Media concentration is the ownership of the mass media by fewer individuals. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, used with permission from the Associated Press) ![]() In this photo, a commuter reads The Wall Street Journal while waiting for his flight in 2007 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta. An example of media concentration is the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal for $5 billion by the media empire, News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch.
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