How would you like to get your news from one place and have no other options for information? It’s a scary thought, but America is not far from making this a reality. My interest for the semester project is the consequences of having all of the media in the country controlled by only a handful of corporations. It was hard to determine where to being researching so I asked myself three major questions I had about the subject: 1. Who owns the media? 2. How did media become like this? 3. What system of ownership would work best for media? These questions seemed like a good jump off point to begin my assignment because they addressed different yet equally important parts of the issue. Using Temple’s resource database I began to find accurate sources of information to answer my questions.
My research allowed me to first off understand that media can be defined as everything from telephones to newspapers to the internet, something that I had not fully considered before, but realized made sense because they are all ways of determining the travel of information and who can and cannot access information. My research on Business and Company Resource Center led me to an application on the Columbia Journalism Review website, which listed the media sources that are owned by larger conglomerates. For example, it showed me all of the television stations, film studios, magazine, publishers, newspaper, cable companies that News Corporation owns. The list of companies that own almost all major media in the country was short, only 55 companies, some only owned a few publications regionally while others owned large quantities nationally as well as internationally. This site answered my first question accurately and well.
I found some answers to question two in a scholarly article that turned up on the Academic Search Premier database. While searching for “media ownership” I found an article by Robert McCheseney, called “The US Media Reform Movement”; the article discussed the limited progression of media ownership in the United States and the limited effort put forth by the FCC to stop media conglomerates from buying up and merging with other companies. The article talked about the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Searching through news articles to better understand what the act was and how it affected the industry; I found that the act was used to stimulate the telecommunications marketplace by allowing companies to expand into other services. They had to open up their local area’s to competition; i.e. Bell Telephones were able to become a long distance provider but was forced to allow competitors use lines in their area and compete. This is an example I found (one of many using Lexus Nexus) in an article from the Washington Times by William Glanz with the head line “Disconnect Telecommunications Bill, Senator Says”. The article discusses Bell’s attempt to allow them to deregulate the regulations so that they can both maintain their original local monopoly by no longer having to lease their lines to competitions and still be allowed to expand nationally, basically their desire was to grow their monopoly. The act was supposed to help companies expand, and make the market more diverse and competitive, which would lead to the lower prices and better services. It seems though that the larger companies used the act to begin buying up competitors and different forms of media leading to the condensing of the market that we see today. It is clear in articles I found that problems have always existed in this market but this seemed to be the most concentrated and documented situation. The deregulation has resulted in industrial incest, all of the companies that were related have begun to merge and form into large companies, with single owners and boards of trustee’s standing atop.
McCheseney’s article also provided insight into my third question, what system of ownership would best work for media? By pointing out the flaws of a capitalist media system, such as the controlling of media by only a few sources, I was able to determine on my own that a more socialized or democratic media would be beneficial. By spreading out and plentifying the media and the information, different views and themes of thought would be able to surface in the media and companies would have to compete to be the most accurate news group rather than simply just the only newsgroup. A place like the internet seemed to be a perfect example. News was reported far and wide by different voices, but it is important to examine the validity of information on the internet.
While I used the Temple Library’s Research links to find all of the information above, I checked the information I found against that on Wikipedia.com. I was shocked to find out how accurate and well cited the information on the Wikipedia pages were. Experimenting with altering Wikipedia pages, I found that the false information I entered was corrected twice within an hour. Both times I attempted to alter the News Corp information page, I first changed the names of each member of the Corporate Governance to names of comic book characters, this was corrected within an hour. My second attempt to alter the page was again on the Corporate Governance, this time I removed the first ‘n’ from Peter Chernin’s last name, this was again corrected within an hour. The first time I entered the false information onto the page I laughed at myself; I really thought that nobody was going to alter my information. I was shocked that there was someone out there proofing these pages. The second time I entered the false information I was more so impressed and awed by the power of the site to edit its information. I checked the computer every several minutes to see if my lie had been detected, and surely enough it was. In the end, I had gained a new respect for Wikipedia as a valid source. Though it is looked down upon for its peer edited information, I now believe that’s what makes this site better than sources such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia’s information is up to date and can constantly have more in-depth information added by experts in the field who would not normally be writing for an encyclopedia, unlike Britannica which is updated only once a year and cannot be edited by all the experts in a field. Wikipedia seems to offer an option of socialized information access, working towards the bettering of information, contributed by multiple sources.
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