Page 269 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Med a Reform

did you know?
The media industry is changing rapidly. Concentration of ownership in all forms of media is
increasing.

Television
According to the Stop Big Media Coalition, between 1995 and 2003, 10 of the largest TV-
station owners went from owning 104 stations with $5.9 billion in revenue to owning
299 stations with $11.8 billion in revenue.

Newspapers
Stop Big Media also reports that two-thirds of independent newspaper owners have
disappeared since 1975. At time of printing, less than 275 of the nation’s 1,500 daily
newspapers remain independently owned, and more than half of all U.S. markets (cit-
ies and regions) are dominated by one paper.

Radio

Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, radio has become the most concentrated
medium—at one point Clear Channel Communications owned more than 1,300 radio
stations, in addition to 42 television stations in 28 different broadcast markets.

Source: Who Owns the Media? http://www.stopbigmedia.com/chart.php (accessed April 30, 2007).

from 50 to 10 large conglomerates, according to industry analyst Benjamin Bag-
dikian. As fewer corporations control more and more channels of information,
there is less access to a diversity of viewpoints. Media reformers note that the
main motivation for the media companies is profit rather than their role as
information providers in the public sphere. Another area that media reform
works on is the hypercommercialization and privatization of public spaces and
forums.

EarLy ChaLLEngEs To CommErCiaLizing
ThE BroaDCasT sysTEm
Media reform scholar and activist Robert McChesney notes that the his-
tory of citizen resistance to the commercial radio system is often ignored and
marginalized. In general, traditional broadcast histories generally agree that
the public was not opposed to the trend of private enterprise regulation of the
broadcast media system. McChesney argues that this historical consensus natu-
ralizes the system of corporate ownership of the broadcasting infrastructure by
marginalizing or ignoring resistance and diverse perspectives about the early
direction of broadcast regulation, especially by educators who understood the
powerful potential of the mass media. Scholars and public interest historians