I didn’t understand this at first as Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” discussed media consolidation many years ago. But of course the problem is that we’ve gone from a small number of companies controlling _the news_ to a small number of companies controlling _all media_. It’s less Chomsky and more Orwell.
As Neil Postman pointed out, it's less Orwell and more Huxley.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.""
This point comes up so often when discussing Orwell/1984 it's almost meta in itself. 1984 seems more scary to us for some reason, perhaps because it's more foreign/further from our reality than Huxley's fears/Brave New World?
It's beyond that. Arguably Huxley's vision of the future is closer to reality. The thing is Huxley's vision is ego syntonic - it's compatible with our self-conception. The characters in Brave New World aren't struggling against anything, their self-conception has adapted so much that they accept the brave new world as right and natural. Orwell's vision is ego dystonic - there is still a "me" in Winston that recognizes the world he lives in as corrupt and struggles against it. In that way the characters of Brave New World are farther gone than Winston and Julia. There is no need for a Thought Police in Brave New World, because everybody has so internalized the value system of the World State that it's not necessary.
In a democracy, this is a recipe for mediocrity, because reaching consensus and buy-in is so difficult, it is easier to ignore hard problems than to solve them.
Have you heard of Bounded Rationality? There is an upper bound on what the chimp brain can do. No big diff with a group of chimps. There is always an upper bound.
Pretending there is no bound leads to a big trap.
Its like telling second graders they can solve tenth grade problems. They cant no matter what they are entertained by, how well they built od consensus or how hard they work. All that it archives is make them feel useless or angry and plants the seeds for pointless blame games.
Huxley and Orwell are irrelevant as they focus on things beyond the bound. Naturally they have no workable solutions out of the trap.
Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems. Thats how the ants thrive.
>Its like telling second graders they can solve tenth grade problems. They cant no matter what they are entertained by, how well they built od consensus or how hard they work.
> Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems
Climate change is a simple problem, reducible to just one number - the percentage of C02 in Earth's atmosphere.
What is difficult is not the technical challenge of how to reduce C02 emissions. We have known that for thousands of years, and all societies practised it until recently. They went about their business without burning fossil fuels.
What is difficult is to get people to walk back from convenience. Once you've driven on the freeway to the beach in 30 minutes, stopping by the supermarket on the way to pick up a bbq chicken and a can of asparagus imported from Argentina for $1.50, nothing will convince you to go back to the old way of living.
Most people would say the pursuit of convenience is at the core of their definition of rationality. If that's the case, we aren't limited by an upper bound on rationality so much as condemned by our perpetual desire to exceed it.
It's complicated. CO2 and other greenhouse gases raise evaporated water concentrations and initial warming, which trigger several one-way thresholds that we can never undo. It gets complicated/impossible after each threshold breakage, as warming will mostly drive itself and chaotic flux from there on.
I suppose in a sense Huxley and Herman/Chomsky were saying something similar. The horror of “Manufacturing Consent” was that the behaviour emerged from the system, rather than intentionally; I recall Herman and Chomsky writing something along the lines that “nobody wakes up in the morning and says ‘how am I going to make the world worse today?’”. The interplay of advertising, money and government simply make criticism of the government very expensive, and therefore much riskier, to produce. You can see this play out on a smaller scale if you ever make the mistake of saying something political on Facebook. Much easier to upvote baby photos and Jackass videos.
But entertainment, drugs and distraction are even cheaper to produce than apolitical news, and once we started to clamour for the creativity-free, trope-laden SFX trollop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I suppose it was just a matter of time.
It’s been decades since I read brave new world but I think it’s time to read it again.
Jay Leno spent years showing us clueless Californians who couldn't tell us why the 4th of July is a holiday. These types would seem to confirm Huxley's suspicions, but they don't make up the entire country.
For people who aren't controlled by their base desires, where soma and orgy porgy failed, today, deplatforming and "fact checkers" are stepping in to finish the job.
In a way, the fact checkers and deplatformers are a regression to Orwell-world. These stick out as something out of place or even wrong. More subtle methods like hellbanning and promoting irrelevant content aren't as noticeable. I almost have a little hope, that the bastards have to show their hands now, even if only a little bit.
Yes, sorry I didn't make that clear. "Fact checking" and deplatforming are the Orwellian knockout punch to finish the job begun by the Huxleyan MTV (and similar influences in that vein) a few decades ago.
It's clear that not everyone will be so easy to control like some kind of oversexed zombie. But most don't have the fortitude to continue questioning when challenged by a determined opposition.
The six they list doesn't include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc where a huge amount of media is consumed.
And would they count YouTube as "one" outlet? I would argue I have greater choice of amongst YouTube creators than I ever did compared to, say ABC, in 1983.
The analysis also seems flawed in that they evaluate movies based on box office sales. Which excludes giants like Netflix?
There may be issues here, but this article wasn't very good.
YouTube has editorial control over which videos are allowed to stay up, which videos are eligible to get monetized, and which videos are actively promoted. It's not just a web server with an index and a movie player.
That may be so. The other point is that all those media mergers are perhaps the inevitable consequence of a battled and dying industry due to disruptive technology (YouTube / Widevine).
from the article it says "Today, 6 media giants control a whopping 90% of what we read, watch, or listen to.". there is a heavy handed content moderation policy on all major social media platforms. it is a rare day when I don't see or hear of blocked suspended or banned content on social media.
They are not just aggregators, but also publishers. They ban/censor certain content, they create algorithms to shape the exposure of information, they control monetization, etc. they have far more influence on “American media” than the six listed here.
Also missing is Nexstar Media which owns 197 US TV stations, and Sinclair Broadcast Group which owns 193 US TV stations.
And let's not forget iHeartMedia which owns around 850 US radio stations. Their stations reach nearly 100 million listeners a week, and nearly 250 million every month.
The 6 corporations "owning the media" concept came out just shortly before, and during, the rise of social media (e.g. I recall it circulating as far back as 2010-'12). In fact, reddit and social media are how a large number of people became aware of it.
Without picking a side or making an argument, it's basically a repeatable factoid that gets people wondering how much collaboration, and potential illicit collusion, is really being applied to the stream of messages they are exposed to on a daily basis.
Sure, but it wasn't a shareable meme that could go viral. I'm referring to the comment about it passing the sniff test, my belief is it doesn't pass the sniff test because the concept of it being "6 corporations" is a decade old. And, as you suggest, perhaps much older.. I'm referring to when it was popularized as only 6.
Personally, I think it's naive to blame some exact set of companies... but in reality I never would've thought about it until someone pointed out how severe the consolidating was, and in plain sight.
Agree this piece was garbage and was exactly the kind of content that the actual tech companies who dominate media would want to promote, to deflect from their ability to silence anyone.
> The six they list doesn't include YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc where a huge amount of media is consumed.
None of whom are major producers of their own content. They're just floating user-generated content and content from the corporations mentioned in the OP.
Skeptical about the 90% claim. Is time spent on YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, The New York Times and Spotify (with Joe Rogan specifically) so insignificant as to be relegated to the "miscellaneous" 10%?
Joe Rogan is now Netflix. YouTube is not an owner so you have to attribute specific videos to owners/sources (and potentially reference their sources). 90% is good to be skeptical about, but is it so unrealistic?
I'd love to see which company is the most shared ones. Fringe ideas always seem the loudest/most shared, so that to me, would be a better measure of 'marketshare of reach'.
Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are social media platforms. They may be the primary mechanism by which the media’s products (articles, videos, podcasts) are shared, but they are not the media.
The biggest loss to society from this change arises from how the billions of dollars of revenue from advertising is spent.
Old media used to plough the money into investigative journalism and local news. New media doesn't do that, which is why our current crop of "leaders" in politics are drawn from celebrity culture and thrive on ignorance.
They moderate their content because if they don't, an angry mob will demand that companies pull ads from the platforms. Ironically, by prioritizing revenue over an agenda, it's actually the most democratic form of censorship.
Censorship based on how much money different groups spend and gets outraged is not very democratic compared to censorship based on democratic votes. And censorship based on democratic votes is seen as bad, what big corps do now is even worse.
Consider that social media figures and podcasts hosts use the authority of corporate media to push narratives or validate their own narratives to their audience.
Corporate media sets the agenda or talking point of the day in a way that people then go on to discuss these talking points on podcasts and social media.
When considering situations that require “access” like daily press conferences with political figures ask yourself how many of those asking questions are independent reporters vs corporate media.
While social media does influence corporate media normally it’s just filler content or celebrity gossip that ends up getting talked about in traditional media.
I guess to summarise most people are getting their news from these six corporations either first hand or second hand via social media/podcasts.
I guess this article doesn't take into account the fact that CBS and Viacom have since merged. They're history looks a bit like an Alabama family tree with multiple splits and mergers.
This is very common in the entertainment industry. If you think the story of Viacom and CBS is crazy, look up the story of the Victor Talking Machine Company and its many descendants and “relatives”, including RCA, HMV, JVC, EMI, Capitol Records and many others.
>Back in 2018, Jim Morrison, a singer, songwriter, and poet, who served as the lead vocalist of the rock band, once said: “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
Jim Morrison Born: December 8, 1943. Died:July 3, 1971.
It is difficult for me to take an article seriously when there are glaringly obvious mistakes.
Agreed. I'll admit I didn't notice it on first pass and just thought the Jim Morrison bit was sloppy writing, but reading it again it has all the hallmarks of GPT-generated text. It even talks about the etymology of the word "elite" for no reason!
If it isn't GPT-3, then it's writing at a high school level at best and shouldn't be on the front page.
Yeah, that was my first thought, too. It certainly makes me wonder about the rest of the article. I did a quick search to see if there was any Jim Morrison-related news from 2018, but other than some other people with the same name dying, there wasn’t anything. Even that movie with Val Kilmer was like 20-30 years ago. Very bizarre.
There wasn't any Morrison related news, but my cursory search shows a resurgence of the quote circulating on the web in the 2017/2018 period. Maybe this was when the author first heard it?
Long time employee of one of those companies, here.
To believe that there is some dictate about how a story is covered or why that comes from the top is to believe that we are way more organized than reality. Yes, some corporate-synergy exists to cross-promote, especially on morning shows, but when it comes to news, we are usually pushing so close to deadline there's no way to even allow for corporate control.
That said, there is a need to meet an ever decreasing budget. That's the parent co's real bias; to be cheap.
"I'm not saying you're self-censoring; I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. What I'm saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
My concern is not how things are covered, but what is covered. The article states that certain things (like the owner's dalliances outside his marriage) will never be covered at all. Chomsky and others talk about constraining the topics for discussion, and this seems the most concerning.
Well, first off, there are other examples (e.g. Sinclair) where it is far more obvious. Lots of local stations are beholden to advertisers and kill the stories.
But it's less "here's today's memo saying how to bamboozle people" and more "person X does Y, the bosses like Y, person X gets promoted/a show/a better timeslot" feedback loop. And the top bosses are selected by the owners. I assume you believe corporate culture can come from the top. Some of this (don't make up stories and sources) is undeniably good. But there is a subtler strain that encourages you to seek out and publish stories you know your bosses will approve of. If, for instance, you started publishing stories about how the KKK was releasing studies that had some really good points you would (rightly) be fired.
I'm not saying you or your coworkers are bad or biased. I'm saying the system you are working within is.
> To believe that there is some dictate about how a story is covered or why that comes from the top is to believe that we are way more organized than reality.
> To believe that there is some dictate about how a story is covered or why that comes from the top is to believe that we are way more organized than reality.
I'm pretty sure there are smoking gun memos and insider reports of dictates from the top at News Corp. or at least within Fox News, which they own. Is News Corp. / Fox just a special case?
Largely, yes. Murdoch has a hands-off approach with News Corp — his politics are, if you can believe it, to the left of most Fox News viewers, but it makes shit-tons of money for him. Roger Ailes was the one sending out the memos, the one Murdoch trusted to increase add revenue year after year.
The other news channels know their viewers, and don’t want them to change the channel so will avoid topics those viewers might find off-putting, but there aren’t the same top-down “here is how we’ll present this story” dictats from above.
This is not news for anyone paying attention to the media space. The big question is ... is there a way out? Or are we destined to have a small number of powerful organizations controlling world's information and in extension, our thought?
Probably not without government intervention. Antitrust or antimonopoly (or anti-oligopoly) enforcement would probably help. Perhaps copyright reform would help, although that is less obvious.
That would help but there seems to be no incentive to push anti-trust efforts. Otherwise these mega corporations wouldn't exist in their current behemoth forms. I think public outcry would need to be strong enough to pressure antitrust action, but people tend to be fine with it since less companies makes access to their media more simple and streamlined
I also think a lot of people aren't aware of the situation, since each company has a multiple of different brands under their umbrella. And it doesn't hurt that since these companies control so much of the media they can, at least in theory, suppress any press that might result in such public outry.
I guess we have the OP's article as something available in public media. The infographics are useful for giving a basic idea of how many media companies are under each corporate umbrella. There needs to be more of an understanding about why trusts and near monopolies like these are going to just get worse as they continue to merge to compete against each other's super Chimera. The fact that these companies own intellectual properties that the public wants to consume may make them more willing to turn a blind eye though. There would need to be an event that causes significant anger in the public to inspire outcry. Not just knowledge.
I’m sure there’s a way out, considering that I already consume the minority of my media from those sources. The internet is still a lot bigger than what’s listed here, and with cord-cutting, that has extended to my TV as well.
The turn of the century was probably the rock-bottom as far as choice in media is concerned. It has been getting better over the past 20 years.
Open source platforms provide an alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, and it’s currently home to over two million users. This was the first open platform to get serious traction, and has been growing steadily since its debut.
While Mastodon retains a similar user experience to Twitter, there is one major difference — it is a federated platform. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, there are many Mastodon servers that all talk to each other to create the Mastodon network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.
Mastodon is built around an open standard allowing other platforms to integrate with it. This led to a number of open platforms being created and joining the network. Collectively these platforms are referred to as the Fediverse. One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Facebook. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions. Some of the other platforms of interest are Pixelfed, PeerTube, Plume, and Lemmy.
Pixelfed is an alternative to Instagram that caters to artists and photographers. PeerTube is a YouTube alternative, Plume is a blogging platform akin to Medium, and Lemmy is a news aggregator forum inspired by Reddit.
All these platforms are developed in the open, and the developers themselves are often left-wing activists (as is the case with Mastodon and Lemmy). These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.
Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.
On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.
Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.
No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.
I’m just saying, I have adhd, I’m not gonna read this whole manifesto, can you just give me a summary at the top? Jeez, people are so trigger happy with the flagging these days.
There's a bootstrapping problem to all these decentralized communities though. Because you need to be slightly technically adept to create, run, or even hear about such instances, all these platforms are innundated with psychotic nerds. I like free software, I think Marx was right about most things, but I can't think of a bigger waste of time than hanging out with a bunch of mentally ill furries and groomers.
That's an inaccurate and disgusting characterization of fediverse users. Many of these users are members of the free software community who do not fit your description:
"Today, 6 media giants control a whopping 90% of what we read, watch, or listen to."
Where's the evidence for the 90% number here?
Every media mentioned is legacy media. People now spend more time consuming digital media than legacy media.[0] So I don't see how this claim can be true.
Exactly right. The 90% number is nonsense. Customers have more choice than ever.
I could start a media company tomorrow and everyone could watch/read/listen to it. Creating content has never been easier than it is today. Distributing content has never been easier than it is today. Creating a big audience has never been easier than it is today. The idea that these companies have "control" is laughable.
note I'm not suggesting creating great content or building an audience is easy per se. I'm just saying it's never been easier for a random person. About the only people for who the media business has become more difficult is... existing large media companies who used to control distribution via cable, tv licenses etc.
Like facebook, instagram, youtube
twitter? Now things are owned by two companies google and facebook but you can still get uncensored content on twitter? Not anymore.
Things are more controlled in the digital world.
Soon Apple will buy one of the major legacy companies, followed by Amazon, Microsoft which will allow Google to do the same.
Should we be concerned about them using their media properties to push narratives designed to consolidate their influence, or ask whether some of the things we believe might be artifacts of that influence, or maybe what the sources and motives of those narratives might be?
Kidding. This isn't the 90's. The only people who worry about an axis of collaboration between corporations and government to create a surveillance distopia are conspiracy theorists pushing misinformation now. Plus, big tech is finally being responsible and working on the right side of history, so we can all get aligned on fighting climate change, and finally force the assholes to pay everyone back for their empty status symbols like all the air they polluted with their SUVs, unpaid emotional labor, meat, and tax breaks they took from us, and finally give it to people who deserve it. We can even replace small thinking regional governments with better international collaboration and cooperation so that everyone will be equal no matter where they live, and we can end the privileged western lifestyle once and for all.
Kidding, not kidding. We should really look at what these companies are pushing.
> The only people who worry about an axis of collaboration between corporations and government to create a surveillance distopia are conspiracy theorists pushing misinformation now.
The president of the United States proudly admitted to alerting Facebook to "problematic" accounts just last week. Maybe that's justified, or isn't in service of a "surveillance dystopia", but the best light is "collaboration" between the largest corporations and the government. It's certainly going on, and that's not a conspiracy theory.
Also, corporations are government - they quite literally are often the same people, having their hands in government agencies and institutions before cashing out in the private sector. Practically everyone at one point or another is thinking about their next job, so it's hard to argue the folks in the highest positions in society aren't.
> Kidding, not kidding. We should really look at what these companies are pushing.
Now you're confusing me a bit - but if this is your actual position, I agree.
> Maybe that's justified, or isn't in service of a "surveillance dystopia"
For crying out loud, I oppose a surveillance dystopia as much as anyone and far more than most. But it's not a surveillance dystopia for the things you publicly say and have your name attached to as you publish it to be brought to the attention of the publisher.
If you wanna talk about censorship, we can talk. But that's a different concept often related.
> have your name attached to as you publish it be brought to the attention of the publisher
Yes but by whom, and are they being held to the same standards of accountability?
If corporations collude in favor of the state against its political opponents in order to secure their place in a new regime's cabinet and no one is around to hear the president order it, is it still fascism?
I didn't say it was good. I said if you want to argue the benefits/costs of censorship that's a different story. But it's not a surveillance dystopia issue.
Under climate emission targets & global equity assumptions, western (#) lifestyle must end. In political terms, the western middle class lifestyle must end, the global elites will still ride their jets 'for the common good'.
According to WRI calculator, in 2018 world GHC emissions totaled 47.6 Gt. Paris accord 1.5C target is 25 Gt. Population in 2050 projected at 10 billion people. Back of the envelope calculation gives per capita target of 2.5 CO2e t. As of 2020, even countries with green electrical energy production (nuclear & renewables) like Sweden, Switzerland or France are still at 4.5, 4.7 and respectively 6.3 CO2e t/capita emissions.
As of 2021, there is no country with a western lifestyle and 2.5 CO2e t/capita emissions, closest being Sweden with 4.5 and Switzerland with 4.7. Perhaps a ray of hope, both these countries started at 8 CO2e t/capita 30 years ago in 1990.
(#) 'western' roughly includes Western Europe, North America, East Asia, Australia and Arabian Peninsula.
None of that sounds particularly attractive. I would rather use nuclear, wind, or solar to capture the carbon until we figure out how to stop making so much of it.
People hear the word "conspiracy" and are already on the opposite side before hearing any arguments. It's like they're terrified of having the wrong thoughts. Don't worry, we haven't reached the mind reading flavor of conspiratorial dystopia yet.
I agree with your first sentence at least. Conspiracies -- from what led to Jan. 6th to Watergate to John Brown's Raid to the XYZ affair -- absolutely exist. But the word has been so completely conflated with absurd, even insane ideas, that to talk of conspiracy immediately puts the accuser at a serious rhetorical disadvantage.
I'm not terrified of having "wrong thoughts", but I do think conspiracy theorizing is dumb because no conspiracy theorist seems able to believe just one conspiracy. Oh, you think COVID was a lab leak, and that global warming is fake? What do you think about the moon landing? Is the government controlled by the Jews or the lizardmen? Why don't you (and this is a purely rhetorical "you") seem to have any limits to your credulity, whatsoever? Surely some things are too outrageous to be a priori likely and require specific evidence!
I don't believe everyone thinks anything, but I've met a hell of a lot of people for whom conspiracy theorizing is a kind of black hole: once they fall in from one direction, they start buying into a variety of theories more fundamentally wacky than the original thing that got them into it.
Governments and corporations always cooperate. It's the nature of any nation's regulatory and legal order. It's more nuanced than that.
What we want to look out for is not corporate cooperation with government, which is natural and proper. Rather we need to be on guard for corporate control of government, and I think America with it's energy, media and banking firms comes close to crossing the line. That line between corporates cooperating in a natural and necessary regulatory order on the one side, and corporates controlling the government's regulatory and legal order.
You may even be able to argue that the line was crossed a while ago. There's a reason we have everything from private prisons, to corporates that are "too big to fail", to wars for oil, to regulatory bodies so corrupted that our word can no longer be safely relied upon to certify an airliner.
My own opinion is we're holding the line in some places, and in others, clearly the dam has already broken.
History is written by the winners. The right side is the one they write for themselves. So just always be on the side that is in the majority and has all of the power. Ezpz
Horrible as this sounds, I think you really want to be on the side that has all the power. Which in many modern democracies, doesn't even require you to be a part of the majority.
It hasn't been a good long-term strategy historically speaking. But you can definitely get your way for quite a while.
Perhaps the GP should have been more explicit with his sarcasm. People say (and apparently believe) the craziest things, it's almost impossible to do satire or sarcasm without a disclaimer.
> Kidding. This isn't the 90's. The only people who worry about an axis of collaboration between corporations and government to create a surveillance distopia are conspiracy theorists pushing misinformation now.
It’s as if the X-Files never ended and is still relevant. So many people, when grappling with why things are the way they are, simply reach in the toolbox for the easy Cynicism and Conspiracy tools. It’s always “shadowy elite” in media, in tech companies, in government, conspiring to make us all buy SUVs because… uh…, well they are conspiring to make everyone wear masks so they can… uhh… do something. No, actually the elites are conspiring to bring on climate change and space travel so they can build their own Elysium space station and then… um… profit in some way we can’t figure out yet.
That’s the great thing about conspiracy theories: you can just spout the first few steps and fail to explain the end game because there’s always another conspiracy theorist building on it and imagining what the next steps might be.
That's not a real solution because education is mostly at the hand of governments, who are close to the said corporations. And the even if people were more critical about what they read, it is not that helpful since all the media outlets are controlled by the same people and thus pushing the same narrative. Without any alternative view it's hard to even think of something.
I don't think it matters how educated I am if everything available comes from one of six sources. I know I'm being propagandized; I've just learned I can't necessarily check society's "official" story on certain things. I still see that when the news media covers an issue regarding which I am personally a knowledgeable expert, they are often not just getting it wrong on the mere facts but throwing in ideological slants I would rarely agree with.
>We should really look at what these companies are pushing.
They're pushing their bottom line, same as ever, but now with a legitimating rhetoric appropriated from humanities academia, the nonprofit and advocacy/NGO sector, and various protest movements.
Honestly the first two paragraphs of this article alone indicate that this article is a polemic intended to stir up a pogrom against so-called elites. This isn't intellectually gratifying: it's an angry political screed.
Furthermore, as a Jewish person myself something else jumped out at me: there is a long, long, long history of the word "elites" being associated with control over the media as an antisemitic dogwhistle. Any Jewish person will read this, see "the media is controlled by elites", and immediately understand that this is a restatement of antisemitic conspiracy theories that are over a century old. This article is wildly irresponsible.
I’m getting really fed up with people lobbing accusations of bigotry to try and dismiss others’ concerns and criticisms without actually providing any substantial counter-argument.
I gotta say, if you always read "elites" as being Jewish, then you're not just a priori ruling out any sort of class analysis, you're missing how antisemitic many of the non-Jewish elites actually are!
I would say it jumps to unsupported conclusions. It is true that few companies own most of the mainstream media produced in this country.
As someone else who worked at one of these companies stated, that these companies are just pedaling propaganda to serve elites or oligarchs needs much more evidence to substantiate such claims.
Most of these are public companies whose primary motives are just to make a profit.
These companies have millions of employees with diverse opinions and diverse sources of content production.
So, I think the article oversteps its claims that the mdeia in this country just serves the interest of some set of elites.
The article doesn't really show how this situation has evolved over time. Before cable didn't we essentially only have CBS, NBC, and ABC?
When I see other sources like OANN, or the disinformation being peddled from some corners, I am not sure what is a better alternative.
These media companies also employ a large number of people with diverse opinions. To suggest that a small group of elites are controlling the output of these companies is far fetched.
For some reason, a certain segment of Americans, have lost trust in these institutions that have been there all along. I fear the alternative.
I suppose an argument could be made that google has undermined newspapers which has resulted in consolidation and “official” narratives that forces people to turn to social media for (mis)information.
But I think the problem is too much of media is written by journalists who by and large are really bad at math, logic, and science so all to often what they end up writing isn’t much better than the alternative.
Witness the random hysteria around covid and vaccines. It almost seems like every article is concluding something different and the only consistent theme is that they really have no clue.
When was the last time you read a well reasoned argument based on per capita hospitalizations ordered by state and vaccine rates? Never, and I’ve looked. Journalists are incapable of reasoning about these problems because they lack basic math skills.
All they can say is vaccine good and anti vaccine bad. Since they can’t coherently say why that is true, too many people just dismiss them.
And on the right, Fox let go some of longtime staffers who were not sympathetic to the networks coverage of the 2020 elections.
ESPN fired Jemele Hill for calling Trump a white supremacist.
If you want to claim that the NY Times is left-leaning than I would agree. It's a newspaper in one of the most liberal cities in the country. Its ethos are probably more reflective of that than any elite orthodoxy.
Every media organization sacrificed their credibility wholesale over the past five years.
The federal government accomplished the same for themselves over 2020.
Americans now live in a world where the institutions underpinning public life have lost all of their credibility with the public itself, outside of Blue enclaves.
We don't know where this goes. We really don't. Historically, nowhere good.
While this article is covering reports about traditional media, a few companies such as Facebook and Google control much of the online media landscape, and even what seem like scrappy challengers such as Clubhouse have businesses such as Andreessen Horowitz as investors (and after unfavorable reports by the likes of the NY Times, a16z is also making other efforts to create its own alternate media).
Unless you choose principle, high-quality journalism, you won't get it. For example, who wrote this report? Why do you trust them?
Not really, considering many people spend a majority of their time consuming "indie" content on Instagram or YouTube and it's never been easier to create and release content of any kind.
The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems slip through your fingers.
But does your average person use more than six sources for news? You'll hear people talk about CNN, MSNBC, nyt, wsj, maybe la times. Most people also have three or four local news and maybe a paper.
If you stick with main stream media, I don't think most people look to more than a handful of places.
Edit: As in owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns Fox. "is" for the purposes of number of corps who control media. Murdoch is the poster child for influencing media he owns to get deals out of politicians generating outsized returns. For masthead newspapers they don't even need to make a profit. I believe the Australian newspaper never has in decades of history while Murdoch made a ton of money in Australia. It seems Bezos watched, learned and bought the wapo.
For 2018, 20% of people regularly got their news from social media.[0] That number has increased.
Maybe the claim was true in like the 90s... but it's certainly not true anymore and the article is irresponsible for repeating out of date information.
> But does your average person use more than six sources for news?
The average person might rely on 2 or 3 sources of news. But it's a different world when they have to choose those sources from 6 that are running the same line, compared to a world in which hundreds of diverse viewpoints are ready and waiting to shine a light on any issue.
Lol hardly. The problem is no one controls the media so it can get very random. The crazy crap people believe isn’t coming from “corporate” media. You think they are writing about Qanon?
The crazy shit people believe from corporate media isn't called crazy since so many believe them. And the reason so many believe them is because all corporate media spreads it.
Also I am significantly more afraid of crazy shit that people don't call crazy than crazy shit everyone calls crazy.
I think one way to help give the people back some control over the information flow is to educate as many people as possible in the skill of data evaluation. There are definite "outpoints" and "pluspoints" in any piece of information portrayed, and when you give someone the power to differentiate and evaluate the relative importance of individual data points, the controllers of said data become much less powerful. I guess this could be also likened to "critical thinking"? There will always be huge megacorp "mass media" and we need to learn the skills necessary to immunize ourselves to the negative effects of it.
I try not to get angry about "the bottom 20% eats 90% of the cheeseburgers" stats until I have a reasonable benchmark, or I have a really deep understanding of the "why" and "how" of a given disparity.
Two children raised in the same house with the same parents never have equal outcomes - I don't expect it anywhere else either (as a default assumption).
This is not a surprise is it? My gut tells me the large majority of us here at HN already knew this either empirically or intuitively. I’m not mad about this fact being publicized though. It definitely not obvious to everyone.
The super sad and disheartening part of this is even in a ‘free market’, capitalistic environment, in the long run this state of propaganda is still what we are reduced to.
It's always important to remember how shocking it was when Ben Bagdikian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian was writing about only 50 corporations controlling US media.
How could you have a functioning democracy with only 50 companies controlling the media?
Blame Sean Fanning for causing software companies to incur liability for misuse of peer to peer technology at a rather pivotal point in the development of the Internet. If not for those court rulings, there would have been background info servers running on everyone’s home router long ago. (Ask me how I know )
Companies with shitty media algorithms designed to maximize ad revenues while keeping consumer hooked on their platform through content curated to exploit their tendencies and vulnerabilities.
They mean the media companies who actually product content. The users (and the media companies the OP refers to) are the ones who do that on the platforms that you mentioned.
It was flagged promptly and removed from view in a little while..
Although, I ll have to admit that this site holds up better than most similar places, and that is probably because it is not very well known...
But on the otherside, you can buy a high karma HN account on some sites, so everything is in place to poison this site as well. I think it's just a matter of getting upto some threshold of popularity..
In communist countries the party controls the media. In dictatorships the secret police control the media. In liberal democracies the rich control the media.
Since in "communist" countries, the party heads are rich and likewise in other dictatorships, I think we can just settle on the rich always control the media.
Yeah but there is a massive difference between money controlling the media because of their money and - for example - a dictator controlling the media because he’s got the guns.
The media will have a totally different tint: glorifying leader/ideology in the case of dictatorship/communism. What about our profit-oriented media? Remember how it beats the drums of war every single time? Who knows what interests they represent or whose agenda they are working for.
> Yeah but there is a massive difference between money controlling the media because of their money and - for example - a dictator controlling the media because he’s got the guns.
The consequences are the same: the media is used to enrich the rich and empower the powerful.
The article was written based on older memes about those corporations. I agree with the sentiment of it, but it's unfortunately stale info. The article is a year old, the merger was a year before that, and the graphics are sourced enough to probably track down.
From the article itself:
"Of note, this infographic is dated and does not reflect the current media owners of some of the news outlets."
This is a writer who found something controversial and refreshed the topic, but added a disclaimer that it's based on older pieces of information.
All that said, I'd be wondering if it's a placement piece for YouTube's NowThisWorld user/channel. Or if it's young editors at the website just stirring things up for traffic and/or relevant content for their audience.
