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These 15 Billionaires Own America's News Media Companies (2016)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- relieferator 6y agoWhat about Turner/Warner & cnn?
- mtmail 6y agoWhich billionaire is behind WarnerMedia (now AT&T)?
- lotsofpulp 6y agohttps://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052516/top-4-att-shareholders-t.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052516/top-4-...
- dnissley 6y agoNo billionaires here, interestingly enough.
- ipsocannibal 6y agoId like to see how this number has changed since 2016. Has the march toward media company consolidation increased during the Trump period?
- marshmallow_12 6y agouniformity of thought in the media has increased. media consolidation cannot be blamed on trump. EDIT:my first statement is unqualified and based on personal feeling. the bitter partisanship i'm confronted with whenever i tune in to american news outlets form my opinion. i cannot present a historical decline in journalistic diversity. my second point is the main one. consolidation of an industry is a more symptom of capitalism than the actions of one man.
- duxup 6y ago>uniformity of thought in the media has increased. Has it? How do you measure that?
- josho 6y agoRead about the Overton window. As an example of uniformity of thought in media. Have you considered why we aren’t having debates about open sourcing the vaccine? We just take for granted that the right thing to do is lock it up behind a couple companies and never consider the lives we could be saving by making its production immediately accessible to the entire world.
- marshmallow_12 6y agostrange that it hasn't been discussed. i think the answer may be that open sourcing wouldn't speed up manufacturing as the issues are supply-chain based. not sure if that's strictly true i'm just suggesting. and open sourcing this vaccine will make it less profitable which will actually slow down the development.
- josho 6y agoThere are many countries where the constraint is vaccine supply.
- duxup 6y ago>Have you considered why we aren’t having debates about open sourcing the vaccine? Because historically speaking that's not really something that really has come up at all? Like how do you measure that not being discussed as some sort of uniformity of thought? There's so much "issue important to me isn't being discussed, it's the media" that I don't see any evidence that it would otherwise come up ....
- josho 6y agoInsulin’s patent was not enforced. Volkswagen gave their seatbelt patent to competitors. There is a history of life saving technologies being made available for free. So, we do in fact have a history of foregoing profit to save lives.
- naebother 6y agoWhile social media is owned by what 5-6 billionaires?
- fsflover 6y agoThis is why it's important to support distributed alternatives: https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/.
- jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y agoNot user friendly = nobody is going to use this
- fsflover 6y agoEvery project is user-unfriendly in its infancy. But not all are helpful to the society.
- jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y agoNot true, Facebook was a piece of shit on day 1 but was very user friendly
- azinman2 6y agoDifference is they don’t create or license the content.
- pstrateman 6y agoIf you have enough users writing enough content then you don't need to write the content yourself. Simply delete the things you disagree with to control the narrative. It's barely different then writing it yourself.
- acover 6y agoWhy delete when you can just adjust it's priority in people's feeds.
- blunte 6y agoWhat are some reputable media companies not owned by big money? NPR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR CSMonitor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Science_Monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Science_Monitor ???
- humaniania 6y agoReuters, Associated Press, Guardian, NYT I think? Don't take my word for it. Go check.
- timbit42 6y agoThe Conversation
- blunte 6y agoThanks for this. I had never even heard of it, and it looks very high quality!
- kypro 6y agoI've never understood how I'm supposed to feel about this. Successful businessmen are always going to own successful media companies in a capitalist society. Perhaps there is room in the US for a national media company like we have here in the UK, but even here most successful media companies are still owned by successful businessmen.
- A12-B 6y agoMedia should not be centralised
- er4hn 6y agoI think this is the correct answer. Any business where there is a lack of competition tends towards negative monopolistic behaviors. Monopolies tend to not be good for consumers with knock-on effects for society. If gas (standard oil, for example) is a monopoly then consumers experience inflated prices. If media has a lack of competition consumers are told a point of view that they believe over time due to a lack of alternatives.
- B1FF_PSUVM 6y agoThat horse bolted long ago, as long as the 18th or 19th century, as soon as people got news of what other people far away liked, and had a chance to pay for a piece of it. The star system (one star takes the pickings over thousands of local artists) started then, and probably won't get stopped unless we get punted back to sticks and stones.
- guerrilla 6y agoI think it would help you see where people are coming from if you assume media ownership is power and consider that consolidation of power is undemocratic.
- HenryBemis 6y agoSomehow to add to what guerilla is writing.. Example: I have lots of money. Media is a profitable business. I buy some media companies because 'more profit'. I accept and welcome the above. BUT.. I have lots of money, I made it selling heroin, and now the media are on to me, so I will 'buy a couple of media companies to counter the noise', is completely different game. I am thinking of Italy's Berlusconi. He had sex parties, some had minor(s) [0][1], but it's all good. He owned media companies, ad companies, he was the prime minister, he was untouchable. He used all this power and control to have sex with minors? He wasn't Epstein-grade, but he wasn't a clean guy either. So.. media consolidation helps or not the 'evils'? [0]: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=195272163 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=195272... [1]: https://www.smh.com.au/world/second-minor-at-berlusconi-parties-report-20110128-1a75b.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/second-minor-at-berlusconi-part...
- Gupie 6y agoPutin controls Russian media for the same reasons billionaires control American media. Neither are democratic. Whoever controls the media controls the electorate.
- vmception 6y agoThat's pretty cool. I want that power. New stretch goal!
- breck 6y agoAgreed. We need to pass an amendment and #AbolishImaginaryProperty (#EndCopyright and #EndPatents). #LiberateIdeas so the people can exchange information p2p, we stop subsidizing lies, and we can have decentralized intelligence.
- BalinKing 6y agoI could be convinced that intellectual property shouldn't be protected by the government, but how does that help with the current consolidation of media?
- breck 6y ago*imaginaryproperty (the other term is an oxymoron) Abolish IP laws and I could build a worthy competitor to CNN or NYTimes in a year
- BalinKing 6y agoNot trying to be obtuse, just trying to understand your point: What advantages do CNN/NYTimes have due to IP laws specifically?
- breck 6y agoI cannot realistically create a public domain competitor. Imagine I were to do that, and it were slowly to make it good. They can come in and clone all my material, while I could not do the same to them. In a public domain world, I would not have the resource concentration to fight them in court, and they would drive me into the ground. Could I still beat them? Perhaps. But best case it would take 50 years, not 5, and everyone will suffer in the interim as a result. If we got rid of #ImaginaryProperty laws, we would compete on a level playing field, and innovate like crazy. Everyone would benefit (except for the current .1% who sits back and profits from #ImaginaryProperty royalties)
- naveen99 6y agoDo billionaires have religion or politics ? Or are they all on the same team ? And do they have a solution to self custody of wealth ?
- fatsdomino001 6y agoThat America and other countries have allowed the consolidation of media companies to such a degree is a large part of the reason why we're having so many problems today.
- duxup 6y agoHow do you connect that to 'why we're having so many problems today'?
- danielscrubs 6y agoNot the op, but I think any consolation of media will make people care less about their neighborhood and more about the world, which might be a good and a bad thing. Bad in that local news are often a tiny bit more actionable and social building, and good in that it makes progress faster. I remember when I moved to another country and was absolutely shocked that they had local restaurant reviews on the news channels. Really appreciated it instead of all the doom and gloom. I visited quite a lot of them!
- dfmooreqqq 6y agoTo be fair, lots of local nightly news shows in America have local restaurant reviews. My parents live outside of Asheville, NC, and their local nightly news on all the broadcast channels carries restaurant reviews and lots of "around town" happenings.
- alisonkisk 6y agoHave they ever aired a negative review?
- medlazik 6y agoIt's the #1 reason why so many people have been voting against their own interest for the past 20 years
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- duxup 6y agoI'd like to see how this has or hasn't changed over time and how much 'media' there is to own and etc...
- idownvoted 6y ago"In Russia or China the state runs the media, in the US the media runs the state" Apart from Sheldon and Rupert not a single name strikes me as significantly non-progressive. Sheldon has passed away, Rupert is going to be not to far in the future and his heir is decidedly in the opposite camp (maxed out his legal spending cap for donations to Biden's campaign).
- AndrewBissell 6y agoPerhaps if you equate "progressive" with "supporting the Democratic Party," but that's about the extent of the bona fides of most of the others.
- spicyramen 6y agoNothing new here, the fourth power.
- ilikedthatone 6y agofreedom of speech is mostly not about the who owns media company etc! its mostly about who owns naming, addressing people,,, if it is not easy to publish anything, own name and ip to share whatever I have then its never possible to be free ( as in free, not in beer[social media deceive people])
- eznzt 6y agoI find this post to be extremely antisemitic.
- rogerdickey 6y agoDo we know how much control owners of media companies have over the media they produce, in practice?
- jimmytidey 6y agoIt's not that they march into the news room and tell everyone what to write. That's not how power works. The point is that people will write in a particular way if they believe it 's what the owner wants.
- guerrilla 6y agoThey have complete control since they hire the people ... who hire the people who make those decisions. They won't hire people ... who hire people who don't do what they want. You can bake the bias right into the company without ever having to issue an editorial order.
- paul7986 6y agoAfter seeing what Theil did it made me look at the world slightly differently in a more open way that money and those with a lot of it could be behind so many things in our society from politics to whatever. Everything can be bought/manipulated/etc based on the desires of the richest people whether they are open about it or not. Thus, I don't believe much of what I see and read especially in politics.
- ufmace 6y agoFWIW, I'd argue that Theil's actions were a rare example of that sort of thing happening semi-openly. It's probably always happening behind the scenes to all other publications by all people of that class. The rest of them just have better cut-outs and relationships already established to quietly kill anything they don't like.
- chrispeel 6y agoThe Salt Lake Tribune was turned into a 501(c)(3) non-profit a couple of years ago. Obviously the Salt Lake market will be ignored by people such as the author of this article; it would be super interesting if a major market media company went this route.
- cj 6y agoNPR comes to mind.
- analog31 6y agoWealth is ownership and power. So long as there is concentration of wealth, and things with power that can be owned, there will be concentration of ownership of those things.
- bryan_w 6y agoI think it's time to use antitrust laws to break up these media corporations. There's a point where a company grows so large that the amount of power that they have is too much for democracy to bear.