One thing I found really disappointing about this article was the complete lack of discussion about the economic drivers of this consolidation. You know what ha

One thing I found really disappointing about this article was the complete lack of discussion about the economic drivers of this consolidation. You know what happened to the news stations and newspapers that didn't merge to become behemoths? They generally just went out of business because they weren't able to make money. This consolidation doesn't happen through some massive conspiracy, it happens because it's way more economical to have 1 team of researchers and journalist produce content for every small news station rather than having tonnes of independent teams. You can say that's bad, but it's the reality that advertising revenue on local television stations won't fund high quality local journalism. So you can regulate that no company can dominate that market, but what you will end up with is no local news stations at all. It's also a bit weak to say "Well atleast I know who funds Russia Today", do you want to know who funds CNN? It's a publicly listed company, it's on the stock market. It's not like there's some shadowy owner. In some cases there actually are shadowy owners and we really should be more critical of those situations - the British Newspaper business for example - Metro, owned by Rothermere, Mail - Rothermere, Evening Standard- Lebedev, Telegraph - Barclays. And those owners do have direct private conversations with politicians to wield political power. But it all comes down to - what is the business model for a large, diverse news eco-system? Because as far as I can see at the moment the consolidation has been driven by economic factors, and so that's how you have to reverse it (if you can).