The US did used to have rules preventing too much concentration of media ownership. Then the telecommunication act of 1996 happened and jettisoned a bunch of t

The US did used to have rules preventing too much concentration of media ownership. Then the telecommunication act of 1996 happened and jettisoned a bunch of those rules “to foster competition”, which in fact predictably reduced competition. Later action prompted by the act (2003) made it even worse. It has always been the case that rich & powerful folks tend to own media, but for a while we had pretty effective rules preventing any one entity from controlling too much of a given media market, which tempered that tendency. We got rid of much of that, with predictable results.