Corporatization Good for Media Industry, Leads to Less Choice for Viewers Worldwide

          There is no doubt regarding the path that digital media is going on these days. For the entire world's population, digital media such as the social media sites, blogs, telephones, television, and movies play a distinct and important role in our lives. Without the use of both synchronous and asynchronous media, our society would move at a snail's pace in hearing information, and sending and receiving messages. However, while our society is advancing speedily through newer and faster technology and gadgets, the amount of unbiased and uncensored content available to us is shrinking with the ever-growing media monopolies.

         
Large oligopolies dominate media business

        While these companies are growing rapidly, these larger umbrella companies are forming mergers with other companies to create even bigger oligopolies, or consolidated powerful owners of media. As our nation continues to head in the direction of privatization and media monopolies, there is continued questioning about how the information we receive through news, print, and other media sources is filtered by the larger companies. It is a known fact that most of our cash-cow television stations, magazines, and newspapers are owned by larger companies. The list is astonishing, actually, and it is so surprising to see one major company owning a large umbrella of smaller, yet still important and famous television stations, magazines, etc. For example, the media giants such as Viacom, News Corp, Walt Disney, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and Bertelsmann own the majority of our media sources. One of the major media giants is Time Warner, which owns all branches of CNN as well as Cartoonnetwork, Boomerang, HBO, Cinemax, Comedy Central, Time Magazine, TBS, TNT, Mapquest, Warner Brothers Studios and, before they left Time Warner and bought The Huffington Post in 2001, Time Warner owned AOL. In addition, GE is now a big player in the media field as it now owns Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, and Focus Features.

Companies merge for the greater good of the industry

         This major media organization change is, according to Converging Media, partially due to the large cost of creation, production, marketing, and distribution of major media sources. No small company could produce, organize, and uphold such popular products; therefore, it seems necessary for all these companies to be under one larger corporation to help keep these projects and media outlets afloat. Since different sources of media are beginning to combine in what is called convergence, the consolidation of bigger companies is being fueled since a magazine company, email and messaging company, and a television company can now be merged with technological convergence.  As our nation continues to head in the direction of privatization and media monopolies, there is continued questioning about how the information we receive through news, print, and other media sources is filtered by the larger companies.

      Filtered content, viewers do not even know

  While it seems all fine and dandy that all these companies are part of a much bigger media company, we are overlooking the fact that the larger parent companies are able to limit and control what each media outlet is playing, advertising, and what hidden messages one medium could be trying to send. What the above picture refers to as "The Illusion of Choice", media companies make it seem as though you are browsing through the channels and choosing what you want to watch but, in reality, the bigger corporations are controlling and filtering what is aired on every single television station. According to a site calling for media reform, TV and radio are not airing media that serves the public, cable and telecommunications is blocking some areas from utilizing broadband, and the internet secretly blocks sections of online sites and allows some sites to go "mining" through our personal information.

        This corporatization of the media will not end as long as bigger, better, and faster mediums are created and more money is necessary to fund them. This road that digital media is on will lead to bigger and better companies creating bigger and faster products and productions; however, the larger these corporations become, the more benevolent control they will have over all our favorite media.