Capitalism And Monopolies: How Five Companies Control All US Media

this episode is brought to you by curiositystream get free access to nebula the streaming service built by all your favorite youtubers when you sign up for curiosity stream at the link below [Music] vice espn and the history channel what do these three media outlets have in common despite their different target audiences they're all owned by the same company disney what about these three same story they're all owned by comcast if you were to pick a bunch of media operations from a hat odds are the vast majority of them are owned and operated by one of just five mega corporations since the early 1980s the number of media companies controlling the bulk of us media has shrunk from 50 to just five we've gone from a media landscape operated by a reasonable number of controlling interests to a reality dominated by near monopolies just barely sneaking under the enforcement of anti-trust laws in this episode we're going to talk about the consolidation of american media in the hands of a few ultra powerful companies and what that means in a time when the very wealthy have outsized influence over public policy before we begin it's worth noting that corporate deals acquisitions and mergers happen all the time often with little to no coverage it's quite possible that by the time you watch this video some of these data points will have changed but unless something truly cataclysmic happens the vast majority of us media will still be under the thumb of one or more of the five super corporations we're about to discuss so without further ado let's meet the big five comcast disney national amusements news corp and at t taking the spot from time warner which it acquired in 2018 for 109 billion dollars you probably guessed that disney was on the list since they've had some seriously high profile acquisitions in recent years most notably marvel and lucasfilm but i'd be surprised if you've ever heard of national amusements or news corp these incredibly bland names and their lack of public-facing operations are intentional why draw attention to yourself as one of a tiny number of corporate behemoths when people only care about a select few of your properties whether you're watching cbs news scrolling through gamespot or reading a book published by simon schuster you're patting the enormous wallet of national amusements and you'd never suspect that these three very different operations are run by the same company the same goes for news corp they own national geographic fox news and harpercollins altogether the big five are worth over 400 billion dollars controlling something like 90 percent of all u.s media including news networks hollywood movie studios and print publications and they reach nearly 100 of all u.s households and fun fact much of the remaining 10 is owned by only slightly less giant multi-billion dollar corporations like sinclair which as you may remember got itself into hot water by blasting out a propaganda broadcast over hundreds of local us news channels so how exactly are they allowed to do this surely having just five companies dominate the nation's media is considered monopolizing right well no but just barely let's look at what it takes to be considered a monopoly in order to be considered a pure monopoly a single company has to have complete control over a market containing a good or service with no close substitutes so there you go since there are five large corporations that share the us media market none of them qualify as a monopoly but you don't have to be classified as a pure monopoly in order to wield monopolistic power with such a massive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of so few it all but ensures that smaller operations never have the chance to succeed unless you count the very american concept of success which is building a company just large enough to get bought out by one of the big players what we see in the u.s media landscape is more of an oligopoly complete control spread across just a handful of powerful groups there's so much interplay and deal-making within these five mega-corporations that in effect they are a monopoly in every sense but the legal one for example it's not uncommon to see one of the big five hold a massive stake in a property owned by another of the big five but if there were so many more media corporations as recently as the 1980s how did we get to the dystopian all-powerful corporate landscape we see today to make a long story short it all boils down to the passing of the 1996 telecommunications act this piece of legislation was supposedly intended to deregulate the increasingly tangled broadcast and telecommunications markets allowing anyone to enter and compete in the industry whatever the intended result was the actual outcome was simply the rapid consolidation of power in the hands of fewer and fewer massive corporations in the 2003 edition of howard zinn's a people's history of the united states he notes the telecommunications act of 1996 enabled the handful of corporations dominating the airwaves to expand their power further mergers enabled tighter control of information he was right and it only got worse the decade before the telecommunications act 50 companies controlled the majority of the media landscape by 1992 that number had fallen by 50 percent and after the passage of the new tv and broadcast legislation the number quickly shrank even further to just six in the year 2000 and that's roughly where it stayed to this day not because these giant companies wouldn't love to own more of the market but because they physically can't without triggering anti-trust lawsuits to put in perspective just how much of the market the big five control let's have a look at some of the media operations they own we'll start with news corp rupert murdoch's empire owns fox including all of its branches like fox sports and 20th century fox it owns fx gq the wall street journal sky news harpercollins publishing the new york post national geographic zondervan market watch and countless others national amusements owns cbs and its branches it owns paramount nickelodeon mtv bet gamespot vh1 comedy central the smithsonian channel spike showtime simon schuster game faqs cnet and viacom once a major player in the media world itself before being consumed a t the newest member of the big five after acquiring the massive time warner controls cnn hbo cartoon network warner brothers dc tbs truetv cinemax tnt adult swim part of hulu turner classic movies time magazine rocksteady games and time warner cable to name just a few comcast which has a well-deserved reputation as a thoroughly evil corporation owns nbc msnbc usa network sci-fi fandango universal pictures focus features working title films rotten tomatoes bravo oxygen big idea part of hulu mlb network nhl network and dozens of internet ventures and finally everyone's favorite family-friendly corporate overlord disney disney owns abc pixar dreamworks espn lifetime the history channel marvel lucasfilm hollywood records touchstone pictures vice plus a giant swath of the comic book industry thanks to their acquisition of marvel and of course these are only a small sample of the media operations owned by the big five odds are if you can think of a network you watch you'll find it's owned by one of them the one main exception you may have noticed is netflix netflix while not outright owned by any of the big five is owned in part by a number of large interests some of them very shady like the well-known blackrock the world's largest shadow bank so really no matter what your network preferences you're only being offered the illusion of choice in reality almost everything we watch or read whether on tv online in theaters or on the pages of a book newspaper or magazine is just a tentacle of the enormous kraken that is the corporate media landscape no matter what perspectives these outlets offer remember that they're all owned by the same ultra wealthy business interests and they have their own agenda the big five own all the major news networks and the messages they put out are designed to reinforce the status quo peddling minor aesthetic disagreements and diverting attention away from serious societal problems this is simply the natural conclusion of the hyper-capitalist system we have in the united states powerful companies will grow larger and larger consuming smaller companies that can't compete acquiring more and more properties until they've reached the very limit of what could be considered legal thereby dodging anti-trust laws and maintaining the maximum amount of power profit and cultural significance and this is only one area of the american market every other aspect of american life is becoming similarly consolidated from pharmaceuticals to energy to manufacturing the threat of the monopolization of every area of modern life is real and its consequences could be disastrous and far-reaching except for those pulling the 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Channel: Second Thought

Views: 747,444

Rating: 4.9476376 out of 5

Keywords: Second thought, second thought channel, facts about, facts you didn’t know, things you didn’t know, education, learning, media, US media, capitalism, how five companies control all US media, capitalism and monopolies, who owns the media, current events, analysis, social science

Id: A1_lCe3vyyc

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Kudemos]

Oh boy! Time to go manufacture some consent!

[u/HankScorpio42]

This is exactly how you manufacture consent.

[u/mediumwhite]

The ownership data he presents is actually outdated by a couple years. Part of Newscorp was bought by Disney, so they own NatGeo, 20thCentury etc.. The video says it was uploaded today, but I wonder if it’s a re-upload or if it was made a while back.

[u/emisneko]

“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.

“The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.

“The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.

“In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.

“In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.

—Lenin

[u/mowshowitz]

This is one of those things that right-populists use to whip up support because it's true and an injustice and pretty much everybody who's not reaping the rewards of the system can agree should be addressed. The problem is that, after correctly identifying a symptom of an unhealthy society, they then point at a wildly bad root cause. Like in this case, they often trot out anti-Semitism. It's...so exhausting.

[u/tjf314]

chomsky intensifies

[u/thepinkbunnyboy]

Cool video. I have a thought, though, and would like to hear others thoughts on this too. The feeling I got from the video was: "The billionaires at the top of these megacorps are pulling the strings, the messages you see from them are much more about maintaining the status quo than than actually addressing major societal shortcomings, and they do this because the status quo is what earns them billions of dollars". I feel like this is a little backwards, though. The way I think these media mega corps work is just based on one thing: Profit. Whatever their audience likes to see, give it to them. People don't want to be told our society is terrible and also there's very little you can do about it, people want to be told that our society is "almost good, except this one international threat / political party / person / thing that you, yes YOU, can vote against / argue with people about / hate / boycott".

Maybe this is pedantic since the end result is the exact same, but I kind of feel that the problem would exist even if we didn't have mass consolidation. The problem is really that media companies own news organizations and rely on those news organizations to make money for the media companies, rather than doing it for some greater journalistic purpose, discovering truth for the better of all humanity.

[u/[deleted]]

This is why I don’t trust the media at all when it comes to China, Cuba, Venezuela, or NK

[u/[deleted]]

Happening in every industry. Antitrust laws and the interest in the public good are completely meaningless anymore.