The media monopoly
"When the first edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 1983, critics called Ben Bagdikian's warnings about the chilling effects of corporate ownership and mass advertising on the nation's news "alarmist." Since then, the number of corporations controlling most of America's daily newspapers, magazines, radio, television, books, and movies has dropped from fifty to ten to six. This edition features a dramatic new preface, detailing the media landscape as we enter the twenty-first century, and includes an entirely new examination of the implications of new technologies."--BOOK JACKET.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
8mentions
4people
2011–2026years
13% recommend88% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Disclaimer: I've not specialised in media history, though I've been exploring it for a few years.
You can find clear bias through sources such as I.F. Stone (active 1950s -- 1970s), or George Seldes (1930s -- 1960s, lived to 1995). Earlier muckrakers included Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and It Can't Happen Here, 1910s -- 1950s), Ida M. Tarbell (The History of Standard Oil, 1890s -- 1920s), and Lincoln Steffans and Ray Stannard Baker (both late 19th century / early 20th).
There's a phenomenal interview with Stone from 1974 on ... Public Television's ... "Day at Night" programme: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
I've commented numerous times recommending Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short book highlighting the influence of advertising on media. It's short, readable, fact-filled, and available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) largely established the model for the "impartial press" (so called, only partially successful as such) during the bulk of the 20th century. It was based in significant part on Lippmann's own experience with failures of the news media in reporting accurately on the Russian Revolution of 1917--23.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.126489/page/n1...
Other authors I'd recommend would be Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (the title itself is a reference to Lippmann's work), Robert W. McChesney's many books on media, Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (cited in the famouse Google "Backrub" paper (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourself to Death, and Edward Jay Espstein, News from Nowhere (https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst).
The last looks at television news as of 1971, including the numerous biases built in to the medium through narrative focus, budget constraints, and technological limitations, as well as the pace and scale of operations. Not all of those still apply, though some do, but it does remain a persuasive argument of how even incidental characteristics can profoundly influence a medium.
For contemporaneous criticisms of television, see Edward J. Murrow's "Lights and Wires in a Box" speech, and Newton Minnow's "Vast Wasteland" speech, from the late 1950s / early 1960s.
https://www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_l...
http://www.janda.org/b20/News%20articles/vastwastland.htm
I've compiled a few further references concerning media generally in a "light reading list": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
- The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.
That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
- Ben Bagdikian, whose most famous book is The Media Monopoly [1] said that the story of "media bias" is that newspaper reporters are liberal but the owner of the paper is conservative.
The awful truth is that readers are indifferent to real reporting, because they could care less that a young underpaid journalist spent weeks investigating something involving some people they've never heard of, in some town they never heard of, involving some issue they never heard of, and where there is not a clear moral conclusion. [2]
Musk certainly is excited about the MAGA thing, other oligarchs like Bezos might be less enthusiastic but may be going through the motions to say out of trouble. This was the story of oligarchs under Putin, who are much more likely to have their permits disappear, wind up in trouble for paracriminal activities, or fall out of a window than the vast bulk of people who just don't count.
Bezos has announced a change in direction for the opinion page, which Trump cares about. The rest of the paper, less so.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Media-Monopoly-Ben-H-Bagdikian/dp/080...
[2] Thus the likes of Paul Krugman and Bari Weiss who will never tell you something you didn't already know are better off going to Substack.
- There was a book circa 1970 called "The Information Machines" by Ben Bagdikian (who was famous for his later book "The Media Monopoly") which contains the most damning indictment of "The news" I have ever seen.
Bagdikian and many futurists around 1970 expected online communications to develop more quickly than it did and in this report for the RAND corporation he expected most people to be getting their news from something like CNN.com in the early 1980s and expecting personalization, filter bubbles and all of that.
There is a part in that book where he talks about the process by which the editor of a small town newspaper selects articles from the AP newswire and how that person has 6 seconds to decide if something is "fit to print". Thus the very process of selecting "news" from a wide range of events does damage to the fabric of reality: what appears in a newspaper is by no means a legitimate sample of "what is going on".
Worse yet, real events get crowded out by psuedo-events as pointed out in this classic book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...
the author of which expected television stars to outcompete traditional politicians in 1962 and (like Bagdikian) might have been surprised about how it long it took.
Real events get crowded out by pseudo-events because in many ways pseudo-events are more "real" (see Baurdillard's concept of the "hyper-real") and meaningful than real events. One category is the press release about the report that describes some situation for the purpose of advocacy. People might find it really satisfying to read about some theory about, say, black people being beat up by the police, either from a left or right perspective. As a particular article fits into a particular ideology people find these meaningful. In the real world there are numerous events and releases of factual information which are only partially consistent with people's world views and people tend to reject these in favor of processed opinions.
The most embarrassing thing about The New York Times is that articles on the opinion page are the most popular. Mostly these are ignorant people mouthing off, not better than the best discussions on HN. Other reporters for the Times work really hard to do original reporting and get the facts right but readers are indifferent. It is the (really worthless) opinion page that drives subscriptions and revenue.
This is just as true about CNBC (Jim Cramer doesn't know what he is talking about but he makes up acronyms like FAANG that stick) or Fox News (which is only comfortable when people are sitting around the studio talking about the way things are spozed to be... whenever the camera goes to the outside world it scrolls ALERT ALERT ALERT)
Some of what bothers me about people who spam anti-vax and Twitter Files stuff to HN is that if they were successful they would be displacing other content from the site. Maybe I am misrepresenting them but I can't help but perceive their goal is displace other kinds of conversations with their BS.
- The purpose of copyright is to provide a temporary monopoly to creators for their works to encourage them to create more and thus transfer more to the public domain.
Currently, it takes greater than 2 average lifetimes for a work to transfer into the public domain and copyrights have been extended something like 12 times due to Disney's lobbying; there is a strong argument that that current copyright law is forever.
What interest does the public have in copyright that transfers nothing into the public domain? The "mainstream media" is in fact a publishing oligopoly of 4 companies (Ref: Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian). Furthermore, a 20TB HDD can store enough movies you can watch 3 a night for 2 decades; in 20 years time it'll be possible to store every newspaper clipping, TV Broadcast, movie and song on a desktop computer and in 40 on a thumb drive.
Congress and Businesses have neglected the publics interest, and due to that the public is using technology to wipe their arse with the law and rightfully so. The "Legal and Business frameworks" are outdated, orwellian cultural astroturfing exercises supported that are counterproductive to the operation of a disciplined, free society. Go read Vietnam and Korean era Psychological warfare manuals and tell me they are not blueprints for how a modern news org works.
When Mickey Mouse is free, I'll respect what you are doing. Until then, don't come sobbing to me. Nobody cares.
- Among other things: they tend to dry up the options for other forms of content provision (or creator payment), such that they're the only game in town.
It's a Gresham's Law dynamic that's been observed at least as far back as the 1950s, see Dwight McDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture", H.L. Mencken, "Bayard v. Lionheart", or Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly.
There's also the wee slight problem that subversion of mass media by populist, demagogic, and/or fascist political movements is a distinct historical trend. See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, or much of Hannah Arendt's work. This theme is also hit on by MacDonald, below.
https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...
https://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lio...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/media-monopoly/oclc/249189781...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/gutenberg-galaxy-the-making-o...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of...
http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hannah-arendt-explains-ho...
