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How big of a problem is media consolidation?
All we need is one FOX Channel?
Paramount bought out CBS and is in the process of buying Warner Bros, owner of CNN.
What can be done about it?
Can they be broken up through legislation?
All we need is one more channel spewing Trump lies. 
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The Media Monopoly
A phrase that’s NEVER on TV.
Ben Bagdikian, Visionary
Jeff Cohen
Fairness and Accuracy In Media FAIR, March 12, 2016
EXCERPT...
Before almost anyone else, Ben warned about the impact of the modern wave of media mergers that accelerated during the Reagan years (and accelerated further during the Clinton administration). In the first years of FAIR, I heard from various sympathetic journalists in mainstream media who said they were thrilled that, finally, a pro–working journalist media watch group had formed . . . but that we were off-base to emphasize the impact of corporate owners—that the problem was in the newsroom far more than the boardroom. A few years and a few mergers later, these same journalists told us that we’d been right, almost prophetic—that boardrooms were undermining journalism, often quite nakedly.
But we weren’t the visionaries. It was Ben Bagdikian who was the seer.
Ben was a journalist’s journalist—from his years as a local reporter to his years at the Washington Post (where he played a crucial role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and went undercover as an inmate in a maximum-security prison). He served the public, not the boardroom—and luckily for him, he got out of corporate media before the conglomerate era.
SNIP...
Ben’s motto through all these decades could have been: “Tell the Truth and Stand Strong.”
The New York Times obit for Ben (3/11/16) quotes his message to his journalism students at UC Berkeley:
Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.
SOURCE: http://fair.org/home/ben-bagdikian-visionary/
Additional info on corporate owned news:
http://www.corporations.org/media/
https://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/MediaMonopoly_Bagdikian.html
Media Monopoly: Great for NAZIs, billionaires and oligarchs, disastrous for democracy, equality and liberty.
A phrase that’s NEVER on TV.
Ben Bagdikian, Visionary
Jeff Cohen
Fairness and Accuracy In Media FAIR, March 12, 2016
EXCERPT...
Before almost anyone else, Ben warned about the impact of the modern wave of media mergers that accelerated during the Reagan years (and accelerated further during the Clinton administration). In the first years of FAIR, I heard from various sympathetic journalists in mainstream media who said they were thrilled that, finally, a pro–working journalist media watch group had formed . . . but that we were off-base to emphasize the impact of corporate owners—that the problem was in the newsroom far more than the boardroom. A few years and a few mergers later, these same journalists told us that we’d been right, almost prophetic—that boardrooms were undermining journalism, often quite nakedly.
But we weren’t the visionaries. It was Ben Bagdikian who was the seer.
Ben was a journalist’s journalist—from his years as a local reporter to his years at the Washington Post (where he played a crucial role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and went undercover as an inmate in a maximum-security prison). He served the public, not the boardroom—and luckily for him, he got out of corporate media before the conglomerate era.
SNIP...
Ben’s motto through all these decades could have been: “Tell the Truth and Stand Strong.”
The New York Times obit for Ben (3/11/16) quotes his message to his journalism students at UC Berkeley:
Never forget that your obligation is to the people. It is not, at heart, to those who pay you, or to your editor, or to your sources, or to your friends, or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.
SOURCE: http://fair.org/home/ben-bagdikian-visionary/
Additional info on corporate owned news:
http://www.corporations.org/media/
https://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/MediaMonopoly_Bagdikian.html
Media Monopoly: Great for NAZIs, billionaires and oligarchs, disastrous for democracy, equality and liberty.