The media monopoly
by Ben H. Bagdikian · first published 1983
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4HN commenters
2011–2026first – last mentioned
25% recommend75% neutral
"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.
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…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).…
on “The Push for a “PBS for the Internet”” ↗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…
on “'Murder the Truth' explores the campaign against the First Amendment” ↗…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…
on “Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds” ↗…www.akorn.tv. We look forward to partnering with YOU in creating a film that educates and informs the American public on these important issues. Sources for this article include: Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly Free Press. <http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main> Lessig, Lawrence. Remix McChesney, Robert and John Nichols. The Death and Life of American Journalism.…
on “New documentary #killswitch exposes media consolidation and government collusion” ↗…media firms that are competitors in the United States are many times joined at the hip in Europe. There is a ton of collusion going on. Ben Bagdikian, former Berkeley Journalism Dean and author of "Media Monopoly" has spent 30 years painstakingly chronicling these relationships. These media conglomerates are constantly merging and getting more powerful by the day. They of course have their sights firmly on taking…
on “Saving the Internet for the People” ↗…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,…
on “Please stop asking me to use the app” ↗…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…
on “Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive” ↗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…
on “When Americans Lost Faith in the News” ↗