Matt Yglesias channels Adam Thierer:
the media’s become less concentrated. They’re up to six giants from just four–General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that’s six.
Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.
What’s more, the curious thing about these six media monopolists is that between them they control zero of America’s most-influential newspapers. Nobody, I hope, will deny that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are important elements of the media. And yet, they’re owned by three separate companies, each of them apart from the Big Six. Beyond the Big Six electronic media companies and the Big Three newspapers, there’s also Gannett which owns the high-circulation USA Today along with a boatload of smaller newspapers. And then there’s Tribune Media with The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other papers.
He notes that PBS and NPR offer credible alternatives to the mainstream media. And on top of all that, the Internet is rapidly expanding peoples’ access to the world’s media sources. And it’s easy to multiply these examples. Matt doesn’t mention C-SPAN, the Economist, political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect and Reason, or radio talk shows–yet these too are all ways for viewers to get access to news and information.
In short, there’s more news and information available, from more different perspectives, in more different formats, than any one person could hope to consume–even if you live in the middle of nowhere. The reason that the Big Six have the market share they do, I suspect, is the same reason that Coke and Pepsi command the lion’s share of the beverage market: they cater toward mainstream tastes and so manage to meet the needs of the vast majority of ordinary viewers. For all the bitching that ordinary voters do about the mainstream media, most of them continue to watch it, despite the availability of many, many alternatives.
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