On concentration of media ownership

Matthew Yglesias, with whom I often agree, has a post about media concentration. He argues that the media has become less concentrated than ten years ago, and that the internet has opened up new sources of information to the general public:

[T]he 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.

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On top of all this, the Internet is greatly enhancing peoples' range of options. Actual "new media" -- blogs, etc. -- play a relatively small role in this. The main thing is that, unlike it past eras, it's now really, really easy for somebody living in St. Louis to read The Los Angeles Times or The Boston Globe or, for that matter, The Guardian or The Independent if they're interested in a different perspective on world or national affairs.

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This is getting very longwinded. But suffice it to say that while I have major -- major -- complaints with the reality of most media content, I don't find it especially plausible to attribute these problems to overconcentration.

Well, okay. But, as one of his commenters observes,

I don't think it's about how many companies, I think it's about how many viewpoints. It is ENTIRELY the corporatist viewpoint now.

The problem is that the boundaries of acceptable discourse are now more narrow than ever before. One concrete example: a recent rejection by three major networks of a paid advertisement by the United Church of Christ. Apparently the ad was too inclusive, thereby violating the strictly enforced public definition of Christian morality. An older Alternet opinion piece reflects on the previous time a UCC ad was rejected (oddly in a hopeful tone):

[The UCC] commercial has more power to shock us — into either agreement or rage — than the most erotic sucking of food or miming of the sexual act; the grossest feat of survival; the most lurid tale of incest on The Jerry Springer Show. We're as shallow as we can get, as a society, yet we're still capable of being engaged by the deepest questions of community, sacredness, and ethics.

Corporatist media strictly enforces which viewpoints are acceptable (laissez-faire Capitalism, short-term profit over long-range benefit, materialism, mindless hedonism, human chauvanism) and which are not (environmental concsiousness, the complexities of spirituality, respect for all life). And while the internet is currently a rich marketplace of information and knowledge, how long will that last when net neutrality is imperiled? And how can you be sure that NSA isn't watching what you view?

Another problem is the impact of various kinds of media. Moving images constitute an incredibly powerful form of communication. Podcasts notwithstanding, the ability to broadcast such images is concentrated within a handful of large corporate media outlets that conform to a narrow ideology. Their carefully crafted images are ubiquitous, and succeed in formatting a large segment of the public consciousness. All the reasoned arguments on a thousand alternative blogs have but a miniscule effect against the force of these images. The medium is indeed the message.

I agree with Yglesias that the problem is more complex than concentration of media ownership per se. But it is definitely part of the problem. I'm not naive: I realize we have little control over dealings in the corporate stratosphere. However, to the extent that we constitute the marketplace of eyeballs, we have some influence over our corporate masters. In particular, we can demand a richer menu of offerings, simply by seeking out a wider range of ideas and sources of information.