The social lives of media giants
Following up from my last post about social networks and interlocking directorates of corporations, I now have the top 300 companies in my database (minus 15 companies that are not publicly traded and plus 17 other companies of interest, for a total of 302 companies). The top five "bridging" companies are Citigroup, Pepsico, AMR (American Airlines), Target, and GE, with betweenness measures of 2582, 2151, 1540, 1390, and 1349, respectively.
This post illustrates the social neighborhoods of media giants, defined (as previously) by interlocking directorates.
The first graph shows the social neighborhood of NewsCorp (Rupert Murdoch's spawn), taken out to two degrees of separation from NewsCorp. Note the direct connections to Ford and Amex.
The next graph shows the 2-degree social neighborhood of Disney.
This one shows CBS.
General Electric and TimeWarner have complicated 2-degree neighborhoods, so I'm only showing 1 degree for each. In particular, TimeWarner is connected to CitiGroup, which is hugely connected.
Finally, here's Viacom, the apparently shy media giant (although note the connection to CBS).
The betweenness measures of these companies are 1349 (GE), 580 (Disney), 359 (TimeWarner), 321 (CBS), 122 (Viacom), and 27 (News Corp).
What should we learn from this? Well, it doesn't seem like there's any overall general pattern in terms of cross-memberships on boards, other than that a couple media giants are well-connected. However, I think these figures are a useful reference for suggesting how a particular media message may be slanted. For example, we might be alert to the subtexts of media products produced by NBC, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, Focus Features, Rogue Pictures, MSNBC.com, msn,com, and NBC.com, all subsidiaries of GE.
This has been an interesting exercise, and I hope to conduct similar analyses of defense contractors, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, and food companies.
This post illustrates the social neighborhoods of media giants, defined (as previously) by interlocking directorates.
The first graph shows the social neighborhood of NewsCorp (Rupert Murdoch's spawn), taken out to two degrees of separation from NewsCorp. Note the direct connections to Ford and Amex.
The next graph shows the 2-degree social neighborhood of Disney.
This one shows CBS.
General Electric and TimeWarner have complicated 2-degree neighborhoods, so I'm only showing 1 degree for each. In particular, TimeWarner is connected to CitiGroup, which is hugely connected.
Finally, here's Viacom, the apparently shy media giant (although note the connection to CBS).
The betweenness measures of these companies are 1349 (GE), 580 (Disney), 359 (TimeWarner), 321 (CBS), 122 (Viacom), and 27 (News Corp).
What should we learn from this? Well, it doesn't seem like there's any overall general pattern in terms of cross-memberships on boards, other than that a couple media giants are well-connected. However, I think these figures are a useful reference for suggesting how a particular media message may be slanted. For example, we might be alert to the subtexts of media products produced by NBC, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, Focus Features, Rogue Pictures, MSNBC.com, msn,com, and NBC.com, all subsidiaries of GE.
This has been an interesting exercise, and I hope to conduct similar analyses of defense contractors, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, and food companies.
Labels: experimental
posted by slomo at 2:43 PM
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