IP Democracy: The National Entertainment State

For those who missed it, The Nation’s most recent past issue (dated July 3) focused on the state of the media. Along with a series of articles (more below), The Nation updated its chart on The National Entertainment State.

This chart is a visually stunning depiction of the far-reaching ownership slate of the top media companies and it’s an impressive piece of work. You can click on the thumbnail for a better view — it downloads a PDF.

As impressive as the chart is, it’s also incomplete. The Nation is stuck in the 1980s — the magazine only included media companies that own major broadcast television networks, as if that were an ongoing requirement for a media titan. No cable operators such as the nation’s number one company Comcast, no web-based companies such as Yahoo! or Google, no blogs, and so forth.

Maybe this selective vision drives The Nation’s opinion that our news and information is still under the tight grip of just a few media conglomerates.

It is the power that a handful of corporations continue to wield over the media we consume—even the new media of a supposedly liberating Internet—that ought to concern us as citizens. It is not enough to hope that the Internet will set us free.

Admire the chart for the craftsmanship it is, but don’t believe the spin that there isn’t a diversity of media sources out there. Compare today to 1970, for example, when at most there were only three broadcast news outlets and two local papers, plus a handful of weekly news magazines. Who could possibly say that society hasn’t progressed in terms of diversity of viewpoints compared to what we had just one generation ago? Who cares about the now-four broadcast networks when so much information is pumped out by millions of new sources via the Internet?

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on June 25, 2006 3:55 PM to IP Democracy