How does the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms affect media content?
Even a century ago, the number of media with any substantial outreach was limited by the large size of the necessary investment, and this limitation has become increasingly effective over time. As in any well developed market, this means that there are very effective natural barriers to entry into the media industry. Due to this process of concentration, the ownership of the major media has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As Ben Bagdikian’s stresses in his book Media Monopoly, the 29 largest media systems account for over half of the output of all newspapers, and most of the sales and audiences in magazines, broadcasting, books, and movies. The “top tier” of these — somewhere between 10 and 24 systems — along with the government and wire services, “defines the news agenda and supplies much of the national and international news to the lower tiers of the media, and thus for the general public” [Ibid., p. 5] The twenty-four top-tier companies are large, profi
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