Ever heard of a monopoly? Not the game.
A monopoly is when a person or company owns most or all of a certain item or service. For example, Vanderbilt owned a monopoly over the railroad industry for a number of years.
So let's say instead of just one person or company owning most of a certain service, but instead about 10 companies. Let's also say that their focus was mainly media coverage, such as news stations and kids tv shows. What would that be called?
It's called Media Consolidation.
To rephrase it more clearly, Media Consolidation is when a select group of conglomerates owns a majority share of news sources and media outlets in a country or the world. Currently, there are 6 companies that control 90% of all media in the United States. Think about how crazy that is for a second. 90% of all media available in the United States of America is owned and monitored by 6 companies. In 1983, that same share was owned by 50 different companies in the United States. Let's think for a second about the type of power that gives these 6 companies over what you see on a daily basis. That allows for those companies to censor what type of information they want to broadcast, it provides them countless different demographics and statistics on people depending on where you live, allows them to promote what information they want to certain parts of the country, etc. Not to mention the fact of how for all of the reasons I just listed could it be in violation of our constitution. More specifically, how these companies can censor and promote information at their leisure and how that could limit freedom of speech and freedom of expression. One of the first things that popped into my mind when I first started researching media consolidation was the fact that it could affect voter information and then it hit me that the concept of media consolidation is no secret, in fact, it's very well known. The more I thought about it the more I realized this is probably the exact reason why politicians seem to "suck up" to media outlets, and if that's the case wouldn't that pose a threat to our democracy? If politicians are acting not in the interest of the people, but instead of private conglomerates, isn't that a problem that should be addressed?
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