December 20, 2004

Who Owns What. Once upon a time, it was nearly impossible for one company to operate more than one media outlet in a city.

In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act, which did away with that rule. Today, a few large corporations (see first link) own the majority of the telecommunications industry. These companies Presidential political donations went better than 60-40 to George Bush. A former conservative, David Brock, has decided to do something about it.

posted by waitingtoderail 19 years ago
  • I know your pain. In Quebec, there are basically four media companies -- the CBC, Québécor/vidéotron (huge printer), Cogéco and Power corp. Well, on the French side. It's incest-a-cular: Paul Desmarais, CEO of Power corp, is Jean Chrétien's son-in-law. And as any Canadian film student knows, we traded our national screen market to big American companies for.. "representation of canadians" in their movies. Billions of dollars in exchange for a couple of appearance of Melvin, le bûcheron canadien-français.
  • Read The Media Monopoly
  • http://www.corporations.org/media/
  • My company does things a lot better. See, we're a newspaper company. And our monopoly is simply made by owning all the newspapers in about an hour or so radius of here. We've got five adjacent counties with one primary newspaper, and those primary papers are ours. Because towns this size can't support two dailies. So my job is moderately safe (watch me get fired tomorrow)! Yaaaaaay.