Mike Harris
Research Paper #2
COM101-002
Professor: Bush Walker
November 8, 2013

Media Conglomerate Ownership in the U.S. The United States is being greatly affected by conglomerate ownership of media properties in today's industry. A conglomerate is formed when a large company merges with separate and diverse small firms. By definition a media conglomerate is a large company or corporation that has merged with a number of different media outlets such as TV, radio, newspapers and Internet. Big companies have the tendency to expand by diversifying their holdings among different media products, never fully dominating a particular media industry.
A decreasing number of organizations gaining control over an increasing amount of mass media, which defines media consolidation, leads to an oligopoly in the marketplace. Large companies create an oligopoly when only a handful of them dominate the industry and face little economic competition from small independent firms.[1] In 1983, a total of fifty corporations dominated most of the media industry. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, that number shrunk to twenty-nine by 1987. Twenty-three companies had control of the industry by 1990 and in 1997 that number was ten. Presently, media ownership has been concentrated in the hands of only six extremely powerful media conglomerates.[2] The six corporations that control media collectively in the United States today are Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom and News Corporation.[3] These corporate media giants control most of what people read, watch and listen to on a daily basis. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, record labels and a plethora of highly visited websites. Media ownership may have negative effects on the public, as mass media play a