The Monopoly On Your Mind, Part 1: Consolidation Craze & Illusion of Choice.
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.
Higdon noted that it can be especially problematic when media board members also happen to sit on the boards of defense companies — because such an interlock can lead to an increasing push for pro-war narratives. (As of 2011, before U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq, Raytheon interlocked with The New York Times, and Lockheed Martin interlocked with The Washington Post). The Intercept’s recent video of a White House Press briefing on the Ukraine-Russia conflict illustrates this perfectly. In the video, members of the media are shown repeatedly asking questions framed around why President Biden isn’t providing Ukraine with more military support. If you know what questions they’re asking, you can pretty much guess what angle their story will be taking. And in this case, every journalist is laser-focused on what needs to happen to escalate this into U.S. war involvement with Russia. The Intercept’s Ryan Grim is quite literally the only member of the media asking what the U.S. is doing to encourage negotiations for peace.
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A 2021 study published in Mass Communication & Society (MCS) revealed that publicly traded American newspaper companies were interlocked by 1,276 connections to 530 organizations. The data showed that about 36% of these connections were to other media organizations, 20% to advertisers, 16% to financial institutions, 12% to tech firms, and 2% to government and political entities.
More specifically, a 2012 list compiled by FAIR revealed the following interlocks:
CBS/Viacom: Amazon, Pfizer, CVS, Dell, Cardinal Health, and Verizon
Fox/News Corp: Rothschild Investment Corporation, Phillip Morris, British Airways, and New York Stock Exchange
ABC/Disney: Boeing, City National Bank, FedEx, and HCA Healthcare
NBC: Anheuser-Busch, Morgan Chase & Co., Coca-Cola, and Chase Manhattan
CNN/TimeWarner: Citigroup, American Express, Fannie Mae, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton Hotels, PepsiCo, Sears, and Pfizer
The New York Times Co: Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Texaco, Alcoa, Avon, Campbell Soup, Metropolitan Life, and Starwood Hotels & Resorts
(And those are just a few examples of the more than 300 crossovers FAIR discovered.)
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