Media Oligarchs Begin to Colonize Cyberspace
نویسنده
چکیده
The trend in media conglomeration has run at the speed of light over the past couple of decades, accelerated by the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In the midst of merger-mania the internet appeared to be a wide-open media terrain until America Online’s (AOL) acquisition of Time Warner. In light of this recent development between old and new media, this article will apply a critical political, economic, and theoretical framework to this emerging media environment by examining corporate ownership of Internet portal sites and search engines. As corporate presence on the Internet has increased, source diversity appears to decrease. Just after the 1996 Act became law, then Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Reed Hundt had raised concern over fostering four different notions of diversity: outlet diversity, source diversity, voice diversity, and program diversity (Hundt 1996). Two of these concepts apply directly to the recent course of media conglomeration: outlet diversity, which refers to “the number of separately owned media outlets” and source diversity, which concerns the number of “programming producers” or content producers (Hundt 1996). The term “source diversity” will be used here to imply the number of separately owned media outlets, as well as the number of content producers. Corporate concentration subsists in practically all major media (broadcast television, cable television, radio, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, record distributors, etc.), which
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تاریخ انتشار 2002