Originally Posted by
G. M. Palmer
Quote:
|
How are readers being screwed by Amazon?
|
The answer to that is "Do you still beat your wife?"
I suggest you look more closely at the meaning of "oligarchy" and review the acquisition patterns and corporate structure of the media industries (for instance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concent...edia_ownership and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...All3Media.html) .
It is the same pattern as in the pharmaceutical industry
http://www.ehow.com/about_5558983_st...-industry.html
The steel industry, the oil industry, etcetera.
You might also find this of interest
PDF]
Media Ownership – Does It Matter?
According to William Melody, the greatest threat to freedom of expression in the United States or elsewhere is the possibility that private entrepreneurs will always tend to monopolise the marketplace of ideas in the name of economic efficiency and private profit (Melody 1978). As a result of economic conditions or circumstances, access to the marketplace of ideas is restricted to a privileged few.
Twenty-five years ago, when Melody made this statement, only 37 cities out of 1,519 in the United States had two or more daily newspapers. By 2000, the number had decreased and the one-newspaper town had become the national norm (Sterling 2000: xvi). In 1996, the number of the cities with two or more dailies
declined to 19 or 1.3% of all American cities (Compaine and Gomery 2000: 9).
Fewer owners have control over more newspapers and their circulation, and most of the media have been absorbed by large conglomerates, ‘families’ or chains.
In addition to ownership concentration of the mass media industry, content provision, packaging and distribution have also ‘become a standardised production and marketing process in which the messages communicated are constrained and directed in both quantity and quality to meet the economic imperatives of that process’ (Melody 1978: 219). What are the implications of this? The result is that what most people hear and see in the mass media is remarkably uniform in content and world-view (Neuman 1991: 130). Giddens goes even further when he calls for ‘the democratising of the democracy’. He criticises the untamed power of media owners:
The media have a double relation to democracy. (my boldfacing) On the one hand ...
the emergence of a global information society is a powerful democratising force. Yet, television, and the other media, tend to destroy the very public space of dialogue they open up, through relentless trivializing, and personalizing of political issues. Moreover, the growth of giant multinational media corporations means that unelected business tycoons can hold enormous power (Giddens 1999: np).
You might also wish to look more closely at Pierre Bourdieu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu