¶ … media in the United States plays an increasingly more active role in what we see, what we hear, how we think, and how we learn about the rest of our world. The media today is comprised of massive, powerful conglomerates and has replaced the small, independent news agencies that once produced the news. Instead, the dissemination of the news has become the responsibility of large corporations whose primary business is most likely something other than collecting, researching, and broadcasting the news. Journalism is no longer the primary responsibility of most news agencies. The new responsibility is generating profits.
Take the example of the one of the world's largest news media companies: Rupert Murdochs's News Corporation which owns the Fox News Agency. In addition Murdoch's Corporation owns an additional individual 26 televisions stations and a majority interest in 7 others. The News Corporation has total assets in excess of 52 billion dollars and enjoys total revenues every year of at least 40 billion dollars. Murdoch's corporation is involved in cable and satellite television, owns several different magazines and newspapers, and an internet information service. When it comes to the dissemination of information, Murdoch's News Corporation is involved in every aspect of it and the News Corporation is not alone. The fact is that every news agency in America, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and TBS is widely diversified and no longer has as its primary responsibility the broadcasting of the news.
The wide reach of the news agencies allows them to control, or least strongly influence, every aspect of American life. The news agencies control what is broadcast on television, what is aired on our radios, and what is contained in our newspapers and magazines. The news broadcast system essentially determines what we should be interested in and controls what we know about such subjects. Take, for instance, the recent furor over the Trayvon Martin. The event is tragic and deserves considerable attention but the attention afforded such incident impacted greatly on how the matter was perceived by the viewing public and also on how the matter was handled by the local authorities. Is there little doubt that without the coverage provided by the national news agencies that the decisions of the local authorities might have been much different?
The overall influence of the nation's news agency is obvious when one examines the corporate owners of these news agencies. ABC news is owned by the Disney Corporation. NBC is owned by General Electric and CBS by Westinghouse. How can it be expected that with such ownership that journalism can be a top priority. These corporations all have agendas that involve far more than broadcasting the news and when profits are added to the equation the motivations behind what is broadcast and what is not becomes even more complex.
Society has been transformed by the major improvements in communication technology in the past fifty plus years. As a result of these improvements, the amount of available information has increased as well. Unfortunately, the increased amount of information is not always readily available because the control of the dissemination of this information is controlled by entities whose primary interests transcend this responsibility. Instead, the news business is controlled by businesses who are intimately involved in advertising, selling products, and making profits. Against this background it is easy to be critical of the motivations of the news agencies.
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