Media Consolidation: Hollywood Versus The Big Six: What if six male billionaires decided what 300 million people watched on TV, saw in movie theatres, heard on the radio, and read in every major newspaper? What if those six men, including the country's biggest defense contractor, chose which projects got green-lighted and which actors were cast? [...]
As it stands, six companies own 90 percent of the media holdings in the United States: Viacom, which owns Paramount, CBS, MTV Networks, and DreamWorks; Disney, whose subsidiaries include ABC, Miramax, Pixar, Touchstone, Walt Disney Studios, and Walt Disney Theatrical; Time Warner, parent company of Warner Bros., HBO, half of the CW (co-owned with CBS Corp.), CNN, and AOL; General Electric, which owns NBC Universal; Bertelsmann, whose holdings include Sony and BMG Music Publishing; and News Corp., owner of 20th Century Fox, Fox Broadcasting, MyNetworkTV, FX Networks, and MySpace. The men at the helm of those corporations are, respectively, Sumner Redstone, Robert Iger, Richard Parsons, Jeffrey R. Immelt, Carl Bertelsmann, and Rupert Murdoch. [...]
[T]he consolidated networks not only block independent content from reaching the small screen, but also prevent actors from receiving fair pay.
