Post #3

Media Ownership

We all are exposed to the media everyday but what we don't realize is, what or who do we actually see while viewing.   There is a certain amount of trust that we have for the media conglomerates of the world to give us information that is reliable and unbiassed. Unfortunately, this is not the case due to who actually possesses ownership of these media companies and mediums.  All we are doing is consuming we have no idea what these owners look like or anything about them.  I am not saying that we would need a whole Facebook profile of these people to get a full understanding of who they are but if these are the people are eventually going to become part of the FCC then as people we should know a little bit about them. These rich white men are infiltrating their ideas across several mediums and buying out most of that medium giving less variety to programming then we think have. 

In the chart above it shows what media companies there are and what they own.  An average audience member probably has no desire to examine this chart but while analyzing it, we can find this of interest to us. All these companies have their share of different mediums, each dominating in different industries such as Clear Channel owns pretty much all of the radio stations. I will begin to examine the owners of each of these companies and finally giving people a face to go with the corporation.



Sumner Redstone (Viacom), this man owns a majority of Viacom and CBS corporation. His net worth is around 4.7 billion dollars. While he has a sufficient amount of money Redstone is known to donate to charity for causes such as autism and hungry children.  A man that is so involved with all the media that we consume but is so far from the public eye. We can wonder why he chooses to be this way or if he is just protecting himself from what others might say about what he owns and ultimately controls.  He does not seem like a bad guy.  Sumner has written an autobiography about himself which shows that maybe he is not scared to be exposed to the public.



This mystery man is Vivi Nevo, who up until 2006 was considered "un-googleable."  Nevo is a major shareholder of Time Warner and is quite a young man who is hugely successful.  A smart businessman but a sneaky one at that because if it wasn't for investigative journalists we would have no idea who he was, talk about being discreet.  He has thoroughly invested in many other mediums such as Twitter and other businesses like JP Morgan.  His net worth is close to $500 million dollars and is enjoying his life secretly in a $48 million mansion in Malibu with beautiful women hanging off his shoulders like Kate Moss.


We have talked about Disney and the disneyfication of our society because it is a media conglomerate that has influenced us since we were children unknowingly.  Walt Disney could have been a guy obsessed with using fables or fairy tales to manipulate masses into consuming Disney products ultimately making his wallet bigger.  Unfortunately, Walt has passed away and we would have to examine who is in control of these media giant at the moment.  I think as this is the third owner I am analyzing we are starting to see a trend here: older, white, wealthy and male.  Robert Iger, is the current major shareholder of the Disney corporation which owns ESPN and a bunch of movie studios.  His net worth is $50 million.  While there has been a slight change of the depiction of diversity in Disney and Pixar films it still is quite bias as this media giant controls many tv stations and movie studios.


Lowry Mays, the founder of Clear Channel, also known as the owner of the radio.  Clear Channel owns pretty much all of the radio stations that exist on our airwaves.  With over 1,200 radio stations under his belt, he has become a media giant because of his control of all these stations.  How many times do we hear about Sansone auto trying to sell us cars?  We can be listening to Z100 and then be bored with the overwhelming amount of commercials so we switch to lets say Hot97 and the same auto commercial will begin.  Even my least favorite commercial of Brad Benson giving us a social media lesson before demanding that we go buy a car from him.  Mays is a smart businessman by taking over a whole medium and basically owning it himself. We can believe that we have variety but its whatever Mr. Mays wants us to buy or to acknowledge before we finally tune out and place the auxiliary cable in our iPod.


Rupert Murdoch, the founder and owner of News Corp is one of the biggest multimedia companies in the world.  They primarily specialize in the ownership of news organizations.  It was created in 1979 and through the use of media consolidation News Corp began to become the major player in the media field.  As we have examined in these other owners, who have pretty much taken up a certain media market.  News Corp controls almost all of the news that we consume and know to trust.  At the age of 82, Murdoch has a net worth of $11.2 billion making him in my opinion the most powerful and successful man out of these media owners.




As you can see these successful men are what control what is viewed, heard and consumed in our media.  They prey on the general public to infiltrate certain ideologies to make a buck or two  millions.  Woman and minorities are at a disadvantage because they have the least amount of ownership in the media.  Ownership matters because that is the control of what these companies publish.  There is no diversity among these owners and while woman and minorities take up a great percentage of our population they own just a little bit of our media companies.  We need more people like Oprah and other successful woman business owners to give the public an alternative media that would give us a different view of what we are being exposed to.  As people we want media that we can relate to not be used to make the rich richer.