They Control Everything...

The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, Citizen Kane—some of the greatest movies ever made were made during the famed Studio system era of Hollywood. We, as audiences, look back on this era with nostalgia. What an exciting time it must have been to be alive! From the 1920s through the late 40s, eight companies controlled almost every single film made in the United States.

Each of these companies contracted writers, directors, actors, and crew to be full-time employees. Sometimes a studio would loan an actor or a director to another studio, but ultimately the heads of these studios were in total control of the artists who worked for them. The lack of competition and the concentration of power eventually caught the attention of the federal government, and the studios were broken up. No longer could they own their talent, nor could they both be the company that made the movie and the company that owned the movie theater it would be shown in.

The studio system came to an end by 1950, and the entertainment industry was forever transformed. But the days of a handful of companies controlling what we consume were far from over. Seventy-five years later, 90% of all the media in the United States is controlled by just six monstrous conglomerates: the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, Sony Corporation, and Viacom.

These companies own everything from CNN to ESPN to Hulu to National Geographic to DC Comics and Nickelodeon. In 2021, they earned 478 billion in revenue, more than the combined GDP of Finland and Ukraine combined. Nowadays, not trusting the media has become mainstream, but even if you attempt to avoid cable news or sit on your couch for hours on end watching television, there's no way to truly escape the influence that media has on all of our lives.

Media molds us; it tells us which world events deserve our attention or which movies and TV are worth seeing. It can affect what we buy, and it can shape our opinions on every significant topic from immigration to healthcare. Of course, it has more than a significant sway when it comes to elections. Modern media companies want to make us feel like we have options across the political and cultural spectrum, but it's simply an illusion—an illusion of choice fabricated by the people in control, the small group that runs these companies and infiltrates your life day in and day out.

They present us with what seems like endless options when, in fact, every network, channel, company, or platform is answering to the larger entity that owns it. We certainly didn't get here by accident. The unfortunate reality is that the trend of a small number of companies controlling an entire industry goes far beyond the media. Just seven tech companies accounted for 30% of the S&P 500's value last year.

The combined stock value of these companies alone amounts to the second-largest market in the entire world. This is important even if you're not interested in finance markets because, even without your knowledge or consent, your retirement savings or investment portfolio might just be tied up in some of these companies to prevent taking a lot of losses on your investments if something drastic happens to the tech industry.

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Also, more than 900,000 have signed up so far as of early 2024, with many more on the waitlist. However, subscribers of the channel can skip the waitlist and get started today using the link in the description. Back in the 1940s, the Federal Communication Commission, which regulates the media, had rules limiting ownership of multiple media outlets, like radio and TV stations. In 1983, media in the United States was owned by 50 different companies.

That all changed in the '80s and '90s. The '80s roared into picture, and soon a newly elected President Reagan embraced deregulation and an exceedingly free market economy. By the 1990s, only nine companies remained in charge. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton, was the cherry on top of Reagan's deregulation. The act declared that large companies in media could further expand their control.

At the time, only 3% of Congress voted against this bill. Suddenly, small TV and radio stations were either bought up by big companies or failed because they couldn't compete. It was reported at the time that a consumer group tried to buy ad space on CNN to criticize the Telecommunications Bill; a CNN, which was owned by one of these mega-corporations, wouldn't sell the group the airtime.

By 2020, the number had shrunk from nine to six ultra-powerful companies. As the years have gone on, power has gotten more condensed, and any regulation that has passed or been lifted is done so without much publicity. This makes it very hard for citizens to get the facts straight and for voters to push back on any policy decision. But what does this kind of concentrated ownership really mean?

Well, it means that fewer individuals and organizations control shares of the mass media. When controlling entities, like the government, decide that a free market is more beneficial than imposed regulations on businesses, companies act quickly because, after all, it's in their interest to consolidate. Merging and consolidating power can increase profit margins, reduce risk, and get rid of the dreaded competitive edge they're all fighting for.

So, it's no wonder that these mega-companies spend millions of dollars every year lobbying to sway legislation in their favor. A concerning control over our political system is far from the only problem with ownership concentration. As anyone who has taken an introductory economics class can tell you, deregulation can lead to consolidation of power, like we saw back in the studio system and like we're seeing now in media as a whole.

The monopolies born out of that consolidation would be great for providers but bad for customers. Not only is this model riddled with conflicts of interest—as billionaires like Jeff Bezos own the very publications, like The Washington Post, that are supposed to be reporting on them—but when six companies control all the information that we consume, it threatens diversity of expression and reduces diversity of viewpoints and content and news coverage.

This narrowing of perspective then forces us as audiences to silo ourselves. Are you an MSNBC person or a Fox person? Our identity becomes wrapped up in what media we consume and, therefore, what ideas and facts we prescribe. Ownership concentration also limits competition and, therefore, decreases consumer choice. How many times have you craved a truly unbiased news source or been looking for an old movie on your streaming services, and you can't seem to find the thing you're looking for?

If the channels or services you subscribe to don't have what you're looking for, you're out of luck. Ultimately, we all end up spewing the same talking points and discussing the same TV shows. We get nice and cozy in our echo chambers because the media we've been consuming has a vast influence on public opinion and discourse. It shapes the narrative in our society and often pushes us in a specific direction that we might not have gone in otherwise.

This understandably worries some about the impact ownership concentration might have on our democracy and the free flow of information. We're less likely to consider other points of view that don't come from news sources we like. We don't take a chance on smaller movies or shows that don't get big marketing pushes because we're consumed with the blockbusters that are pushed to us.

That illusion of choice starts to change how we think, socialize, and live our lives. But it's not just our psyche at play here. When six companies control everything, they can change the way the country and the world operate, depending on what economic narrative they decide to push. It can influence consumer spending and habits, which can have immediate impacts on the economic climate.

What controls the stock market? Essentially, the 250 or so executives who have the power to decide what information almost every American has access to. We've seen this before—during the studio system era, it was on a smaller scale, as the size of Hollywood in the 30s and 40s fed into the size of the overall media market now. But could that be a cautionary tale?

In 1938, the federal government charged eight studios that controlled Hollywood with being monopolies under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and they were forced to break up. They divested from movie theaters that they owned, and artists were free to work for whoever they wanted, allowing them an opportunity to shape their careers.

An audience has benefited from the burgeoning independent film business. But what goes around comes around because, by the 1980s, deregulation was the name of the game again. Under the Reagan administration, the antitrust department was cut by 50%, and businesses took advantage of the ability to buy up their competitors again. In 1994, we saw the first significant integration of film and television when Viacom acquired Paramount for 7.6 billion to become the second-largest media conglomerate at the time.

A few years later, they bought CBS. This unleashed a pattern of mergers, like Disney buying up ABC in 1995 and Time Warner buying TBS in 1996. By 2010, around 90% of filmed entertainment's domestic revenue came from five companies: NBC Universal, Viacom, CBS, Warner Media, Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures.

But these weren't even the companies that owned the entertainment they created. Each of these powerful companies is still owned by even larger companies like Comcast and Time Warner. But this new consolidation in entertainment had much further reaching effects than its ancestor, the studio system. Now, all of these companies don't just own movies, but TV stations and news organizations that dictate precisely how we should think and feel about politics and culture.

We are in a time when media integrity is being tested. Do media outlets have the ability to serve the public interest as they're meant to and aid the democratic process? I think most of us would argue the answer is no. We've entered an age where we see a plurality of political, cultural, and societal points of view.

This plurality can be internal or external. Internal plurality looks like everyone who works for a company adhering to the same viewpoints. This can mean that journalists or news anchors are all told to talk about the same things, investigate the same stories, and push the same cultural narratives. External plurality tells us about the overall media landscape because, even if you have all the journalists working for a particular outlet operating the same, if there's enough of those outlets to represent different viewpoints in different stories, consumers are still getting a variety of choices.

But what we're approaching now is an external plurality where most of our news and cultural outlets are either owned by the same company or have a similar agenda. The objectivity we expect in journalism is an illusion, or it's fed the appearance of balanced news, but we all know it's anything but. And it's not really the journalists' fault themselves; many who work for outlets owned by the big six answer to the owners of their companies and ultimately serve whatever narrative those owners want to push.

Often, journalists are risking their jobs if they pursue stories that might reflect poorly on the company they work for or the person who runs it. This obviously interferes with journalistic independence, and inevitably, crucial stories get burned. However, in the free market world that we've embraced, which allows big companies to consolidate and knock out the competition, owners can decide the strategy of their company. But it's not always smooth sailing; there are politicians, organizations, and individuals who try to push back on it.

So, these huge conglomerates spend millions of dollars every year lobbying for their interests. One report showed that the association, which represents more than 90% of the cable market, spent more than 14 million trying to influence policy in 2021. Comcast alone spent 13.38 million that same year. They're both in the top 15 spenders for political lobbying that year and beyond. Lobbying and the profits these mega-companies rack in translate to more political influence.

The owners of the media giants contribute directly to campaigns so they can be in the pocket of whoever might end up in power, and the outlets they control decide what the discourse around political elections and issues looks like. When it comes to the news, local stations and newspapers are dying out. Now, more than 2,000 U.S. counties lack a daily newspaper, and it's led to all of us embracing solely national issues and divisions, while the things and people we face in our own backyards go unnoticed and unresolved.

While the big six exercise the most control over our media, other companies like Sinclair Broadcasting are also responsible for ownership concentration in specific areas. Sinclair owns almost 200 TV stations and 86 markets across the U.S. You might have seen a viral video that showed dozens of newscasters from different local stations reading the same script, and they all work for Sinclair-owned stations. A former FCC commissioner calls Sinclair "the most dangerous company out there" for both its scope of ownership and its far-right-leaning ideological agenda.

And there are other giants out there as well, like Gannett, which owns over 100 daily U.S. newspapers, and iHeart Media, which owns over 800 radio stations nationwide. That's to say nothing of social media companies like Meta that buy up smaller ones like Instagram and WhatsApp to control the way we consume information online, but that’s a whole another video.

We are, of course, lucky to live in a democracy and a free market economy that allows for competition and innovation. We don't have state-owned TV like Russia; and as much as these six companies control the narrative, we, as individuals, have the freedom to speak our minds and oppose that narrative. But even if the government doesn't control every moment of our lives and every piece of content we consume, we can't overlook the people that do, and we can't overlook why they do it.

Perhaps the former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner put it best in a leaked memo: "We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."