What is Reddit's opinion of The New Media Monopoly: A Completely Revised and Updated Edition With Seven New Chapters?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The 1996 Telecommunications Act wasn't the beginning, not even close. Benjamin H. Bagdikian wrote a book in 1983 called The Media Monopoly, in which he warned that mergers and deregulation had caused 90% of US media to be controlled by 50 companies. Critics called him an alarmist. By 2011, 90% of US media was controlled by just 6 companies.

Stossel's a straight shooter. Until the madia mob dissolved the investigatory program with him and Diane Sawyer. Course, she was sleeping with the boss.

It's all written about in "Media Monopoly "1980's by Ben Bagdikian, of Pentagon papers rep. That predicted the Madia current mess.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Monopoly-Completely-Chapters/dp/0807061875

10's of millions is more like it. That kind of economics of scale is stymied by the telecom monopolies.

Where is Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?

Check Media Monopoly, 1984 by the highly respected Ben Bagdikian. He forecast these troubles nearly 40 years ago!!!

AND how to fix it simply. No interlocking directories members of any interstate company.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Monopoly-Completely-Chapters/dp/0807061875

I recommend ordering the latest edition of Media Monopoly by Benjamin Bagdikian. First published in 1983, he updates it as the landscape changes. Bagdikian details the collusion and cross-channel corruption of today's media. It's important to read because it reminds you to take every message with a grain of salt. And know that wherever there's a dollar at stake, the puppet strings get tighter. Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807061875/

I have a masters in public policy and this was probably the book that stuck with me the most. We read it in my Politics and the Media class in fall 2000 (during the Bush/Gore presidential election debacle). It completely changes your perspective.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807061875/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_9PN2WCSG20QDZDTMZ8MG

Nearly out of stock dude

Ben Bagdikian called it back in the 80's and was either ignored or trashed in the mainstream media. Everything he predicted has come true, and worse.

I reject your hypothesis about larger scale making it easier to sway people, and a century-and-a-half's worth of local political machines maintaining near exclusive control seems like strong counter corroboration. Nationalization of politics has also led to decreased control from centralized actors like parties and media organizations. Trump never would have made it through the primary process even 30 years ago, nor would Obama.

>All of those legacy media’s are not apolitical. They still disseminate a particular point of view whether it’s news or entertainment.

I didn't say they were apolitical. I said this was a widely misconstrued statistic about legacy entertainment media.

You neglected to provide a source, but the big tell is the year 1983, which indicates this stat is pulled from Bagdikian, probably through any number of intermediaries taking their own hatchets to the relevant data along the way. A couple of relevant facts here:

1) This statistic only references legacy media -- print, radio, television, and film. Using it to make a claim about who dominates control of information would require you to exclude both new media titans like Google, Facebook, and Netflix, along with most of the major newspaper chains like McClatchy which simply aren't very profitable. It would also ignore the obviously outsized power of independently-owned outlets like the NYT and WashPo -- whom you specifically call out above -- to set the news agenda of the moment.

2) Bagdikian made this claim in 2004. It's not a description of any recent trend that would apply exclusively to the 2020 election. The reality is that Bagdikian was describing the natural consolidation of legacy media markets as their profits collapsed in the age of digital media. Diversity of information has continued to flourish online and one can get access to just about any POV one would like. Again, everyone in the country heard about Hunter Biden's laptop, and everyone in the country could have read anything they wanted to about it with about 12 seconds of effort. There are definitely problems with bottlenecks of information distribution in the new model, but those have less to do with centralized control and more to do with the fact that in an environment of information abundance, most of us will gladly seek out and settle for the media which reconfirms our existing beliefs.

>But further more, can you discern a single ideological difference between the NYT, the WaPo, and CNN?

Sure, of course. It's not hard for anyone looking.

But before we play this game, can you clarify your position here? 2 of these 3 are not owned by the 5 conglomerates you mentioned above, nor are they owned by the 3 social media companies you referenced. Are these outlets influential or not? If no, why are you bringing them up? If yes, how does this revise your claim above that 5 conglomerates dominate the selection of information available to Americans?

>To pretend like all of these mainstream media sources are totally different and independent options for news is naive to the extreme. They are in lockstep with each other in terms of the type of content they report and the viewpoint they are coming from.

I'm not pretending like they are "totally different and independent," but this is far different than being "in lockstep." If you can't think outside of these absolutist binaries, there's really no point in continuing the conversation.

One big issue here is that you seem to think that anyone opposed to Trump is necessarily ideologically aligned. E.g. the fact that you're including FoxNews' 2016 anti-Trump coverage as an indication of ideological alignment with center-left media is, well, silly. Personally, I have some ideological differences with the NYT, more with the WashPo, more still with CNN, and I find FoxNews' ideology abhorrent. The fact that we all (used to) agree "democracy is pretty good and demagogues are bad" doesn't mean we're ideologically aligned; it means we're sane people with at least a minimal grasp of history.

>As for NewsCorp, even if I granted that they were decidedly pro-Trump, only 1 out of 5 of the major media conglomerates being right wing is merely 20 percent of the major media conglomerates.

Yes, but of the five, NewsCorp is also the one for which news media -- and particularly political news -- is the largest part of their empire. It's so far out of scope to the role of news in the other four conglomerates that it's not even comparable. This is why I asked you above what the connection between this media consolidation and influence/editorial control of news content was, as you appear to be lazily citing a statistic which has very little to do with that.

For example, if you want to make the case that Disney's "left wing views" via multicultural casting in the MCU or the coverage of Kaepernik on ESPN or whatever somehow means the 2020 election wasn't free and fair, you have an even bigger road ahead to hoe. Otherwise, whatever Disney's political orientation may be is pretty irrelevant to the question at hand, considering that ABC News probably already reaches fewer viewers than r/politics and is dropping every year.

>business titans consolidated their efforts in order to prevent Trump from winning an election

This isn't what the quote you provided says, and it's directly contradicted by the following sentence, already quoted above. I'm not sure what else to tell you, except that you're clearly seeing what you want to see there.

Ben Bagdikian - Media Monopoly - Required reading for us in J-School.

If you are interested in this subject, check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Media-Monopoly-Completely/dp/0807061875/ref=pd_sim_sbs_14_1/192-6714861-5499914?ie=UTF8&refRID=1FRF0HBTPN9ZTXGSTCV4