by Gadiel McGarrean

Created on: March 09, 2007   Last Updated: April 27, 2007

So say you own a mango store. Say you are friends with the mayor, you contribute to his campaign, and he deregulates your business sector(like the Telecommunications act of 1996). And Lets say your know other major businessmen in town. Now, lets say that green mangos hurt the mayors approval and the approval of other businessmen, and orange mangos don't. Which are you more likely to sell, acting in your best interest, considering green mangos have been forgotten in recent times?

This is the implicit bias of mainstream media. It is not the fault of the media, it acts only in the systemic model provided for it. Consolidated media results in homogenized content.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the radio industry(among other deregulations), for more competition-right? Wrong, most of the privately owned radio stations in the country are owned by 2 companies, one of them
is called ClearChannel Communications. Ever hear the same song on two different stations, minutes apart? They get play lists, and if not for the internet, would virtually control the music industry.

Homogenized content results in an uninformed public, with fewer perspectives and less information. It is different when an oil company holds a monopoly, or another public utility, but media? Freedom of speech can be averted with such a vast economic gap, with the highest buyers controlling the news. The top 10% of wealthy individuals controls 90% of the wealth, so how could the news that they own and produce be perfectly representative of the other 90% of the country? It could not,especially not in the feild of economics or politics, or media industry reform.

Market consolidation is also detrimental to wealth diffusion. Think if the person who owned the ClearChannel company lived in your town, they would probablly spend money in your town and contribute to the wealth of others in it as well as their education and public services through taxes. But there is only one owner of ClearChannel,so odds are, he doesn't. But if there were 1300 owners of the stations they own, then more of that corporate profit would be distributed to more towns.
Fewer companies, does not induce competition. Deregulation does not induce competition(unless you deregulate liscences-which will never happen,as things are). Perfect Competition happens when a market sector has a large amount of firms working on equal ground, not two mamoths buying up ever mom and pop on the block.

Consolidation in a market, engenders bias in that market.This afflicts many markets, media being own of them. For the sake of upward social mobility (ie the american dream) we must act to assuade this, what ever you standing on issues happens to be.

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