Are 90% of all US Media Outlets Really Owned by Just Six Companies?

One thing that always bothers me is how much the same messages are pushed in lockstep across so much of our media. It’s almost like they’re all sharing from the same, small bowl of information. There’s not even anything creative about the way they present it, either (watch this funny but kind of scary compilation video of local news anchors throughout the country reading literally the exact same scripts). I noted this a couple of weeks ago when the national media outlets all started using the same virtue-slash-opinion-signal word, “baseless,” in sync. But it goes MUCH deeper than that. 

Did you ever notice that they all seem to cover the exact same core group of stories each day, in the exact same kinds of ways? The fact that so many outlets draw so heavily from the news wires accounts for some of that. But I think I found a bigger reason, when I stumbled across this chart – Media Consolidation: The Illusion of Choice - while doing research a few weeks ago for this blog:

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: This chart (which is much longer than just these three frames) was made in 2012 by some guy I don’t know named Jason at a now defunct website called Frugal Dad, so at the least, it’s definitely outdated. But when I started fact-checking the data presented, I found out something really interesting. Jason / Frugal Dad is pretty much right! Only a handful of companies owns almost every single media outlet in this nation. And I’m not just talking news outlets – I’m talking magazines, films, websites, books – you name it. 

It’s really easy to replicate this guy’s research at home (though I would STRONGLY suggest using Bing or Duck Duck Go instead of Google, which I have been avoiding like the plague ever since I watched this interview with Harvard Scholar Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”); just type “who owns X company?” into the search engine and see what comes up. Then ask the search engine who owns that company, and so on. As long as you stick to reputable sources of information (steer clear of Wikipedia! And go straight to the company’s own websites wherever possible), this is a pretty crazy and eye-opening exercise.

Here are just a few random things I found out:

• AT&T now owns Warner Media, which in turn owns tons of cable channels, including: Adult Swim, Boomerang, Cartoon Network, CNN, TruTV, all of the Turner Broadcasting companies (TNT, TBS, Turner Classic movies, Turner sports) , HBO & HBOMax. They also own, of course, Warner Brothers.

• Xfinity now owns Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal (+ Universal Pictures + Dreamworks), which owns: Bravo, E!, USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, SyFy, The Weather Channel, the Golf Channel, the MLB & NHL Networks, and Telemundo (plus several other Hispanic television networks). Comcast is also part owner of Hulu, along with Disney & 21st Century Fox. Comcast even owns at least one smaller news outlet I thought was independent - Buzzfeed (which itself just bought HuffPost last month).  

• National Amusements (owners of more than a thousand movie & Imax theaters worldwide) now owns Viacom AND CBS Corporation. Their website, viacomcbs.com, shows those companies, in turn, own: BET, Comedy Central, MTV, CMT, CW, VH1, Nickelodeon, Paramount, Pluto (a streaming service), Showtime AND – until last month - book publisher Simon & Schuster, which they sold 11/25 to a German company called Bertelsmann… which also owns competing publisher Penguin Random House and which, per their own website summary, was founded to “develop and carry out projects for promoting social change.”

That last thing about Simon & Schuster brings up a good point - did you also know that Harper Collins is owned by NewsCorp (owner of WSJ, NY Post, Fox News)?

And did you also know about all of the “smaller” media conglomerates, like E.W. Scripps (which owns 50+ local stations nationwide plus national outlets like Newsy, simplemost, CourtTV & more) or Hearst Communications, which owns Lifetime, Town & Country, Car & Driver, Delish & Elle, but also several major city newspapers (in Houston & San Francisco, for example) as well as partial stakes in ESPN & A&E? 

Even the American City Business Journals – the publisher of my hometown business paper, the Cincinnati Business Courier, is owned by a “small” conglomerate called Advance Publications, which also owns Conde Nast, which in turn owns Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Architectural Digest and others. Advance also, strangely, owns a widely-used academic resource called Turnitin (am I the only one who finds it interesting that a major media company would want to have ties to academia???)

I could go on for days, but the bottom line is this: when you start to feel like everything you read – your daily newspaper, your local business newspaper, your go-to website, your favorite glossy magazine (political, home or even fashion) - even the hottest new books (fiction and non-fiction alike) - is pushing the same kinds of stories and narratives, it’s likely because they ARE. They all sound the same because they are all pretty much owned by the same few parent companies. 

Why does this matter? I’ll give you both a hypothetical example and real-life one to illustrate. 

Say, for instance, that some higher-up person at one of these media conglomerates reads a study that says peanut butter makes dogs crazy (*this is the made-up example - stick with me!). The person may or may not know that the study sponsor is also the president of the I HATE PEANUT BUTTER Club, but either way – the media person becomes convinced that the study is right – that peanut butter makes dogs crazy. Furthermore, he feels like it’s imperative that the whole world know about this study, too, so he talks to the head honchos at a few of his media outlets and tells them – Hey! You should really write a story (or book, or produce a show segment) about this study, showing how peanut butter makes dogs crazy.

Pretty soon, you – the consumer – are walking through the grocery store and you see an article on a magazine cover: SCIENTISTS SHOW - PEANUT BUTTER MAKES FIDO NUTS! That’s weird, you think. I’ve never heard that before. Later that evening, you’re watching your favorite cable TV talk show and the host says – Hey! I just read a new study today! It said: PEANUT BUTTER MAKES DOGS CRAZY! This time you pay a little more attention, because you’ve seen / heard this information twice, now. Then, the next morning, as you’re scrolling through your online newsfeed, you see the story again, on your favorite corporate news site. That does it, you think. I guess peanut butter does make dogs crazy after all.

Of course, you had no idea that the magazine, talk show and news program were all owned by the same media corporation. You just saw the same story three different places and figured it must be true (not because you are dumb; because – once upon a time in a faraway land – media outlets all used to work independent of one another and could be trusted to fact-check one another). Adding insult to injury, other, competing media outlets will likely pick up on this story, too, without questioning it, because they steal heavily from each other. So, before long, that DOG / PEANUT BUTTER / CRAZY story ends up being touted as deafcto “news.” 

Sounds silly, but it’s as simple as that. This is how media corporations / conglomerates use all of their media tools – magazines, TV shows, books and news programming alike – to make a story based on one small (and oftentimes questionable) piece of information appear to be more widespread and prevalent than it really is. To me, this explains SO MUCH about how certain media narratives are so widely overemphasized today. It has nothing to do with what you, the consumers think; it has everything to do with what the corporate media types WANT you to think.

Sure – there are media people who will argue that, even though they are owned by big companies, each newspaper or magazine or TV show has autonomous control over itself, but ... I’m going to respectfully disagree. Looking at that funny (but scary) Facebook video I showed you up top, and thinking about the consistent narratives that our media keeps pushing ad nauseum over so many other things happening in our world today, it just all makes sense. 

By owning so many different media outlets (and so many different kinds of media outlets, too), the companies who control our news essentially now have the ability to CREATE our news as well.

Instead of just reporting what’s happening in our world today, which is how journalism used to work, they increasingly seem to prefer literally making up “the news” as they go along, and using their sister publications and programming to re-affirm it. 

Unfortunately, power like this is almost never used for good. In fact, this is how people at big corporate media outlets target, or “cancel” other people or issues they do not like or agree with. Remember how weird they all were about Hydroxychloroquine (see in particular my dissection of An ABC Story About Hydroxychloroquine)? They made it seem like EVERY news outlet in the nation that mattered was reporting HCQ was bad. But, in fact, probably only a few big MEDIA CONGLOMERATES were reporting that information – they were just spreading it across their hundreds of smaller news and other media outlets, so it looked like more. 

I want to close this week’s post with a real-life example of how this kind of corporate media-bullying-slash-narrative-making directly affected one of the alternative news outlets I mentioned last week, The Epoch Times. A good friend sent me this interview with a journalist named Sharyl Atkisson, who is pretty politically neutral and who does what I do in this blog but on a MUCH bigger scale. She’s worked for much bigger news outlets than I have (she was an anchor at both CNN and CBS national news) and she’s just published a book about all of the horrible things she’s seen happening in media (which aligns closely with everything I have showed you thus far). But I found this specific interview with her to be particularly telling - most especially this excerpt explaining, hypothetically, the way corporate news outlets likely implemented a very structured attack against The Epoch Times.

(FYI, she alleges that a lot of the source information at corporate news outlets originates from political organizations, which is both interesting and frightening. Also, FYI, don’t get hung up on the climate change thing. If you do, you’ll miss the point of what she’s saying about how corporate media “cancels” outlets they don’t like … which is exactly what those very same corporate media types hope you’ll do … ) : 

Well, I’ll give you one example of how it happens. Let’s say a big money interest doesn’t like Epoch Times reporting because it’s factual a lot. Maybe it’s dual-sided on a climate change issue. There’s a ton of money, as you know, being put out there to control people’s thoughts on climate change, so they need to controversialize you rather than just argue the points in the story.

They need to make it where people won’t read your publication, or they automatically think it’s discredited, right. So that’s the goal off the top. How to accomplish that? They go, big money—this is a hypothetical example—these big donors send their money through a fundraiser, so you can’t trace it, to a group like Media Matters, which is run by the conservative-smear-artist-turned-liberal-smear-artist David Brock, who runs this network of Super PACs and nonprofits, names that you may know and thought were independent groups but they’re all under this umbrella—I diagrammed it in my last book, “The Smear.”

And all he has to do is write a blog about it, and the unquestioning media is either on board with the same thing, because we’ve hired these propagandists in our newsrooms, or they’re unaware, and sometimes reporters are lazy. They take this information sent to them about what a big story this is, look what we found out about Epoch Times, and they don’t do their own checking.

And then they have it put out through their nonprofits and their watchdog groups so it looks like to the media that all these different groups have discovered things about Epoch Times. It’s really just one group and a guy and some funders that started this, but it’s to give the appearance that there’s widespread support for or against somebody or something.

And pretty soon the news is reporting it. Media Matters, word for word, lockstep, you talk about—first sometimes it goes with a quasi-news like Salon and Vox and Huffington Post and all the people that march to the same tune when Media Matters says go. And it’s really hard to stop that momentum of opinion when it’s been put down and become so pervasive like that.

And I think that’s what’s happened to Epoch Times. I think it started, with your publication, when you came to be more and more noticed for doing fair, off-narrative reporting on really important topics that the mainstream media was not itself attacking and investigating. Instead, when you started doing important work, that’s when I saw all of this bubbling to the top, all this controversy trying to be stirred up about the publication.

Pretty scary allegations, if you ask me, and more than enough reason to keep exploring those alternative news outlets and independent journalists I talked about in last week’s post.

PS - If you have time to read the whole interview with Atkisson, I HIGHLY recommend it. I especially recommend the section just before the excerpt I pulled, if you want to get into the “why” part about these smear campaigns. It’s both chilling and disturbing. And note - I also really loved her comparison to the Truman show; I only saw this video after writing last week’s post - so I was pleasantly surprised (and, at the same time, sad) to know someone else had the same thoughts / experiences as I did.