Media Consolidation
There's a great forum happening on Monday at Columbia University in NYC about media consolidation. If you're going to be in the area, I highly recommend checking out the debate between staffers from The Nation and The Economist. John Nichols and Jenny Toomey will take on Ben Edwards and the FCC's W. Kenneth Ferree. More information about the event is available at ActNow!
Just in case you need another reason to be concerned about this stuff, check out these media consolidation chart - all of them are somewhat out-of-date, but bear in mind that things have only gotten worse in the last few years - from Media Channel, The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, and Frontline. Lots more information can be had on FAIR's telecommunications policy pages. And if you're still pining for more, check out Ben Bagdikian's book, The Media Monopoly. (I do realize that it's only slightly ironic that I'm linking to Amazon.com when mentioning books on my site. Here's the link to Powells if you'd prefer to buy it there.)
Comments
Yeah, sarcasm aside, linking to amazon all the time for your book links is considerably more ironic than you might think. In a few previous gigs at...well...amazon I had to search for product prices and product manuals for stuff that was no longer in amazon's catalog. Of course, searching for the stuff in various search engines would either point me back to amazon, competing sites that had been subsumed by amazon, or sites that linked to the product on amazon...
And given Google's popularity and its insipid PageRank method of determining relevancy, constantly linking to one source does taint search results and drown out other sources of information -- inadvertantly leading to some form of de-facto consolidation and homogenization of information sources. Worst of all, given the explosion of blogs, we ourselves might be causing it. Sometimes it can be properly used for comedic evil, however.
But still...schlep bloggers like all y'all are dictating the quality and relevancy of *my* high-octane, clean-burning search results.
Posted by: Rev. Tom | December 13, 2003 6:12 PM