Here We Go Again: How Rupert Murdoch/Time Warner Merger Would Fuck You In Hollywood

[Blue_Adept]

Link

Back in 1983, some 90% of the U.S. media was controlled by 50 companies. I thought Hollywood had it bad enough when studios started gobbling up networks, and cable companies started taking over studios and networks. Now 90% of media is controlled by 5 companies – Comcast, Viacom, CBS, Walt Disney, Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. The Nation used to complain about "The National Entertainment State" and the journalistic, political and cultural questions raised by the ongoing concentration of media power in so few hands. Nowadays, journalism doesn’t matter because it’s barely in existence. Note how quickly Murdoch said he would toss aside CNN. (No journalism on that so-called cable news channel anymore: just watered-down partisan political polemics, reruns of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknowns, and endless searches for that missing Malaysian plane.) I now see where Big Media will soon consist of Disney and Comcast and 21st Century Fox. Analysts today called Murdoch’s Time Warner offer "basically the first salvo in a wave of media consolidation." You’re fucked.

[GeorgeGist]

1. First salvo?

[Blue_Adept]

2. It's why it's easy to ignore the analysts

They really have no history or context since most are young and just looking to make money rather than analyze anything beyond that.

[reddread]

3. i look forward to it

the sooner people drop their pretense that "the media" serves their interests, the better.
we are decades removed from those days of yore. if they ever existed.

[betterdemsonly]

4. It could be stopped by Obama's fcc appointments

but I doubt it will be. They won't preserve net neutrality either. One reason among many we need a progressive President rather than a socalled centrists. A progressive would appoint something other than cable industry lobbyists.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Alternative media options are growing, however.

Lots of people are no longer a "captive audience", tethered to the tv or even to the big studios and theaters.

More people are cutting the cord. The ranks of Americans who no longer get cable or satellite TV have increased 44 percent in the past four years to 7.6 million households, according to a new report by Experian Marketing Services.

Approximately 18.1 percent of all US households with a Netflix or Hulu account are considered to be cord cutters, the report found.
This includes many independent young adults who have never paid for TV services.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/household-cable-cord-cutting-rise/story?id=23411056

Another figure: The latest numbers show that 19 percent of Americans live without cable TV, according to a study by market research firm GfK.
http://www.wtop.com/541/3664108/Cutting-the-cord-The-trend-of-ditching-the-cable-box

Same goes for alternative news, mostly thanks to the internet.

[betterdemsonly]

6. That trend won't continue if the fcc won't defend net neutrality either n/t