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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The 10 Companies That Control the News


Victor Frankenstein & his all Powerful Government-Friendly Corporatist Frankenmedia Spinner







The composition of media property ownership reflects how Americans consume news today. Most of the largest brands have only a fraction of their business in magazines or radio, which once represented a much larger share of American media. None of the largest media companies derive more than 10% of total audience from newspapers, and five do not have any presence at all in the medium. Meanwhile, eight of the largest media corporations have at least 20% of total viewership from local TV, and seven of the ten have at least 15% of total viewers online.

As a measure of audience and news content broadcast at the local level, in individual cities, is just as important as news broadcast nationally because of the overall size of the country’s combined local markets. Many of the largest news organizations own televisions stations in the country’s most populated cities. Some companies have dozens of local radio stations. Others own dozens of newspapers. A large media company may offer news access to millions of people, even if it does not have a single national news outlet such as a television network, a widely visited website or a national magazine or newspaper.

Based on Pew’s State of the News Media report, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 companies that control the news in America. We considered newspaper circulation, television viewership at the national and local level, radio audience and online traffic. Unless otherwise indicated, all figures related to viewership are as of June 2012. In several cases, the media companies surveyed only gave Pew the audience size for their largest property.

Where this was the case, the sizes of the total online audience and the largest online property were recorded as identical. Companies that have the greatest effect on news consumption are those that own media across several of these property types. For example, CBS, which is the biggest media company by audience, owns network television, local television, local radio and national Internet businesses. Together, these CBS outlets reach over 130 million people, an extraordinary number given that the entire population of the United States is about 315 million.
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