>> Today, just six conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS) — control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to.
No google/youtube? No twitter? No facebook? Is this article from the past? Most people do not get their information from the television and so I doubt these six control most of anything.
> Most people do not get their information from the television and so I doubt these six control most of anything.
I know a lot of people who get the majority of their news either from television, or from media properties that they would see on TV, but via the Internet instead.
But I understood part of the point of the article to not be solely about "news" per se, but about general produced media content. And if that's the case, then the list given makes sense to me (Facebook doesn't make TV shows, at least that I know of.)
For general media, Netflix/Amazon? iTunes? ThePirateBay? PornHub? The number of organizations generating and/or delivering content so vast and diverse that I cannot understand how any small group could get their hands around most of anything. I watched a Doctor Who episode today (horrible, bad effects, bad acting). Which of the six owns the BBC?
Most of the content on any of these is produced by companies on the OP's list.
> PornHub
I mean, it's likely that in general this kind of estimate is ignoring things that are not considered savory so porn is gonna be underrepresented for sure. It's probably not going to move the needle as much as you think though.
> BBC
A lot of BBC's content is produced outside this set of companies, but it's likely that some of it is at least co-produced with companies on the list, usually for the sake of international distribution. This probably counts as some degree of 'control', which doesn't necessarily imply direct ownership.
Outside of the BBC, on the private British networks (and in general wrt any regional media production) this kind of co-production arrangement is really common.
The only people that I know of that still get the majority of their news from TV is people of my parents generation, who are in their 70s. I’m in my 50s and none of my acquaintances of a similar age watch broadcast TV, or even use social media.
I’m in my 50s and none of my acquaintances of a similar age watch broadcast TV, or even use social media.
It doesn't matter if they're instead binging tv shows on streaming platforms produced by production studios owned by those 6 companies. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are binging youtube channels or tiktok "influencers", all of which are seemingly independent, but are in fact being funded by new media studios owned by those 6 companies.
Those companies control a lot more than you think. The fact that people are unaware of it is a feature of that control, not a bug.
In the most recent Pew survey on media habits, TV was still far and away the leading source of news. For people who prefer to use a computer, tablet or phone to read the news, the websites of traditional media companies was their preference. Nothing else even approaches the popularity of traditional news orgs. And for people who do get news from social media, Facebook is the most popular source by a large margin.
So you may not know any TV watchers outside of your parents (which is also true for me), there are somehow millions and millions of TV news watchers out there.
Suppose I watch Fox News for an hour and then read Reddit for an hour (either posts, linked articles, or comments, your choice). How is that counted? I am reading 5-10x as much content on Reddit as I am seeing/hearing on TV.
Not sure but when asked which medium they preferred, respondents ranked all social media (including Reddit) a distant fourth. Among social media sites Reddit was 5th, behind Instagram, in terms of how many people said they used it specifically for news. This particular survey does not seem to ask about time spent.
Much of the media gets their "news" from other media. Take Jan 2021 for example. Remember how quickly "insurection" proliferated? Just an example, but this happens all the time. These "news" outlets are so desperate to be relevate and keep the clicks clicking (and revenue chaching'ing) that they reiterate without little or no filter.
Better to parrot than to be left behind. The current system rewards parrotting more than it does discretion.
* I get access to 1,100,295 DRM-free books in several formats (including Word, EPUB, computer-narrated audio) via Bookshare.org [~$50/year]
* I get access to 40,000+ professionally narrated books via the National Library Service through the Library of Congress in the US [Free]
* I get access to 80,000+ volunteer narrated books via LearningAlly.org (formerly Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic) [$135/year]
* I get access to hundreds of magazines and newspapers, including breaking news services, via the National Federation for the Blind NewsLine [Free]
* I get reciprocity with other countries' libraries for the print-disabled around the world, which is useful as I am learning new languages. [Usually Free]
This is nice because I also never have a need to go to websites that serve ads to me. Of course it's called uBlock Origin and using ProtonVPN with Anti-tracking + Ad-blocking features plus such as a Pi-Hole...but still...I have it good.
I get news from all of the providers you listed, but they don’t produce the content. The actual content is from the big media companies like CNBC, CNN, Fox News, WSJ, and NY Times.
These online media are content aggregators. They help socialize and propagate narratives, but they don’t produce narratives. They certainly amplify the echo chamber effect.
> big media companies like CNBC, CNN, Fox News, WSJ, and NY Times
Of those, the six companies mentioned by the grandparent (Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, Paramount) only own CNBC and Fox. CNN is owned by Warner Bros, WSJ is owned by News Corp (of course, the link to Fox through Murdoch is relevant), and NYT is its own company.
> Most people do not get their information from the television
Uh... yes they do. Most people in your particular subculture probably don't. I don't. But the majority of "news" consumption in the modern west happens via live television.
The death of TV news is being overstated by the above poster but it's certainly no longer the dominant form of news media. Among the younger age demographics on Hacker News I really can't imagine many people are willing to tolerate the insufferable cable news format with massive and frequent ad breaks.
Don't forget apple and amazon. People always forget about amazon and their media offerings tied to Prime membership.
But I agree, tech monopolies are just as worrying as the media monopolies. I'd imagine the next period of consolidation will be tech + media. With the amount of cash tech companies have lying around and the market cap differential between tech and media, these media conglomerates would be absorbed without a sweat.
Not according to professional content creators. Every one I have ever talked to openly states that they regularly alter their content to optimize compliance with youtube algorithms. Content is controlled, promoted, diminished, monetized or eliminated by the algorithms which are the embodiment of youtube's policy decisions. If you want to actually make a living on youtube, you will care as much about what youtube thinks of your content as you do your viewers.
> They host but don’t control content via e.g. editorial policy, ideology or private interests.
They absolutely do control content, by banning content that violates the TOS. And they do make editorial decisions in terms of what content they promote, and what is rewarded by monetization.
And to be clear there isn't anything nefarious about this, nor does it cause these platforms to lose Section 230 protections (despite how often people claim it does).
But the fallback these content delivery networks always use to avoid regulatory scrutiny is always to promote these traditional producers at the expense of independent voices.
Google, Youtube and Facebook aren't news producers, they aggregate and provide content in feed form. First order journalism, the people that actually point the cameras at things are largely the mentioned commercial institutions, the rest is commentary.
There's the production end, which this article covers. Then there's the distribution end, which is where tech companies come in. Both are problematic in different ways.
To be fair, the word used was "control". The HN title is, once again, distorting the content of the submission. The author's discussion is focused on media consolidation and the slow death of local news, not Big Tech's control over what people consume. (Though she does cite Big Tech's practice of censoring independent news sources.)
Yes, but without the title preceding it, the statement loses its context.
It baffles me when people want to override authors on titles. Sure, sometimes it might make sense to do so, but most of the time the author is the person in the best position to present and explain what she has written.
If this was the HN title I would not necessarily think about Big Tech.
Then when I began reading the blog post I would quickly see it is about media consolidation and the decline of local news, not about Big Tech intermediary (middleman) control over the delivery of media that some other entity has produced.
This is only Part 1, so there may be more about Big Tech in Parts 2 and 3.
How is this promoting an agenda? I hate when people hate on frivolous things when it doesn’t fit their agenda. Republicans called this out and it was largely ignore (I know, i was one of them calling it out) and now people are upset they used the subtitle instead of the more liberal friendly main title?
The people who actually point their camera at things are everyday people with smartphones. The majority of "news" content I've seen taken with a camera over the last few years was not been taken by a professional journalist.
The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade revolved around footage taken with a smartphone camera.
> The George Floyd story, maybe the story of the decade
Pandemic with millions of dead, war in Ukraine, huge scale corruption ( Pandora papers), COP26, an attempted coup in a supposedly liberal democracy to name just a few things from this decade, and a racially motivated murder by a policeman in the US is your pick for "the story of the decade" 2 years in? Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the planet doesn't care that much (beyond initial compassion) about racial problems in the US.
Ukraine war is a bigger story, just slipped my mind.
The Floyd story is bigger than a murder though, at least 19 people died in the ensuing protests, over 10 thousand were arrested, and there was a few billion in property damage.
Judging by personal experience a large portion of humanity gets their worldview from memes which are most certainly not produced by the aforementioned institutions.
I agree with you, but we also need to agree that even if you include G, YT, F; that probably would up the percentage to even higher levels and I would argue that they should be included in the cartel behavior because they and the likes of Twitter are all heavy censors/“publishers” that make it explicit how far they are willing to go to control what supposedly sovereign adults are allowed/can see.
Yeah but they choose what, from all that produced stuff, you will see and not-see. Which is a pretty big deal. Maybe bigger control than the producers.
Agree. The problem is the producers have been allowed to vertically align a distribution channel (Disney+, Paramount+, HBOMax, etc.), so it's not clearly distinguished. Google and Facebook are distributors of content, and the distributors control what people see.
The previous poster does have a point though. A lot of the 'news' people see on Facebook and the like are simply shared from other news outlets on facebook. Facebook doesn't produce the news but it disseminates it.
Because of this some countries even wanted to impose a facebook tax. Like Australia.
That is /so/ much nonsense. Doesn't matter how you editorialize by controlling what people see including with a trained algorithm optimized for "engagement" that tends to be pretty similar to "outrage." The second you "promote" a wider engagement on any article or topic at the expense of another you aren't pure or anything like it. And we'd be heroically naive if we really were willing to bet our own lives on someone not "tweaking" the algo for their own beliefs along the chain somewhere. I know I would if I saw too many pro-nazi content promoted, for example and that is editorial with nothing at all "pure" about it.
FB has never, ever been a "purely a platform" other than in their own PR releases. Censoring because politicians tell them to do it is a wholly different issue on top of that.
It's always been like that, from the very beginning. They never just let true laissez-faire with the news on the site, like they pretended to sometimes and it looked like a story "went viral" like out of control. The only time I remember a story really getting out of the control of the editor, was on reddit in the thread about tips waiters received from a certain race. Just hit a nerve like what the fuck, like they found out the conspiracy behind Santa Claus, the existence of stereotypes doesn't guarantee that reality is to the exact contrary. Patterns emerged with no machine learning, just thousands of screams into the void, which wasn't quite that empty a void. Those waiters weren't alone, and this was back when reddit was less bot-infested, it always has been and it always hasn't been, but back then it was harder to do a robotic painfully sincere tone. I do remember one argument against the current of that thread, one among hundreds, like Social Justice short circuit. If you tell someone it's just him with 9 bad experiences for every 1 good experience, just statistics, and for that to work of course you need them not to know more statistics like statistical estimates for the probability the statistics report can be proven to be a lie with very little data, you must never let them talk to anyone about their uniquely unlucky misfortune. You can make people really stupid by teaching them bad statistics but in groups it doesn't work. So on that note, Facebook and all the others have to keep an eye out and always moderate. And you know? I did that myself once, there was a site connecting travelers to people who wanted stuff from abroad, like a marketplace, and nobody moderated it for a while, I finally go and it's disgusting, all scammers, buyers and sellers everybody is a scammer, like I needed to blacklist the user database and start from nothing. So if I had done some regex to look for blatant stuff, I might have been able to salvage more of it.
I suppose the unmoderated self-image Facebook (and everyone else) tries to project, beyond being about reducing wage moneys by getting "users" to "generate" "content", is that it looks fresher, more meritocratic, anything could rise to the top, nowadays the obsession with virality is much less than six years ago but everyone buys into the fifteen minutes of fame thing.
I've never understood this statement. Do you have any trusted sources of news? Are you not able to read them directly on the web?
Maybe you're just saying you want news about X, and you're not sure where to find a source that can tell you about that, and this is where you find "control". What kind of control are you talking about here? Deliberate? Accidental? Algorithmic? Censoring?
They are a filtering function applied on top of primary content producers.
However, in the case of these six primary content producers, the distributors don't really do any filtering.
So, yes, the premise of the OP is correct. Six companies produce ~all of the media you consume, with a couple of distributor companies that deliver that media to you. If you're concerned about homogeneity of thought in media, you should be looking at the market share of the primary producers.
No google/youtube? No twitter? No facebook? Is this article from the past? Most people do not get their information from the television and so I doubt these six control most of anything.