Media Ownership Concentration Case Study

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Media ownership concentration basically is the trend which is rapidly growing – more and more of the privately owned media companies today are taken and dominated by the multimedia corporations. It means that the rise of transnational media conglomerates can be noticed clearly resulting in the large amount of media is being placed in fewer owners’ hands. Moreover, there is evident formation of alliances when different media companies are joined together into the global conglomerates. As mentioned before, one of those conglomerates is the Time Warner which we decided to take as our case of study. One could argue: is there are problem with the media ownership concentration if it is a natural outcome of globalisation growth. However, the main …show more content…

The significant question regarding this consequence is whose version of the world is being portrayed in the media content and are there any political or economical reasons behind that. Even more significant is the ideological implications of the media ownership concentration, which is especially relevant nowadays, in the time of new ideological conflicts in the world. Regarding the Time Warner example, the media concentration consequence of growing political and economical influence is also evident in that case. This media conglomerate had been accused of being politically biased several times. Time Warner is claimed to be liberally biased and thus received a lot of critique. It is perceived as a media corporation which deals with particular types of content better or worse depending on the provider’s political and financial relationship to the Time Warner Cable and the established power over it. (Sirota, …show more content…

This means that media conglomerates are generally oriented to focus on certain media content which would expand their market and satisfy the essential economic interests of owners. The media ownership concentration also leads to the profit-making attitude of the media content which sometimes results in promotion of certain content which is more profitable and will make more money. Time Warner is no exception in regard of its capitalistic approach towards journalism and media. “...Mega media giant Time Warner, which clearly looks at journalism as a profit center, not as serving the information needs of the nation. “ (McCall, 2014) This could be avoided if more emphasis of media corporations owning journalism would consider that journalism, even though is business, has a more important function than to increase the earnings. (McCall,

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