As the Disney-ABC merger demonstrates, recent years have brought a surplus of billion-dollar takeovers and mergers, including those between Time Inc. and Warner Communication, Time Warner and Turner, AOL and Time Warner, UPN and WB, Comcast and NBC Universal, Sirius and XM, Universal Music Group and EMI, and Yahoo! and Tumblr. This mergermania has accompanied stripped-down regulation, which has virtually suspended most ownership limits on media industries. As a result, a number of consumer advocates and citizen groups have raised questions about deregulation and ownership consolidation. Still, the 2008 financial crisis saw many of these megamedia firms overleveraged—that is, not making enough from stock investments to offset the debt they took on to add more companies to their empires. So in 2009, the New York Times Company tried to sell the Boston Globe, and Time Warner set AOL adrift. The divestment has continued: The Washington Post Company sold Newsweek, Disney unloaded Miramax, and News Corp. spun off its newspaper and publishing divisions.

One longtime critic of media mergers, Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, has argued that although there are abundant products in the market—thousands of daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, magazines, and book publishers—only a limited number of companies are in charge of those products.²⁴ Bagdikian and others fear that this represents a dangerous antidemocratic tendency in which a handful of media moguls wield a disproportionate amount of economic control. (See “Case Study—From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations”.) The News Corp. phone hacking scandal that came to light in 2011 in the United Kingdom illustrates media power gone awry, with corruption involving top company executives, police, and government officials.