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In the 1880s, Benjamin Wonsal, a Polish cobbler, and his wife, Pearl Eichelbaum, brought their family to America. The New World promised a fresh start, and in the next century, four of their sons would give credence to the myth of America as the land of opportunity, a land that enabled the humblest of immigrants to achieve great power and wealth—though that story would not be punctuated with a standard happy ending.

In 1903, Ben and Pearl’s three oldest sons (Hirsz, Aaron, and Szmul) pooled their resources to purchase a motion picture projector. With this device, they traveled through the hinterlands of Ohio and Pennsylvania exhibiting films like The Great Train Robbery. Nickel by nickel, they more than recovered their investment, and by 1907—the year the family name was changed to Warner—the brothers used their savings to open their first permanent movie theater. In 1918, the men now known as Harry, Albert, and Sam Warner—along with younger brother, Jack—relocated to Hollywood, where they opened a studio. In 1925, the visionary Sam convinced his siblings to gamble their profits on a new technology that was destined to forever change the movies. Thanks to this daring investment, Warner Brothers Pictures would release The Jazz Singer, the world’s first talkie, in 1927. Starring Al Jolson, the game-changing film told the bittersweet story of Jewish assimilation into the American melting pot. Tragically, Sam Warner (the brother most responsible for the studio’s venture into sound) died just two days before the film’s triumphant opening.

In forcing the conversion to sound, the Warner brothers unleashed a change that swept away many of the stars and studios that had dominated the silent era. On their ruins, a new movie oligopoly emerged made up of a handful of vertically integrated movie companies that would be called the “Big Five.” Warner Brothers Pictures enjoyed membership in this elite group and became home to the gangster film and hard-boiled stars like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, and Porky Pig also enhanced the Warner’s brand during this period in the hugely popular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon series. In 1942, the studio produced the greatest of Hollywood’s patriotic wartime romances, Casablanca.

During the postwar period, Warner Brothers Pictures, like the rest of Hollywood, suffered from the competition of television and the inquisition of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accusing film artists of communist propaganda. But the saddest moment in the family business, at least since Sam’s death, came in 1956 when Jack double-crossed Harry and Albert to seize total control of the studio. Harry’s collapse from a mild heart attack on learning of Jack’s betrayal sent his health on a fatal tailspin that would culminate in his death in 1958.

Jack sold the studio in 1966 to Seven Arts Productions for $32 million, and the Warner brand took on a life of its own separate from its founding brothers. Marked by acquisition, takeover, and merger, the brand would survive several incarnations: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts (1966), Warner Communication (1972), Time Warner (1990), AOL Time Warner (2000), and again Time Warner (2003). A decade after the disastrous merger with AOL, a brand that quickly declined, Time Warner still ranks as the world’s second largest entertainment conglomerate in terms of revenue (behind Disney).

TIME WARNER AND DISNEY ARE TWO EXAMPLES OF ENORMOUSLY SUCCESSFUL entertainment conglomerates that have survived years of leadership changes and power struggles. But not all of the mergers, takeovers, and acquisitions that have swept through the global media industries in the last twenty years have capitalized on the histories and reputations of the corporations involved. Take, for instance, the ill-timed purchase of MySpace by News Corp. in 2005. Paying $580 million for what was then the world’s most popular social media site, Rupert Murdoch would watch a newcomer named Mark Zuckerberg (and his site Facebook) reduce the value of MySpace to $35 million, the price Justin Timberlake and Specific Media, Inc., paid for the service in 2011. Despite such spectacular exceptions, many other cases of ownership convergence have provided even more economic benefit to the massive multinational corporations that dominate the current media landscape. As a consequence, we currently find ourselves enmeshed and implicated in an immense media economy characterized by consolidation of power and corporate ownership in just a few hands. This phenomenon, combined with the advent of the Internet, has made our modern media world markedly distinct from that of earlier generations—at least in economic terms. Not only has a handful of media giants—from Time Warner to Google—emerged, but the Internet has permanently transformed the media landscape. The Internet has dried up newspapers’ classified-ad revenues; altered the way music, movies, and TV programs get distributed and exhibited; and forced almost all media businesses to rethink the content they will provide and how they will provide it.

In this chapter, we explore the developments and tensions shaping this brave new world of mass media by: