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Until the 1980s, antitrust rules attempted to ensure diversity of ownership among competing businesses. Sometimes this goal was achieved in media industries. In the mid-1980s, for instance, the Justice Department broke up AT&T’s century-old monopoly, creating competition in the telephone industry. Other times this goal was not achieved. For example, monopolies persisted among local newspaper and cable companies. But overall, there has been much more consolidation than competition in the world of mass media.

One reason is that twentieth-century antitrust laws have been unevenly applied in media industries, forcing competition in some industries while allowing consolidation in others. For example, as the Justice Department broke up AT&T to create competition in the telephone industry, it also authorized several mass media mergers that concentrated power in the hands of a few behemoths. These included General Electric’s purchase of RCA/NBC in the 1980s, Disney’s acquisition of ABC for $19 billion in 1995, and Time Warner’s buying of Turner Broadcasting for $7.5 billion in 1996. In 2001, AOL acquired Time Warner for $106 billion—the largest media merger in history at the time. In 2011, cable giant Comcast purchased a majority share of NBC Universal, once the deal was approved by regulatory agencies.

As traditional mass media corporations have grown bigger, in the twenty-first century we’ve also seen the rise of new media powerhouses. Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook aren’t experts at creating media programming, but they’ve envisioned new ways for us to experience media content—buying content from their retail stores (e.g., the iTunes store and Amazon.com), consuming content on their innovative devices (e.g., the iPad, the Kindle Fire, a Google Android mobile phone), and linking us to other media content (via Google search, and our friends on Facebook). Imagine experiencing the mass media without using a product or service of one of these companies, and you begin to understand how this “digital turn,” with these four companies leading the way, has transformed the mass communication environment in less than a decade (see “Converging Media Case Study: Shifting Economics”).