Mergermania has sparked criticism in some quarters (see “Media Literacy Case Study: From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations” on pages 488–489). Some opponents lament the limits of antitrust laws. Others decry consumers’ loss of control in the marketplace when just a few companies determine what messages and media content are produced. Still others warn against the infiltration of American culture and media messages into every corner of the globe.

The Limits of Antitrust Laws

Despite the intent of antitrust laws to ensure diversity of corporate ownership, companies have easily avoided these laws since the 1980s by diversifying their holdings and by forming local monopolies—especially in newspapers and cable. To accomplish this local control combined with megamedia mergers, media corporations developed well-polished and effective public relations and lobbying campaigns to get the public and lawmakers to back wave after wave of deregulation, thus weakening or stripping antitrust protections. These efforts have resulted in fewer voices in the marketplace and less competition among industry players.

Expanding through Diversification

Diversification, consolidation, and media partnerships promote oligopolies in which a few large companies control the majority of production and distribution of media content. Most media companies diversify among different media products (such as television stations and film studios), never fully dominating one particular media industry. Time Warner, for example, spreads its holdings among television programming, film, publishing, cable channels, and its Internet divisions. However, Time Warner competes directly with only a few other big companies, such as Disney, Viacom, and News Corp. And Comcast, following a series of mergers, not only has become the cable and broadband company that controls the path by which so many media products are streamed into the home but also, after buying NBC Universal, controls a big portion of the media products on that path.

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One prime example of a media partnership is Hulu.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal TV (Comcast), Fox Broadcasting, and Disney-ABC Television. Not only do these three owners of the video-streaming service offer content from the pantheon of networks they own, but they have several other “content partners” as well, including the CW and BBC networks.

This kind of economic arrangement makes it difficult for companies outside the oligopoly to compete in the marketplace. For example, an independent film production company may be unable to attract enough investors to get its movies distributed nationwide.

Building Local Monopolies

Antitrust laws aim to curb national monopolies, so most media monopolies today operate locally. Nearly every cable company has been granted monopoly status in its local community. These firms alone decide which channels are made available and what rates are charged. Independent voices have little opportunity or means to raise the questions that regulatory groups—such as the Justice Department and the FCC—need to hear in order to shape the laws.

A Vast Silence

Despite the concerns expressed by some critics, there has been little public debate overall about the tightening oligopoly structure of international media. Experts have identified two forces behind this vast hegemonic silence: citizens’ reluctance to criticize free markets because they equate them with democracy, and the often unclear distinction between how much choice and how much control consumers have in the marketplace.

Equating Free Markets with Democracy

Throughout the Cold War period in the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans refused to criticize capitalism, which they saw as synonymous with democracy. Any complaints about capitalism were viewed as an attack on the free marketplace, and attacks on the free marketplace in turn sounded like criticism of free speech. This was in part because business owners saw their right to operate in a free marketplace as an extension of their right to buy commercial speech in the form of advertising. This line of thinking, which originated in corporate efforts to equate capitalism with democracy, still casts a shadow over American culture today, making it difficult for many people to openly question the advertising-supported economic structure of the mass media.

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Debating Consumer Choice versus Consumer Control

In discussing free markets, economists distinguish between consumer control over marketplace goods and freedom of consumer choice: “The former requires that consumers participate in deciding what is to be offered; the latter is satisfied if [consumers are] free to select among the options chosen for them by producers.”⁸ Most Americans and the citizens of other economically developed nations clearly have choice: options among a range of media products. Yet the choices sometimes obscure the fact that consumers have limited control: power in deciding what kinds of media get created and circulated. Consumers thus have little ability to shape the messages conveyed through media products about what is important and how the world should work. Instead, they can only react to those messages.

Yet independent and alternative producers, artists, writers, and publishers have provided a ray of hope. When their work becomes even marginally popular, big media companies often capitalize on these innovations by acquiring it—which enables these works to get out to the public. Moreover, business leaders “at the top” depend on independent ideas “from below” to generate new product lines. Fortunately, a number of transnational corporations encourage the development of promising local artists.

Cultural Imperialism

The increasing dominance of American popular culture around the world has sparked heated debate in international circles. On the one hand, people in other countries seem to relish the themes of innovation and rebellion expressed in American media products, and the global spread of access to media (particularly the ease of digital documentation via mobile devices) has made it harder for political leaders to secretly repress dissident groups. On the other hand, American styles in fashion and food, as well as media fare, dominate the global market—a situation known as cultural imperialism. Today, numerous international observers contend that consumers in countries inundated by American-made movies, music, television, and images have even less control than American consumers. Even the Internet has a distinctively American orientation. The United States got a head start in deploying the Internet as a mass medium and has been the dominant force ever since. Although the Internet is worldwide and in many languages, the majority of the Web’s content is still in English; the United States controls the top domains, including .com and .org (without the requirement of having a nation-identifying domain name, such as .jp for Japan or .fr for France); and leading global sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and Wikipedia are all American in design.

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Defenders of American popular culture’s dominance argue that a universal culture creates a global village and fosters communication and collaboration across national boundaries. Critics, however, point out that two-thirds of the world’s population cannot afford most of the products advertised on American, Japanese, and European television. Yet they see, hear, and read about consumer abundance and middle-class values through TV and other media, including magazines and the Internet. Critics worry that the obvious disparities in economic well-being and the frustration that must surely come from not having the money to buy advertised products may lead to social unrest.