In journalism, mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence many people and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought.[1] The term is used to contrast with alternative media.
The term is often used for large news conglomerates, including newspapers and broadcast media, that underwent successive mergers in many countries. The concentration of media ownership has raised concerns of a homogenization of viewpoints presented to news consumers. Consequently, the term mainstream media has been used in conversation and the blogosphere, sometimes in oppositional, pejorative or dismissive senses, in discussion of the mass media and media bias.
In the United States, movie production is known to have been dominated by major studios since the early 20th century; before that, there was a period in time which Edison's Trust monopolized the industry.[citation needed] In the early 21st century, the music and television industries was subject to media consolidation, with Sony Music Entertainment's parent company merging their music division with Bertelsmann AG's BMG to form Sony BMG, and Warner Bros. Entertainment's The WB and CBS Corp.'s UPN merging to form The CW. In the case of Sony BMG there existed a "Big Five", later "Big Four", of major record companies, while The CW's creation was an attempt to consolidate ratings and stand up to the "Big Four" of American network (terrestrial) television (although the CW was actually partially owned by one of the Big Four in CBS). In television, the vast majority of broadcast and basic cable networks, over a hundred in all, are controlled by eight corporations: Fox Corporation, The Walt Disney Company (which includes the ABC, ESPN, FX and Disney brands), National Amusements (which owns Paramount Global), Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal), Warner Bros. Discovery, E. W. Scripps Company, Altice USA, or some combination thereof.[2]
Media mergers and concentration in the United States
Over time the rate of media mergers has increased, while the number of media outlets has also increased. This has resulted in a higher concentration of media ownership, with fewer companies owning more media outlets.[3]
Some critics, such as Ben Bagdikian, assailed concentration of ownership, arguing that large media acquisitions limit the information accessible to the public.[4] Other commentators, such as Ben Compaine and Jack Shafer, find Bagdikian's critique overblown.[4] Shafer noted that U.S. media consumers have a wide variety of news sources, including independent national and local sources.[4] Compaine argues that, based on economic metrics such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, the media industry is not very highly concentrated and did not become more concentrated during the 1990s and 2000s.[4] Compaine also points out that most media mergers are not purely acquisitions, but also include divestitures.[4]
One of the biggest mergers/acquisitions in the mainstream media world was Disney Acquiring 21st Century Fox and all of their assets. One of the main things that was accomplished with this merger was completing the rights to the rest of the Marvel movie franchise. Previously Disney did not have the rights to franchises such as X-Men and certain Spider-Man movie rights. With the acquisition they now do. 21st Century Fox was purchased for 71.3 billion dollars in March 2019.
The "Big five"
This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(March 2022)
(*) As of 2020, Two Murdoch companies, with publishing assets and Australian media assets going to News Corp, and broadcasting assets going to Fox Corporation.[8]
$39.4 billion ($9 billion News Corp [9] and $30.4 billion 21st Century Fox [10])
Trust in the media declined in the 1970s, and then again in the 2000s. Since the 2000s, distrust in the media has been polarized, as Republicans have grown substantially more distrustful of the media than Democrats.[12]
United Kingdom
In the UK, during 1922, after the closure of many radio stations, the British Broadcasting Corporation started its first daily radio transmission and started to grow an audience.[13] Later that year John Reith, a Scottish engineer, would be appointed the first General Manager for the BBC.[13] Later on January 1, 1927, the BBC was fully established by Royal Charter and renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation with Reith as the first Director-General.[13] During November 1936 the BBC began to expand into television broadcasting and was the first broadcaster to start the trend of a regularly scheduled TV service.[14]
Today the BBC is one of two chartered public broadcasting companies in the United Kingdom. The second is ITV, Independent Television, which was established in 1955 as the first public commercial television company after the Television act of 1954 in an effort to break up the monopoly the BBC had on television broadcasting, gaining fifteen regional broadcasting licenses in less than twenty years.[15][16] Today the BBC and ITV are the two free to air digital services offered to everyone in the United Kingdom and each other's biggest competitors. The BBC has nine national television channels, BBC three, the first channel to switch from television to online, an interactive channel, ten national and forty local radio stations, BBC Online, and BBC Worldwide.[17] ITV currently holds thirteen of the fifteen regional broadcasting licenses in the United Kingdom that carries their multiple channels including ITV, ITVhub, ITV2, ITVBe, ITV 3, ITV4, CITV, ITV Encore, Britbox, a video-on-demand service in collaboration with the BBC to bring British television content to the United States and Canada, and Cirkus, their own video-on-demand service.[18]
Sky Group Limited is a British media and telecommunications conglomerate, which is a subsidiary of the American conglomerate Comcast, and headquartered in Isleworth. It has operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Sky is Europe's largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster by revenue, with 23 million subscribers and more than 31,000 employees as of 2019. The company is primarily involved in satellite television, producing and broadcasting. The current CEO is Dana Strong.
The original incarnation of News Corporation was an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Prior to its split in 2013, it was the world's largest media company in terms of total assets and the world's fourth largest media group in terms of revenue. It had become a media powerhouse since its inception, dominating the news, television, film, and print industries.
Concentration of media ownership, also known as media consolidation or media convergence, is a process wherein fewer individuals or organizations control shares of the mass media. Research in the 1990s and early 2000s suggested then-increasing levels of consolidation, with many media industries already highly concentrated where a few companies own much of the market. However, since the proliferation of the Internet, smaller and more diverse new media companies maintain a larger share of the overall market.
Major film studios are production and distribution companies that release a substantial number of films annually and consistently command a significant share of box office revenue in a given market. In the American and international markets, the major film studios, often known simply as the majors or the Big Five studios, are commonly regarded as the five diversified media conglomerates whose various film production and distribution subsidiaries collectively command approximately 80 to 85% of U.S. box office revenue. The term may also be applied more specifically to the primary motion picture business subsidiary of each respective conglomerate.
Searchlight Pictures, Inc. is an American independent film production and distribution company owned by the Walt Disney Studios sub-division of Disney Entertainment, a business segment of the Walt Disney Company. Founded in 1994 as Fox Searchlight Pictures for 20th Century Fox, the studio focuses primarily on producing, distributing, and acquiring specialty films.
Carlton Communications plc was a British media company. It was led by Michael P. Green and listed on the London Stock Exchange from 1983 until 2 February 2004, when it was bought by Granada plc in a corporate takeover to form ITV plc. Carlton shareholders gained approximately 32% of ITV plc.
A media conglomerate, media company, media group, or media institution is a company that owns numerous companies involved in mass media enterprises, such as music, television, radio, publishing, motion pictures, video games, theme parks, or the Internet. The weekly magazine The Nation commented, "Media conglomerates strive for policies that facilitate their control of the markets around the world."
Fox Television Stations, LLC is a group of television stations in the United States owned-and-operated by the Fox Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of the Fox Corporation.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, during the network era of American television, there were three commercial broadcast television networks – NBC, CBS, ABC – that due to their longevity and ratings success are informally referred to as the "Big Three". The three networks' dominance was interrupted with the launch of Fox in 1986, leading it to join them as one of the expanded "Big Four", while the viewership shares of all the major broadcast networks declined over the following years.
The second incarnation of CBS Corporation was an American multinational media company with interests primarily in commercial broadcasting, publishing, and television production. It was formed on December 31, 2005, as the legal successor of the original Viacom, following the spin-off of the second incarnation of Viacom; both CBS Corporation and the second Viacom were controlled by National Amusements, a theater company owned by billionaire Sumner Redstone.
In the broadcasting industry, an owned-and-operated station usually refers to a television or radio station owned by the network with which it is associated. This distinguishes such a station from an affiliate, which is independently owned and carries network programming by contract.
Disney General Entertainment Content (DGEC), formerly ABC Group, Disney–ABC Television Group and the second incarnation of Walt Disney Television, is part of Disney Entertainment, a division of The Walt Disney Company that oversees its owned-and-operated television content, assets and sub-divisions.
In the United States, owned-and-operated television stations constitute only a portion of their parent television networks' station bodies, due to ownership limits imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Currently, the total number of television stations owned by any company can only reach a maximum of 39% of all U.S. households; in the past, the ownership limit was much lower, and was determined by a specific number of television stations rather than basing the limits on total market coverage.
Media cross-ownership is the common ownership of multiple media sources by a single person or corporate entity. Media sources include radio, broadcast television, specialty and pay television, cable, satellite, Internet Protocol television (IPTV), newspapers, magazines and periodicals, music, film, book publishing, video games, search engines, social media, internet service providers, and wired and wireless telecommunications.
On December 3, 2009, telecommunications company Comcast announced its intent to acquire mass media company NBC Universal from General Electric (GE). The acquisition was subject to scrutiny from activists and government officials; their concerns primarily surrounded the potential effects of the vertical integration that the acquisition could create, as Comcast is also heavily involved in cable television and internet services in many media markets. The deal went through on January 28, 2011, resulting in Comcast owning 51% of the company until March 19, 2013, when GE divested its stake to give Comcast sole ownership. Through this acquisition, Comcast gained ownership of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the film studio Universal Pictures, cable channels such as Syfy, CNBC and MSNBC, and Universal Parks & Resorts, among other assets owned by NBC Universal. It has also integrated its own cable channels – including E! and Golf Channel – into NBC Universal. As a result of the acquisition, NBC Universal slightly changed its name to "NBCUniversal", rendered in camel case, to indicate the integration between NBC and Universal Studios.
Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc., which did business as 21st Century Fox (21CF), was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate based in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was one of the two companies formed on June 28, 2013, following a spin-off of the publishing assets of the old News Corporation as News Corp.
News Corporation, stylized as News Corp, is an American mass media and publishing company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The company was formed on June 28, 2013, following a spin-off of the media outlets of the original News Corporation as 21st Century Fox (21CF). Operating across digital real estate information, news media, book publishing, and cable television, News Corp's notable assets include Dow Jones & Company, which is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal; News UK, publisher of The Sun and The Times; News Corp Australia; and REA Group, operator of realestate.com.au, realtor.com, and book publisher HarperCollins.
The attempted acquisition of Tribune Media by Sinclair Broadcast Group was a proposed broadcast media transaction between Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media. Formally announced on May 8, 2017, the $3.9 billion deal would have resulted in Sinclair owning—or having operational control over—stations available in 72% of all households with a television set in the United States.
Fox Corporation is an American multinational mass media company headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Incorporated in Delaware, it was formed as the portion of 21st Century Fox that was not acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2019. The company is controlled by the Murdoch family via a family trust with 39.6% ownership share, and by Rupert Murdoch himself to the effect of almost 40%.
The Fox Entertainment Group (FEG) was an American entertainment company specialized in filmed entertainment owned by 21st Century Fox. Following the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney, the group's assets were dispersed to various Disney units. The film studios 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Blue Sky Studios were transferred to Walt Disney Studios, while Fox Star Studios transferred to Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer & International.
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