hmm.. But they are bad in the sense of DEMOCRACY!

Democracy is what are country was built on..... and in our reading it states that, "Political narrowness inevitably leads to a narrow range of genuwine choices at elections and since meaningful voter choice is vital to sustain any democracy, to that extent, the contemporary mass media's constricted politics weaken the foundation of the democratic process.". Because they are so few corporations running everything, choice is very limited. There is not a proper representation of the entire news spectrum... What does make it onto the news is then accepted as what is the news, however there is a whole other side to the story many times that never gets told. The idea that ALL news isn't "newsworthy" is bad for the democratic process. All of this concentrated private power is almost troubling to think about. Do we, as viewers, really know what's going on in the world, or do we just think we know. Is what makes the news really even what matters, or is it what makes the media giants the most money? It's interesting to think about our media diets and all of the things we are consuming, why and what we believe and are faithful to.

A question of the danger of conglomeration.. Is it really all that negative?

Would we as viewers truly want to take in all that the world has to offer? I think we couldn't possibly process all of the information that is available at any given second..... I believe that this could be a possible perk to there only being the big 6. The idea that we have a little variety, but not too much variety. When people are given too many choices, they usually can't make a decision. In this direction then, it is good we only have 6 big corporations in control because that's probably all we could handle..... Okay.. that was a silly approach, of course I think more of the human mind, I believe more information is better and less bias is very important. Let's face it though, when we go to sell our selves(watch tv) we don't want to sift through the channels for something we MIGHT like, We want to turn on the t.v. and turn it to our favorite show and know it will be on at our specific time.... We have this reassuance because these media giants are so extremely huge.. Because they exist, they market to what we like to consume. That's why are favorite shows are on at 8:00p.m. Thursday night weekly etc. They are the reason we have 2 minutes of commercials instead of 20 and they make this possible for us.... SO I guess they arn't SOOOOO bad after all.

The DANGER of Conglomerations....

In our reading it talks about the idea of the BIG 6, it states that, "Mergers of this size further dwarfs news as merely another industrial byproduct. As dramatized by the case of the las angeles Times, the new mergers deepen the dangers of more deterioration of news as a handmaiden of its owners' corporate ambitions, endangering the future of the independent and diverse public information on which democracy depends"... This is indeed a problem.... It seems as though news is very much reflection the owners ambitions. If we truely had 6 (the big 6) individual dominant companies we would be in better shape than we are in. The truth is that there are six but they are all intertwined and joined in earning profit together which means to me that they are not 6 individuals but much less than that.... We more than likely probably have about 2 media giants, or even scarier of a thought would be that one company controls it all. There are laws against monopolyzing, but if 6 diff. companies independently own stock in each other then it seems they can go around the law. The reason this is so bad is that this means that all of our information is extremely limited by the owners of these companies, they obviously wouldn't air something that could crunch their numbers even if that something were beneficial to us as viewers. If our news reporting is narrow than our choices are also, meaning that we don't recieve ALL of the information ALL of the time..