Media Conglomeration

Movies and television dominate our society. They inform us of the news, current events, social trends and great occurences our or daily lives. Movies give us new worlds to escape to every day, and create entertainment that houses a multi billion dollar industry. Every screen we view is packed with media messages that durastically affect the way we live, and conglomeration has affected these messages greatly.

The idea of conglomeration is to expand your company by owning many entities. While Paramount, Disney, Columbia, 20th century fox, Universal, and Warner dominate the movie industry, Disney, NBC Universal, News Corp, Time Warner, and Viacom all dominate the cable and television world. These six movie producing companies produce almost all for the major films, receveing most of the industries profits. The cable companies own many many networks, making it finacially possible to have many different stations to appeal to almost any viewer. Conglomeration itself has had very positive finacial affects on the industry. It allows for the networks to survive through finacial hardships, while having enough money to put a lot of effort into every creative idea they concieve, which helps to up keep the quality of films and shows produced. It creates both a safety net, and a potential quality gaurantee for the industry.

Negatively, conglomeration really controls the industry. With very little companies controlling such large entities, they get to pick and choose, or essentially censor what they show. If they do not like the media messages behind a film, they can choose not produce or aid in the producing of it, something that could greatly hurt the final quality of the movie. It has also allowed for the companies to control the media messages sent to society, which greatly affect our social views and standards.

Whether or not conglomeration has been a positive or negative thing for the movie industry, it certainly has created a powerful organization and lobby that currently seems here to stay.