6 Corporations Control 90% of the Media in America

> Monopolies and oligopolies are crippling capitalism.

There's nothing happening now that is new. That has been repeating for 150 years post the Civil War industrial boom in the US. There are few examples of new, high competition industries not consolidating down to several big companies that stand above the rest.

Retail? Mom & Pop shops -> Walmart, Target, Sears, Amazon, BestBuy, Kroger, Costco, CVS, Walgreens, etc.

Software? Little companies circa 1970s, 1980s -> Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, etc

Search engines? Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, MSN, Inktomi, GoTo, etc. -> Google

Steel? Dozens of steel makers -> US Steel

Oil? Dozens of refiners -> Standard Oil

Automobiles? Hundreds of car makers -> Ford & GM

Thousands of radio stations -> SiriusXM, Pandora, Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon

Hundreds of auction companies -> eBay

A thousand newspaper classified ad sections -> Craigslist

A thousand computer makers -> Dell, HP, Gateway, IBM, Apple, etc

These are all the same conceptual scenario playing out.

That process is not in fact a bad thing. The only bad thing is if you allow the enlarged companies / winners (ie the companies with superior products/service/price/combination), to then prevent new competition through regulation (or direct violence). If you do that, then you get obnoxious airlines, or companies like Comcast, or crap automobiles such as what GM and Ford were producing for a few decades until a wave of foreign competition arrived (GM and Ford being prime examples of utilizing government to aggressive prevent competition).

There's no scenario where even bad Capitalism (usually a combination of abusive government and abusive companies conspiring) doesn't kill itself. US Steel for example was killed by potent, nimble, cheaper foreign competition. GM and Ford had to figure out how to make higher quality cars again, as Toyota (and others) stole a huge amount of their market.

I can't think of even a few examples where such consolidation has occurred, resulting in a horrible dominant product/company, in which the government hasn't played a primary role in ensuring said company's survival via regulatory protection. External to that, the market topples the eventual winners time and time again.

Kodak was a monster in photo/camera, now where are they? Sears, toast. US Steel, toast. Pennsylvania Railroad? Doesn't exist. Pan-am? Doesn't exist. Standard Oil? A bit player, split into pieces, in a far larger global oil market. Microsoft? The Windows empire has been largely neutralized by Apple, Android, Linux in general, etc. Intel? The ARM army has put them in a box. Cisco? They're being made increasingly irrelevant by innovations such as those by Facebook in the datacenter, software is eating their pricey hardware. IBM? Who? Xerox? Irrelevant, largely toppled by Japanese competition. Alcoa? Smashed by China etc. Ford and GM? A dozen big foreign competitors took half their market.

Brietbart and oann have strong republican bias but mises and reason don't? /:

The point is that big companies with financial backing will use market advantage to stifle competition before it gets a chance (e.g. buying up the spectrum for cell phones, lobbying to prevent broadband competitors, patenting very basic concepts, buying up competition in its infancy).

You can argue they missed the boat on buying youtube and putting it to their own ends (e.g. YouTube prime is only comcast subscribers). It sounds like you want to disagree with me, but my two points are [and you haven't really provided arguments against either]

1. There is insufficient competition in the market (cell phones, ISP, computer parts, and many others). Much of this is due to deliberate actions by larger companies to protect their pie.

2. The consolidation of media is bad for consumers, and its death is good. The level playing field of a public internet made all the difference.

I noticed that, too.

Clear Channel is also not Clear Channel anymore and do not own 1100 stations.

It is interesting the conversation it has started in this thread even though it is based on false and out of date information. I guess people just accept the infographic as reliable truth and go with it.

When I ditched cable TV about 7 years ago I lost track of these outlets. I can't say I've missed them. I occasionally open cnn.com if I'm bored, mostly because it's quick to type.

I have a (physical) subscription to the Economist, which is where I get all my serious news. I can't tell you how great it is to read the news without the page content shifting all around because of ads loading.