from Russia Insider:

Back in 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the American media, but by 1992 the number had dropped by half, and by 2000 there were left only 5 corporations wielding totalitarian control over the media. Their control covers all the means for expression of speech and ideas: television, movies, radio, books, music, news feeds. Those figures refer to everything except for print media, newspapers and magazines, which would add a couple of more oligarchs to the small group of media controlling owners. Some of the Big Five media corporations are in themselves also print media owners.

The present article follows on my article on the extreme concentration of ownership in general in the United States, which was published in parallel with the present one. That article illustrates how the ownership of all America’s major corporations has been concentrated in incredibly few hands. To make matters worse, those business corporations (in themselves oligopolies) are as a rule owned by the same set of investors, which in turn are cross-owned by each other (oligopolistic investors). There then is a situation where oligopolies own oligopolies.

What was said above about the extreme concentration of ownership obviously also holds true for the media (including print). I reported there that institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 firms, which roughly correspond to America’s 500 largest corporations. (*1). Both BlackRock and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America’s largest 2,000 publicly traded corporations. These same institutional investors largely control the media, television, film, publishing, telecommunications and Internet, as it will be shown below. (*2).

In media there is therefore ultimately the situation that just a few persons hold the power over the entire media.

We do not have the means to untangle the whole web of control connections to get to the ultimate few. However, what I present here should be damning enough. This report shows beyond any doubt that an incredibly small group of oligarchs have amassed all the most important media assets in the United States. Whether the ultimate owners are a yet smaller group than it would seem at this first glance does not alter the picture to any significant degree. What is clear is that just a few oligarchs now have the means to exercise a totalitarian control over speech and ideas in the United States (and increasingly globally, too). In this connection, I will not digress into a substantial discussion of how this totalitarian control manifests itself. For now suffice to allude to the multitude of instances when the media has through systematic campaigns of propaganda for war coerced the political leaders to declare wars (or to wage undeclared wars): Iraq, Libya, Syria, to mention just a few relatively recent ones.

The continuous vilification of Russia’s President Putin and Russia as a nation is another of their campaigns of war propaganda. More recently, similar patterns of vilification have been extended to the treatment of China and its President Xi. The Russia hoax, that is, the attempted coup against US President Trump by alleging his election campaign colluded with Russia, was founded in totalitarian media lies.

Other examples of agendas that the media pursue by way of abusing their monopoly on expression include a one-sided fact-free propagation of climate change alarmism and gender identity politics to the extent of denying obvious biological facts. These were but a few examples of the totally agenda-driven reporting by the concentrated oligarch media. In an article where he maintains that “America is a dictatorship by its super-rich,” American writer and investigative historian Eric Zuesse maintains that the US regime has elevated propaganda lies to the role of primary means of coercion, obviously seconded by its ample use of violence both domestically and around the globe. It is through this incredible concentration of media that the regime has achieved a virtual monopoly on lies, which it employs to justify and varnish that violence.

National Amusements

The biggest media owners are Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, the oligarch Rupert Murdoch,with News Corp and Fox Corporation, the oligarch Sumner Redstone via his National Amusements Inc., which holds both Viacom Inc., CBS Corporation, and Warner Media (owned by AT&T),

Comcast – a former General Electric subsidiary – owns among other assets NBC and the British based Sky TV. It provides consumer cable television, telephone, internet, and wireless services under the brand name Xfinity. Comcast is America’s largest provider of cable internet access servicing 40% of the market. The film studio Universal Pictures (aka Universal Studios) is a NBC subsidiary. The major shareholders of Comcast are listed in below table. (The shareholder data in this and other tables are sourced, when other source not mentioned, from www.stockzoa.com).

The Walt Disney Company is the world’s largest media conglomerate in terms of revenue. It’s original asset is the Walt Disney Studios and Disney theme parks. Over the years it has added on among others, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, ABC broadcast network, ESPN, National Geographic network, and several other cable TVs. Disney like all the other media oligopolists are also involved in publishing and many other fields of business.

Walt Disney acquired the Fox Entertainment Group (including 20th Century Fox film studio) and National Geographic Partners from 21st Century Fox which had come to being after News Corporation was split in 2013.

In connection with the split of the original News Corporation and the sale of above mentioned assets to Walt Disney, two other companies emerged. These are Fox Corporation and the new News Corp, both controlled by the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Fox Corporations owns the Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox Television Stations, and Fox News. The assets of News Corp include Dow Jones & Company (publisher of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, News UK (publisher of The Sun and The Times), News Corp Australia, Realtor.com and HarperCollins.

Viacom Inc. and CBS Corporation are both controlled by the oligarch Sumner Redstone through his National Amusements Inc. Redstone has cemented his control of those corporations through an arrangement where the oligarch owns the so-called Class A or voting shares whereas the other investors keep the Class B common stock, whose voting rights are severely curtailed.  As of December 2016, National Amusements (and it’s not funny), directly and through subsidiaries, held 79.8% of the Class A voting shares of Viacom Inc., corresponding to only 10% of the overall equity. In CBS Corporations, National Amusements, held 79.5% of the Class A voting shares and 2.4% of the Class B non‐voting shares, which constituted 9.1% of the overall equity.

In the case of Viacom, Redstone’s National Amusements holds 10% of the total equity by which he wields control over the resting 90%. In CBS Corporation National Amusement controls the company with 9% of total equity.

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