Corporate Ownership of Mass Media

Corporate Ownership of Mass Media

It is my opinion that there is bias in mass communication due to corporate ownership. We as a population cannot trust media sources to fully educate us due to the roles and biases that large corporations play in mass popular media today. If there are larger corporations running things, there may also be ulterior motives for disclosing or not disclosing information. An example is the power of General Electric over NBC-TV, in which it did not allow a song to run on its comedy show, Saturday Night Live. The song, entitled "Conspiracy Theory Rock" has verses like "A media-opoly. The whole media's controlled by a few corporations on network TV you'll rarely hear anything bad about the nuclear industry, or when GE was boycotted for operating nuclear bomb plants I hear GE made the bullets that shot JFK" etc.
This obviously shows the power of censorship, GE did not want this information made available on network TV, especially on a station in which they own and have the power to control its content. Therefore, we as the consumer do not receive valuable, possibly influential information about a company or product. It is also my opinion that information is given to the public in bits and pieces. If a reporter writes a story, then it goes to the editor who then takes out what may be a detriment to the parent company and the story no longer has all of the information that was intended for the consumer. We will not know the entire story unless we do more research. It seems the only way to find out anything is on the internet. Although huge corporations own ISPs, there are still message boards around that like minded people can share their views and research so the entire story is finally heard. According to an article I read recently, the New York Times has been accused of soft-peddling news about the Red Sox because they are part owners. The newspaper would never write disparaging comments about the hand that feeds them. In short the only way to rectify the problem is to become more aware of the news around us. I feel that we need to become aware of the effects of corporate ownership of the media and not get sucked into the whirlwind effect created by these large corporations. We I need to take it upon ourselves to question the motives and biases of our information sources, be it entertainment, news, or any other type of media information we I take for granted. We need to actively search for all sides to stories important to us, and discover that there are alternatives to the everyday repetition we are so used to.