Corporately Owned Media’s marriage to the Global Economy

Corporately Owned Media’s marriage to the Global Economy

Imagine a world in which every inhabitant is in their own secluded little pod. Not really knowing what is going on with the rest of the world. The only way that people can have information inside their pods is by cables that runs through each of the pods and plugs them into the events that are happening worldwide. The catch with this cable is that all the information that is being fed is controlled by a shadowy individual who picks and chooses what content is fed into each individual pod.

This scenario sounds a bit like the 1999 movie “The Matrix” right? Well, replace the pods with our own lives, the cables with TV and the Internet and the shadowy individual with the major broadcasting companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and you now have 21st century Earth. We have to now realize that we do have access to an incredible amount of information, but it’s not all the information that is out there and it’s not all completely accurate.

It’s not uncommon for us to hear about thefts,murders,celebrity gossip and natural disasters every time we turn on the 6 o’clock news. The power and influence that news outlets and media in general have in the world has always been present, but has grown tremendously in the past decades. With the wide adoption of cable news and the Internet, people all over the globe have opened up the doors to their homes and let in a wide range of information into their daily lives. The “24 hour” news cycle is constantly going and feeding us insane amount of information. But do you really have a say as to what content you get and what content you don’t?

As of right now 6 major corporations own most of the media outlets and are making an incredible amount of money from them.

  • General Electric – $157 Billion in revenue
  • Walt Disney – $36.1 Billion in revenue
  • News Corp – $30.4 Billion in revenue
  • Time Warner – $25.8 Billion in revenue
  • Viacom – $13.6 Billion in revenue
  • CBS – $13 Billion in revenue

(Numbers based on 09 figures)

All 6 of these corporations own the major news networks (News Corp owns FOX,General Electric owns NBC, and Time Warner owns CNN) along with any other cable channel you can think of. How can we truly expect that our news and information be accurate/unbiased (as the News should be) if the news outlets are owned by major corporations who have everything to gain by making sure viewers don’t get an accurate portrayal of the world? We can’t, and that’s a problem.

Now you may be wondering why I’m taking the time to list out the 6 major corporations that own the news outlets. Well this leads into another huge problem plaguing the world, Corporate Capitalism. The main purpose that these and other major corporations have in the world economy is one thing and one thing only, to make more money. The downside to this is that unlike what is told to us everyday, Capitalism will not let money trickle down from the top earners into the pockets of every day people like me and you. In fact if that happened, the system would be broken. They way that Corporate Capitalism works is very simple, make as much money as you can and then hoard it for yourself or trade it amongst fellow corporations to gain more money. While at the same time, taking as much money as you possibly can from regular people and then just tell them that there’s not enough money to go around while you sit on billions and billions of dollars.

I know that right now your probably thinking that these two concepts (Corporate Capitalism and Corporation Owned Media) have little to do with each other or even nothing at all. But the way I see it is that if you control the media; If you control all the information that gets to people, You can then do everything in your power to keep the focus of off you and your insane amount of wealth. You can pick and choose what information gets fed to the masses and even obscure the fact that it’s because of you that people are facing economic hardships and put the blame on different parts of the community. If you control the media, you pretty much control the world, And if you control the world; Well there’s nothing stopping you from making all the money that you possibly can.

It may seem from what I’ve been saying that we are just at the mercy of corporations and there’s nothing that we can do in order to change this. Well that’s partly correct. We are at the mercy of big corporations but we now live in a time where the same types of communication opportunities that major corporations have are now available to us. To break out of our “pods” and end the total media isolation that we are all in we must speak out and use these tools, (internet,radio,video,print) to our advantage and call out the greed and devaluement of human life. We have to realize that there are way more of us (those who are struggling and work hard to survive) than there are of them (those who make Billions and keep it for themselves) and that by working together we can do something about it.

The tools for a revolution are at our fingertips, All we have to do is learn to use them and create a united front.


(Disclaimer: Everything written here is my own opinion, you may or may not agree with what I will say but I do encourage you to read through it with an open mind, Also, any feedback is greatly appreciated)

Written by Miguel Esteban Andrade


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