Recently I wrote an article here on the blog on what I refer to as "The Information Gap" in society. It is about the knowledge gap that exists between those on the inside of the system (the information rich) and those of us on the outside (the information poor). Now Business Insider runs this article which is a great illustration of one of the contributing factors to this information gap.
The article points out that six major corporations control 90% of all the media in America. This kind of concentration is similar to the concentration that exists among the big banks where just a few banks control over 90%of all trading assets in the country. The concentration of wealth in just a few banks speaks to the so called "wealth gap". The concentration of media control is a contributing factor to the "information gap."
Here are a few quotes from the Business Insider article.
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"This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes from the same six sources.
That's consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.
NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn't own AOL, so Huffington Post isn't affiliated with them.
But the fact that a few companies own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says. While some big sites, like Digg and Reddit aren't owned by any of the corporations,Time Warner owns news sites read by millions of Americans every year.
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My added comments:
This fact is why when I do research for articles on this blog I look at both mainstream and alternative news sites. If you spend any time at all doing this kind of research, you quickly realize that the mainstream media is not the home for all truth. In fact, as we can see from this Business Insider article, it's not really that hard to keep important information from the public if just a handful of executives at six corporations decide to do so. Alternative media sources have helped fill that gap to some degree even if there is also a "wild west" aspect to some alternative media sites. That's OK. It forces people to do their own due diligence to separate high quality information from low quality information. Either is better than no information at all.
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