When looking at today’s media it is important not to overlook the role of funding and ownership in the products you consume. To study this topic we are going to look at film, this is a category of media that encompasses products such as movies, television, and more. Whether we like it or not the whole world of film media is controlled by giant companies that own many stations or sources, these are known as conglomerates. The main ones we will look at are Disney, News Corporation, and Time Warner. These huge conglomerates have large impacts on what we see daily and their effects can be both harmful due to the bias they create and beneficial to people within companies and making money.
With having these super big conglomerates controlling most of what we see on several channels this can most commonly lead to bias among what they show. Most commonly we experience a concept called the bias of inclusion where the companies only advertise and show things that fit their agenda. They have the power to completely control all their viewers and advertisements. For example, Time Warner owns the very popular news station CNN that is known for its liberal-leaning beliefs while New Corporation owns the station Fox which is very right-leaning. This means that once a person tunes into Fox they will receive news from a conservative point of view and see advertisements from other businesses with the same views, there will rarely be advertisements from liberal companies because it does not support their agenda and vice versa with CNN. This bias is so widespread in the conglomerate that it leads to large groups of ignorant people who are controlled by large media corporations who just want to make a profit off of them. This is where another issue of media ownership comes in, over half of the time the conglomerates are interested in the money, not the people. They will do anything to maximize profits even if that means adjusting content to get advertisers. They can also participate in other types of bias such as omission where they omit or get rid of potentially harmful information about their parent company so they can continue making more money for the conglomerate. They can adapt or change to complaints of viewers and advertisers to continuing getting profits off of them. It is pretty harmful to people at home because they are for the most part unaware of true motives and may believe everything they see and think it is more them but, no conglomerate truly has people in their best interest. It can also be very restrictive to the shows within a conglomerate because they are forced to keep up a certain agenda to keep their advertisers so they won’t get in trouble for not making enough money. With these disadvantages of media ownership, we still have some beneficial parts of these conglomerates. It is easier to advertise for other stations and companies on all their platforms because of processes such as cross-promotion and cross-advertising. Cross-promotion is when big conglomerates take advantage of owning a variety of sources to advertise their own shows and movies within their channels. For example, you may see an advertisement commercial on ESPN for movies on Lifetime. This is very strange because ESPN is for sports and Lifetime is for family movies but, they are both owned by Disney. This makes it easier as a whole for Disney to advertise to more people why also spending less money. Conglomerates can also be somewhat helpful to people within them, as long as it makes them look good and gain money, as they can have access to all the different companies, stations, and channels they own. We saw this with Miley Cyrus as she matured and moved on from children's shows to be a singer, she remained within the Disney companies. This helped her have easy contacts and Disney make more money, but it still could have been a restrictive deal for Miley. In conclusion, the sometimes hidden involvement of large conglomerations in the ownership of film media can have some large effects on their products. One huge, powerful company controlling a lot of flim sources can lead to extreme bias in what they show which controls people and restricts the individual stations. But, this same large powerful company can effectively profit off cross-promotion and advertising while helping people within their realm. It is hard to say whether these large corporations help or hurt us in the long run, but they are way too powerful to even try and takedown.
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AuthorAbigail Hopper Archives
April 2021
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