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Should the Giant Media Companies Get Bigger?

For many years, there have been laws limiting the size of media companies, because these companies control the flow of information. Unless you live in a cave, you know those rules are the source of a fierce public battle. For business reasons, media companies want the rules changed so they can get bigger. Many advocacy groups are opposed to changing the laws. For a busy parent, it's tempting to ignore the issue of media conglomeration because it is complicated and technical. After all, what does one family have to do with the business practices of a gigantic transnational media giant?

The answer to that question is precisely the reason that parents should care about conglomeration. The larger the media companies grow, the less they are capable of responding to the pleas, protests, and suggestions of parents. When huge corporations own newspapers, TV channels, movie studios, and cable TV service providers, it's hard to believe they'll pay attention when parents raise concerns about the racy language and chilling violence on the latest prime time TV show. Not only is the size of the media giants intimidating, their cross-marketing business plans are extremely powerful. In the face of these interlinking media strategies, where seductive messages come from all sides at once, one disgruntled parent can feel like a bug on the windshield of a Mack Truck.

Media conglomeration means one company owns a large number of media outlets of different types. One of the controversial rules concerns the number of TV stations that a company can own in any one city. Imagine if one company owned every station in town. It's not difficult to see that family media choices would be limited. Even if every channel made an effort to be family-friendly-an unlikely scenario in an age when the media believe that sex and violence keep audiences in their seats-parents would still be faced with fewer choices for their children. Simply choosing good media over bad becomes much more difficult when only a handful of companies decide what those choices are.

I admit that the media giants can be responsible for some of the most family-friendly media choices out there. Disney, for example, is synonymous with great movies for kids. In the case of one media conglomerate at least, making money can coexist with paying attention to the values of parents. But not all the huge media corporations always see it this way. And in Disney's case, some of its subdivisions produce entertainment that many parents would find wildly inappropriate for children.

As parents, we need to tell our elected officials that we care about media choices. And we can tell the giant media companies, as loudly as possible, that we want them to pay attention to us. Lately, a solution to the downside of giant media is being offered by the government in the form of local control. That's a good sign. The more control we have over the media outlets

David Walsh, Ph.D. is the founder of the MediaWise Movement, a program of National Institute on Media and the Family (www.mediafamily.org). He has written seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio and television.