Media Conglomerates Business Patterns and Strategies

The past several decades’ deregulation and intensifying competition in the U.S. media industry have created a wave of unprecedented mergers and acquisitions, leading the formation of a group of media conglomerates. Today, fewer than 10 powerful conglomerates dominate the U.S. media landscape, exerting oligopolistic control over public service media. Based on a complex web of interdependent business relations, different segments of conglomerates work with each other or with firms outside their organizations to provide a wide variety of products and services in the media marketplace. However, ever-increasing levels of media concentration raise a new question over the correlation between ownership and media content. Free market advocators have argued that media consolidation improves healthy, market-based competition, insisting that today’s media is far more competitive than 30 years ago, as evidenced by the diverse offerings of content and the explosion in the number of media outlets. …