I was looking for this the other day – here’s a list of the companies owned by AOL Time Warner. It’s extraordinary. You can get similarly chilling information about other media conglomerates, like Clear Channel Communications and Disney.
Look at those charts and weep on Monday, when the FCC is expected to approve new regulations making it possible for those companies to have an even tighter grip on our sources of information. FCC chairman Michael Powell, a Bush administration appointee and good friend to the megacorporations, is ramming changes through that will relax the restrictions currently impeding companies wishing to own too many newspapers, television stations and radio stations in a single city. As the Register puts it, “it will be difficult to exercise democracy when [television] propagates only those biases that four or five multinational conglomerates wish to see propagated, and which are backed up by co-owned newspapers and radio stations.”
