Blown Away

I was doing the reading for tomorrow earlier, and I just found myself completely shocked over the insane amount of conglomeration that has been going on. Looking at the exhibits from C&H page 41-43 just completely blew me away. I for one, had no idea that AOL and Disney alone own so many different sources and kinds of media. It just seems completely ridiculous how much power they have by owning so much of the media production, on so many levels. My roommate knew, but I had no idea that Disney owned ESPN, and for me that was extremely surprising as it seems so... not Disney-like.

As mentioned in the book, these companies can do some intense promotion of their own products, through their own media outlets. When Harry Potter was released by Warner Brothers, (owned by AOL Time Warner) was then promoted on tv by all AOLs channels, given ads in their 64 magazines with around 268 million readers, and then promoted further on websites such as moviefone, also owned by AOL. Reading these lists of all these household names and finding out that they are all owned by just a handful of huge corporations is quite mindblowing, and one begins to wonder if there are certain cross-media strategies that these larger corporations could use that could truly influence us all in ways beyond what has already been seen.

In Germany during WW2, Germany's Joseph Goebbels was a propaganda mastermind - even his official title was minister of propaganda, and what other way to spread it than through the media. It seems pretty clear from what happened in the prewar years during Hitlers rize, that propaganda had an enourmous effect on the German people. So the question arises if this could be happening today as well, but perhaps in a much less radical way. Who can say that we are not being affected in any way? And with conglomerates such as ours, that own pretty much every aspect of the media, it is easy to imagine them all trying to affect the largest amount of people in a way that promotes their own ends, obvious ones being sales of their products etc.

But what if they are all promoting specific political agendas, that benefit them in some way. Promoting specific political candidates, because of views that could promote the particular conglomerate's interests. It's certainly food for thought. What if your opinions aren't ur own, but a mix of a few different conglomerates' views that have affected you through their many media outlets?