The issue with News is that it is unique in the power it holds. It is disturbingly vertically integrated, with outright control or at least joint-venture status in nearly every level of Media from Production to Distribution. In Film, Television, Cable, Internet, Books, News Paper, Magazines and the list goes on.
List of assets owned by News Corporation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This enables editorial influence on levels you just can't make transparent. A good example is the one that appears on Wiki under the
Media ownership in Australia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia link. News owns the National Rugby League brand/competition. They also publish the biggest selling tabloid format news paper (The Daily Telegraph) in the largest city (Sydney). What do you think the 'Tele' raves on about for the last 20 pages? NRL of course... and you can probably figure out who yells and howls the loudest when there is potential threats to NRLs market share
The problem is not that News is very successful, or very profitable. More power to them. Whats an issue though, is the level of control and power in this media and entertainment (and when do you hear about one without the other mentioned??) rich society. You are talking about a corporation that can literally produce content, beam it around the world, transmit it into near to a couple hundred million homes, run it at the local Cinema, advertise it in their banners such as Wall St Journal, Washington Post or Daily Telegraph etc, push it on their Internet Sites - All Internally to the Corporation without need for outside influence/co-operation... So if that corporation want to push an agenda or topic I reckon they could influence things just a little bit... don't you ? All we can do is hope that they all live up to their Ethical Mantra's... maybe this will cause a rebirth of "Honest" Journalism... but I doubt it...
Anyway.. thats my ramble...
Last edited by adr1an; 07-20-2011 at 11:14 PM.