Media conglomerate

Based on Wikipedia: Media conglomerate

The Night No One Answered

On January 18, 2002, a freight train carrying anhydrous ammonia derailed in Minot, North Dakota, in the middle of the night. A toxic cloud began drifting toward sleeping residents. The police needed to get the word out immediately—this was exactly the kind of emergency that local radio stations exist to handle.

They called the radio stations. All of them. Every single one.

Nobody picked up. Instead, the police heard the same automated message, over and over. That's because every radio station in Minot—all six of them—was owned by a single company called Clear Channel, which would later rebrand as iHeartMedia. There were no local employees on duty in the middle of the night. The stations were running on autopilot, beaming in pre-recorded content from distant cities.

This incident became a cautionary tale about what happens when media consolidation goes too far. But to understand how we got here—how a single company could control all the radio voices in an entire city—we need to go back nearly a century.

What Exactly Is a Media Conglomerate?

A media conglomerate is a company that owns multiple businesses across the media landscape: television networks, movie studios, radio stations, newspapers, publishing houses, video game companies, streaming services, and sometimes even theme parks. The key distinction is that these giants focus specifically on media—they're not random collections of unrelated businesses like steel mills and insurance companies.

Think of it like an octopus with tentacles reaching into every way you might consume information or entertainment. When you watch a movie, read the news, listen to music on the radio, or binge a streaming series, there's a decent chance the same parent company sits behind several of those experiences.

This differs from a general conglomerate—like the old-school industrial giants of the 1960s that might own everything from aerospace companies to meat-packing plants. Media conglomerates stay in their lane, but they dominate that lane completely.

The Birth of Media Giants

The story begins in 1924, when The Chicago Tribune bought a small radio station called WDAP. They renamed it WGN—standing for "World's Greatest Newspaper," which tells you something about newspaper modesty in the Roaring Twenties. This was one of the first examples of what business types call "vertical integration"—a newspaper expanding into a related but different medium.

The Tribune didn't stop there. In 1948, they launched WGN-TV, operating right out of the newspaper's headquarters. Now they had print, radio, and television all under one roof. The template for the modern media conglomerate was born.

But the federal government was watching. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, to regulate the airwaves. The FCC started requiring broadcast licenses—and charging fees for them. This might sound like routine bureaucracy, but it had a paradoxical effect: smaller radio stations couldn't afford the fees and shut down, while larger companies with deeper pockets survived and grew stronger.

The government recognized the danger. If too few companies controlled too many stations, they could shape public opinion in dangerous ways. So the FCC created rules to limit concentration: caps on how many stations one company could own in a single market, bans on owning two television stations serving the same area. These rules would hold for decades.

The Mechanics of Getting Big

Media conglomerates grow the same way other corporate giants do: through mergers and acquisitions. One company buys another, absorbing its assets, its talent, its audience.

The 1960s saw a conglomerate boom across American industry, and media was no exception. Interest rates on loans dropped low enough that large companies could borrow money cheaply to buy smaller competitors. The math was simple: if the profits from your new acquisition exceeded the interest payments on the loan you took to buy it, you came out ahead. Rinse and repeat, and you could grow enormous.

But the real explosion came later.

The 1980s: Deregulation Unleashed

Under President Ronald Reagan, the philosophy shifted. The FCC, led by Chairman Mark Fowler, began dismantling the rules that had kept media ownership dispersed. Between 1981 and 1985, the cap on television stations a single company could own jumped from seven to twelve.

The New York Times observed in 1987 that Fowler had transformed broadcast licenses from tightly monitored public trusts into "commodities traded on the open market." The airwaves belonged to the people, the theory went, but now they could be bought and sold like real estate.

This same era saw American media companies look beyond domestic borders. Deregulation at home combined with new communication technologies made it easier to expand internationally. The result: media conglomerates that spanned the globe. To this day, international markets often grow faster than domestic ones. In 2024, Walt Disney's revenue grew by over 9 percent in Asia and nearly 8 percent in Europe, while the United States saw growth of barely 1 percent.

1996: The Floodgates Open

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Bill Clinton, represented what the FCC called "the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years." Among its many provisions, it lifted the cap on radio station ownership entirely. Before 1996, no company could own more than 40 stations nationwide.

After 1996? The sky was the limit.

Clear Channel—the same company that would fail Minot, North Dakota—exploded from 40 stations to 870 worldwide. Viacom gobbled up 180 stations across 41 markets after merging with CBS in 2000. The radio dial that once featured dozens of independent voices increasingly played the same songs, delivered by the same playlists, controlled by the same corporate headquarters.

Today, there's technically no upper limit on how many stations one company can own, as long as the total audience doesn't exceed 39 percent of American households. That's still an enormous reach for a single entity.

The Incredible Shrinking Media Landscape

Here's a number that tells the whole story: in 1984, fifty independent companies owned the majority of American media. By 2011, six conglomerates controlled 90 percent of everything Americans watched, read, and heard.

Those six were: Comcast (which owns NBC and Universal), News Corp (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post), Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar), Viacom (MTV, BET, Paramount Pictures), Time Warner (CNN, HBO, Warner Bros.), and CBS (Showtime, the NFL's website).

As of 2025, according to the Forbes Global 2000 ranking, Comcast remains the world's largest media conglomerate by revenue, followed by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount Global.

The math is stark. Fifty companies became six. That's an 88 percent reduction in the number of major players deciding what gets produced, what gets aired, and what gets killed.

Why This Matters: The Case Against Concentration

Critics of media consolidation raise several concerns, and they're not merely theoretical.

First, there's the question of editorial independence. When a massive corporation owns a news outlet, will that outlet report critically on its parent company? Will it cover stories that might embarrass major advertisers or business partners? The incentives push toward self-censorship, even without explicit orders from above. Journalists learn what stories get approved and which ones mysteriously die in editing.

Second, consolidation reduces diversity of viewpoint. When fewer companies make the decisions, fewer perspectives reach the public. This isn't necessarily about political bias in the traditional left-right sense—it's about the range of stories that get told, the voices that get amplified, the issues that get attention.

The numbers on ownership diversity are particularly striking. Women hold less than 7 percent of television and radio licenses. Racial minorities hold about 7 percent of radio licenses and just 3 percent of television licenses. The people making decisions about what Americans see and hear remain overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and male.

Third, critics argue that concentration blurs the line between news and entertainment. When the same company produces both, the temptation grows to make news more sensational—more like entertainment—because that's what drives ratings. Serious coverage of complex issues gives way to conflict, drama, and spectacle.

In November 2007, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson joined protests against further media consolidation, warning that corporate control of information threatened democratic participation itself.

The Global Picture

Media concentration isn't uniquely American. Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand all grapple with similar concerns. Each has its own regulatory body watching the situation: the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Philippine National Telecommunications Commission, and New Zealand's Broadcasting Standards Authority.

Major media conglomerates operate worldwide. In Japan, there's the Fujisankei Communications Group and Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings. Germany has Bertelsmann and Axel Springer. The United Kingdom has ITV. China has both state-controlled entities like China Central Television and private giants like Alibaba Group. Mexico has Grupo Televisa and TV Azteca. Brazil has Grupo Globo.

The pattern repeats across nations: a handful of large players controlling most of what people see and hear, with regulators trying to balance the efficiency of consolidation against the dangers of concentration.

The Opposite of a Conglomerate

What would a media landscape without conglomerates look like? Historically, it meant local ownership: the newspaper owned by a family in town, the radio station run by someone who lived in the community, the television affiliate with actual decision-making power rather than orders from a distant headquarters.

The internet initially seemed to promise a return to this distributed model. Anyone could start a blog, launch a podcast, build an audience without gatekeepers. And to some extent, that's happened. Independent creators on YouTube and Substack and TikTok reach millions without traditional media backing.

But the platforms themselves have consolidated. Google owns YouTube. Meta owns Facebook and Instagram. A handful of tech giants now control the infrastructure through which independent voices must travel to reach audiences. The conglomerate model has simply shifted to a different layer of the stack.

The Content-Sharing Advantage

It's worth noting what conglomerates do well. When one company owns a movie studio, a television network, a streaming service, and a theme park, they can coordinate in ways that smaller competitors cannot. A character introduced in a film becomes a television series becomes a theme park ride becomes merchandise becomes a video game. Each piece promotes the others.

Disney perfected this model. Marvel movies spawn Disney Plus series. Star Wars content flows across every platform the company owns. Theme parks feature attractions based on recent releases. It's a flywheel of content that independent creators simply cannot replicate.

For consumers, this can mean more polished, more heavily invested content. Blockbuster movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Only massive corporations can take those risks. The question is whether the trade-off—spectacular entertainment in exchange for consolidated control—is worth it.

What the Future Holds

The media landscape continues to shift. Streaming has disrupted traditional television. Social media has disrupted traditional news. Every few years, a new technology reshuffles the deck.

But the underlying dynamic—large players acquiring smaller ones, concentration increasing over time, regulators struggling to keep pace—shows no sign of changing. The companies at the top may swap positions. The names may change. The fundamental tension between efficiency and diversity, between corporate coordination and independent voices, remains.

Meanwhile, somewhere in America, a town like Minot continues to rely on radio stations that may or may not have anyone local on duty. The automated systems work fine, most of the time. It's just those rare emergencies—the train derailments, the toxic clouds, the moments when human judgment matters most—when the limits of consolidation become terrifyingly clear.

The question isn't whether media conglomerates are good or bad. They're a structural feature of modern capitalism, as inevitable as gravity. The question is how much concentration we're willing to accept, what safeguards we demand, and whether we remember what's at stake when no one picks up the phone.