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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: The 50, 26, 20... Corporations That Own Our Media By Ben Bagdikian Experimenters have discovered that you can turn a cat into an alcoholic. The normal cat doesn't expect it, but keep adding vodka to the dish and the cat will soon demand spiked milk as an absolute necessity. The fat cats of the American mass media have lost their taste for the mother's milk of normal free enterprise: real competition for a reasonable profit. Thanks to addictive doses of sympathetic governmental policies and two decades of a drive for power, a shrinking number of large media corporations now regard monopoly, oligopoly and historic levels of profit as not only normal, but as their earned right. In the process, the usual democratic expectation for the media -- diversity of ownership and ideas -- has disappeared as the goal of official policy and, worse, as a daily experience of a generation of American readers and viewers. In 1982, when I completed research for my book, The Media Monopoly, 50 corporations controlled half or more of the media business. By December 1986, when I finished a revision for a second edition, the 50 had shrunk to 29. The last time I counted, it was down to 26. [When the latest edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 1993, the number was down to 20. -ed.] A number of serious Wall Street media analysts are predicting that by the 1990s, a half-dozen giant firms will control most of our media. Of the 1,700 daily papers, 98 percent are local monopolies and fewer than 15 corporations control most of the country's daily circulation. A handful of firms have most of the magazine business, with Time, Inc. alone accounting for about 40 percent of that industry's revenues. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1498 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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