Media Monopoly

Journalism professor Ben Bagdikian coined the term media monopoly to describe the concentration of ownership of the dominant media entities in ever-fewer hands. Although monopolies can be said to exist in many local media markets, he used the term metaphorically. No single firm owned all the mass media in the United States, and the prospects of that coming to pass were remote. Nonetheless, media were increasingly controlled by huge multinational corporations, Bagdikian argued, with serious implications for our information infrastructure and the quality of our news and our democracy.

[Page 1007]Before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Bagdikian spent three decades as a journalist, sharing a Pulitzer Prize for his work at The Providence Journal and later playing a ...