6 Corporations Control 90% of the Media

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Here’s a reminder of one reason why we do what we do — that is, bring you independent news on important topics that doesn’t go through the filter of a megacorporation that is saturated with plenty of other interests. Thanks to one of our awesome readers for passing this infographic on to me:

Source: Frugal Dad

Zachary Shahan (2363 Posts)

I'm the director of CleanTechnica, the most popular clean energy website in the world, and Planetsave, a leading green and science news site. I've been covering green news of various sorts since 2008, and I've been especially focused on solar energy, electric vehicles, bicycling, and wind energy for the past few years. You can also find my work on Scientific American, Reuters, Think Progress, GE's ecomagination site, several sites in the Important Media network, & many other places. To connect on some of your favorite social networks, go to zacharyshahan.com or click on some of the links below.


  • TTCWW

    Love your site Zachary and wish you had not beat me to the making of a good environmental site. We all needed one.

    One request, please start tagging better. I have come back many times to reference a article and cannot find the article I wanted.

    • http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan

      Haha. I didn’t actually create it, but came on board a few years ago through good luck. :D

      What do you mean by tagging better? More specific tags? I try to be very specific, but things might get missed. Trying both search options? WP search at the top right and Google search further down.

      • TTCWW

        With out looking at your process I am not sure why your articles are hard to find at a latter date, Obviously it is advantageous to have people dropping links to your site in discussion boards and I find that site builders tend to tag for SEO and forget to tag/keyword for their readers.

        I try to use six primary tags for the whole website putting every article into one or two of those tag categories and then tag article’s for natural search. 

        The one that comes to mind is a chart article you ran a couple of weeks ago about energy consumption. I tried just about every tag possible including “charts”. I realize just how hard it is to guess how people will search but basic category’s will usually narrow the process for your readers and Google loves the simplicity too. And as we know pleasing Mama Google is all important to us all….

        • http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan

          we have a tag for infographics, but don’t think it was one of those. we put charts in a TON of our articles, so never considered it worthwhile to tag articles ‘charts’. basically, i tag on specific technologies, companies, locations, specialized terms.

          don’t recall any charts on energy consumption… wrote some pieces on wind and solar relative to electricity produced with a lot of charts in them (but not energy consumed)…

          i assume people might want more info on specific topics after reading a piece or in general sometimes, which is why i tag in that way. and then we’ve got our general/basic categories as well. would think smth about energy consumption would be under this category: http://cleantechnica.com/category/energy-efficiency/

          but without more info, nothing is currently coming to mind that included a chart on energy consumption.

          • TTCWW

            I was really just trying to provide an example.

            I find that I tend to tag, thinking as a web builder and not a reader coming to my sites or looking for an article. I know where they are, my readers do not..lol

            Appreciate the link and effort.

        • http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan

          aha, maybe this one(!): http://cleantechnica.com/2012/06/06/residential-energy-consumption-per-household-dropping-in-us/

          i just searched “energy consumption” and found it on the 3rd page. hope that’s what you were looking for.

        • http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan

          and i added the tags ‘energy consumption’ and ‘charts’ :D Will try to start using those when appropriate.

          • Bob_Wallace

            I, too, have problems finding articles I’m looking for.

            I wonder if a different search system might work better.  (Not sure it could be done with Disqus, just thinking on the keyboard.)

            Suppose I’m looking for an article on solar, I type in the word “solar” and get a drop-down of all the possible tags.  I could scan down and find a key term that best describes what I’m looking for.

            Some tags might be nested to make things quicker.  ”Cost” might have “by country”, “installed”, “panel”, etc. on another drop-down.

            Perhaps an option to check multiple tags and then search.

            Sometimes I flail around trying to figure out the words to use in a search.  Some of the words I use turn up nothing.  If I knew the words which worked up front things might be easier.

          • http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan

            hmm, not sure of the options regarding tags, but that does sound nice.
            basically, i always find what i need via search. but writing most of the articles, i can probably much more easily remember specific keywords (or words in the title) to search.

            we do have the two search options:

            1. the WordPress search option at the top will just give you everything with the terms you’re looking for in chronological order. so, pretty good for recent articles or if you can remember very specific terms/names/locations that aren’t in most articles.

            2. the Google search box further down shows results just as if you searched in Google (i think), so it brings up articles that have received more links, gives a strong weight to the words in titles and URLs, and also is rather attentive to recent pieces, it seems.

            i normally just go to a new tab (in Chrome) and search the keywords i think will pull up the piece followed by “cleantechnica” but i sometimes use the WordPress search when that doesn’t work out.

            will try to find out if i can make a search through tags more accessible for the public — haven’t given it much thought since the above options
            work well enough for me. (i could search through tags in the backend, but
            never really thought about doing so)

  • Omharisai

    This is an Orwellian  1984 scenario. Now we know that six giant US corporates brain wash 90% of Americans , pushing in software that manipulates all public opinion and outlook. There is no choice in this case for any US citizen. Add to these six conglomerates, the propaganda being dished out by the US government, the Congress and the Senate and the poor Americans do not even have a right to think. Sad. Chomsky where are you?

  • Luke

    Sad to see. Reminds me a bit of George Carlin’s “Illusion of Choice” speech he gave on Real Time with Bill Maher at one point.

    I try and stick to ‘small news’ as much as possible – Cleantechnica, Treehugger (yes, I realize it’s owned by Discovery – but I like them), Grist, Mother Jones, and a variety of aggregate news sources from Google News.

  • http://markxs.myopenid.com/ MarkXS

    Great infographic and commentary.

    A few notes/corrections/suggestions (some aimed at the original infographic creator):
    1. GE does not own Comcast. Comcast bought a majority share in NBC Universal properties from GE. Comcast is now the big dog there, with GE having only a minor share and looking to sell off. Maybe you should swap in Comcast for GE. Oh, don’t forget that Microsoft is the “MS” in MSNBC, making that a 3-way. And making NBC News unlikely to counter the Big IT corporate line of “no qualified American Technologists so we need more H-1B visas” utterly bogus job-destroying Party Line 

    2. It’s really less than 6, when you consider that until 2 or 3 years ago, Viacom and CBS were the same company. They split to “maximize shareholder value” but still are very tightly entwined. And not just by “Star Trek” (property now owned by CBS but movies still owned by Paramount.)

    3. Unrelated companies engage in “co-opetition” – such as the CW Network, where the “C” means CBS and the “W” means Warner Brothers.

    If you add in the newspaper/web ownership like all the newspapers owned by the New York Times Company or the Washington Post Company, or Gannett, it gets even worse. Especially with cross-ownership of many TV stations by Gannett (like the NBC station 9News in Denver). 

    Very little room for new voices. Very little “mainstream” media (left or right) that isn’t really just Corporatocracy-controlled. 

    • http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan

      Thanks for the extra info.

  • Captivation

    Fascinating and Disturbing at the same time.  I consumed the media for years because I found it to be a low cost (albeit low quality) form of education.  But mainstream media has now become a force of disinformation and readers walk away being dumber than non readers.
    I still have a thirst for aggregated news, but am fairly committed to my media embargo.