“Authorized Knowers: News Sources, Their Selection And Their Impact On The News”

13 Pages 3277 Words

subscriptions for the majority of the news outlets income. "The dirty little secret is we are obliged to advertising." Media consumers have the right to question whether such policies are restricted only to the ad department or affect news decisions.
One of the great problems facing this country is that a handful of huge corporations control the flow of information. They not only are media markets dominated by a handful of conglomerates with "barriers to entry", but they make it nearly impossible for newcomers to challenge the media system. Whether it is television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the Internet, fewer and fewer giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read. For many big corporations, cross promotion is good business for more than just one of their holdings. There are a number of significant trends in the ownership of the media of local and regional monopolies, growing concentration control of the most profitable and powerful television stations in the major markets and broadcasting publishing. The company AOL/Time Warner admits (to shareholders, anyway) to freely using some of its media holdings to promote other properties as a prime marketing strategy. The trouble is, readers and viewers can’t distinguish why certain things are selected as newsworthy and not others. Why do some stories make it to the news and not others? They think news is news, not covert corporate self-promotion. One of the options these people have is refer to alternative media. There are a limited number of places to go for news that are not dominated by such conglomerates. "The increasing concentration of the owners of media is the gravest danger to democracy today." Democracy is too precious to be given over to corporations interested only in growing bigger and more profitable.
When journalists want sources, they often rely on similar sources for a number of reasons but largely to do with convenience...