Asyouwish Herman and Chomsky

In CMC 100 I remember discussing similar ideas about how in the USA alone there are only 5 companies that truly influence us, media giants. In the USA our media giants are Walt Disney, News Corp, Sony, AOL Time Warner and Viacom. Each of these corporations are media giants because they do not only sell and therefore influence others in their own country but rather globally. Take the corporation Viacom which owns Spike TV, VH1, MTV, CBS, UPN, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, TV Land, CMT, TNN, Noggin, The movie channel, Showtime Networks, Sundance Channel, FLIX, BET, Comedy Central, among other sub-branches. Not only does this corporation own a ton of television stations, but rather the most influential and many of the most globally publicized networks. Allowing a corporation such as Viacom to own so many different outlets in my opinion is dangerous. Since Viacom controls all of these stations they could easily use their power to control the way people think and see the world. In CMC 100 we learned about different types of integration vertical and horizontal. “One is Horizontal integration, when a company has production occurring throughout different media forms such as radio, television, and the internet. The other form of integration is vertical integration, when a company controls all stages of production or distribution, or both” (Finkelson 08). Viacom and the other media giants have both making them all the more dangerous. Media giants have both direct and indirect power over the generations being influenced by their media productions. It is almost impossible to go to a city or heavily populated town and not see something produced by one of the big 5, their products and productions are everywhere. The dvds in my room alone include 3 of the big 5 products, Disney, Viacom (paramount pictures) and Sony. Jameson talks about the media influencing every aspect of our lives and I agree. The media shows us only what they want us to see and hides everything else, we could already be brainwashed who knows.