Media Conglomerates Business Patterns and Strategies

The past several decades��� deregulation and intensifying competition in the U.S. media industry have created a wave of unprecedented mergers and acquisitions, leading the formation of a group of media conglomerates. Today, fewer than 10 powerful conglomerates dominate the U.S. media landscape, exerting oligopolistic control over public service media. Based on a complex web of interdependent business relations, different segments of conglomerates work with each other or with firms outside their organizations to provide a wide variety of products and services in the media marketplace. However, ever-increasing levels of media concentration raise a new question over the correlation between ownership and media content. Free market advocators have argued that media consolidation improves healthy, market-based competition, insisting that today���s media is far more competitive than 30 years ago, as evidenced by the diverse offerings of content and the explosion in the number of media outlets. On���(������)