Here’s another chart, this one from MediaChannel.org, which appears to be of similar vintage, concentrating on the big six.

Naturally some important events have taken place since then, more important than AOL Time Warner dropping the “AOL”. The consolidation continues apace.

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote “in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media” — controlling almost all of America’s newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

Perhaps, as Lewis Lapham suggests (not, I believe, completely seriously), we should simply acquiesce and try to “make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen”; still, I think we can do better. But if we are to regain our democratic heritage, we must attack the control of media by corporations, who have no soul, are legally eternal, and only interact with human communities to exploit them.