Read the original article here.

---

Okay, here is the educational resource on Media Conglomerates, framed within the context of "The Dead Internet Files: How Bots Silently Replaced Us."

---

Understanding Media Conglomerates in the Digital Age: A Perspective from 'The Dead Internet Files'

Introduction

In an era increasingly dominated by digital information and online interaction, understanding the structures that control and disseminate media is more critical than ever. Media conglomerates are colossal entities that own vast swathes of the information and entertainment landscape, from traditional television and newspapers to film studios, music labels, and increasingly, online platforms and digital content. This resource explores what media conglomerates are, their historical development, the criticisms leveled against them, and how their dominance might intersect with the concerns raised by theories like "The Dead Internet Files," which speculates on the overwhelming presence of non-human activity and synthetic content online.

What is a Media Conglomerate?

At its core, a media conglomerate is a business structure characterized by immense scale and diverse holdings within the mass media sector.

A media conglomerate, also known as a media company, media group, or media institution, is a company that owns numerous subsidiary companies involved in mass media enterprises, such as music, television, radio, publishing, motion pictures, video games, amusement parks, or the Internet.

These companies operate across a wide range of media types, allowing them to exert significant influence over content production, distribution, and consumption. The term media group is sometimes used interchangeably, reflecting the consolidation trend that makes these entities appear less diverse externally, despite their numerous internal holdings.

The Nature of a Conglomerate

To understand a media conglomerate, it's important to grasp the concept of a conglomerate itself.

A conglomerate is a large company composed of a number of subsidiary companies engaged in generally unrelated businesses.

While the subsidiaries of a media conglomerate are generally related by their involvement in media, the types of media can be quite diverse (e.g., owning a film studio, a cable news network, a book publisher, and a theme park simultaneously). This structure allows for synergy, cross-promotion, and shared resources across different sectors.

Explanation: Think of a conglomerate as a parent company with many children companies (subsidiaries). In a standard conglomerate, these children might be in vastly different industries (e.g., one makes cars, another sells insurance, another runs hotels). In a media conglomerate, the children are all in different types of media (TV, radio, movies, books, internet), but the parent company structure is similar – one large entity overseeing multiple, often distinct, business units within that broad sector.

The Mechanics of Conglomerate Power and Influence

Media conglomerates leverage their size and diverse holdings in several ways:

1. Cross-Promotion and Synergy: Content created by one subsidiary (e.g., a movie studio) can be promoted extensively across other subsidiaries (e.g., the company's television networks, radio stations, websites, or even theme parks). This internal marketing power is immense and low-cost.
2. Content Sharing: They can easily share news stories, video clips, music, and other content between their various platforms, maximizing the reach of their material and standardizing the information presented across different outlets.
3. Market Control: By acquiring competitors and expanding into various media sectors, conglomerates strive to control larger shares of advertising revenue, distribution channels, and audience attention, potentially limiting competition and independent voices.

Historical Context: Concentration and Deregulation

The media landscape, particularly in countries like the United States, has seen a dramatic shift towards increased concentration of ownership over the past few decades.

• Past Diversity: In 1984, for instance, fifty independent media companies owned the majority of media interests within the United States.
• Modern Concentration: By 2011, this number had shrunk dramatically, with 90% of the United States's media controlled by just six major media conglomerates (GE/Comcast, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS). While the specific companies and their holdings have shifted since then due to mergers and acquisitions (e.g., Time Warner is now Warner Bros. Discovery, Viacom and CBS merged into ViacomCBS, now Paramount Global), the trend of increasing concentration remains.

This shift was significantly influenced by changes in government regulation.

• Early Restrictions: From 1941 to 1975, laws were enacted to limit the number of radio and television stations a single entity could own, aiming to maintain diverse and unbiased media.
• The Deregulation Era: Starting in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, a period of significant deregulation began. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) relaxed ownership rules. For example, the limit on the number of television stations a single owner could control increased from seven to twelve.
• The Telecommunications Act of 1996: This act, signed by President Bill Clinton, further accelerated consolidation, particularly in the radio industry, by lifting the ownership cap entirely. This allowed companies like IHeartMedia to grow from owning 40 stations to over 1200 across the country, and Viacom (now Paramount Global) to acquire hundreds of stations.

Impact of Deregulation: The lifting of ownership limits directly fueled the rapid consolidation seen in the media sector. This meant fewer independent voices and fewer distinct owners controlling a larger share of the media landscape.

Criticisms of Media Conglomerates

The increasing power and concentration of media ownership have drawn significant criticism from various groups:

1. Dominance and Unfair Practices: Critics argue that large conglomerates use their market power to stifle smaller competitors and independent media outlets.
2. Suppression of Information: A major concern is that corporations may refuse to publicize news or information that is harmful to their own financial interests, or the interests of their parent company or other subsidiaries. This can lead to biased reporting or a lack of coverage on important issues.
3. Limiting Free Speech and Viewpoint Diversity: As ownership consolidates, the number of distinct voices and perspectives available to the public shrinks. This reduces the diversity of news, entertainment, and opinions, potentially limiting public discourse and access to varied viewpoints.
4. Sensationalism and the Blurring of News/Entertainment: Driven by the need to attract large audiences for advertising revenue, conglomerates are accused of contributing to the merging of serious news coverage with sensationalized or entertainment-focused content, often at the expense of in-depth reporting on complex issues.
5. Standardization of Culture: The widespread reach of conglomerates can lead to the standardization of cultural content, promoting a more uniform global culture (sometimes criticized as "Americanization" due to the historical dominance of US media). This can diminish local or niche cultural expression.
6. Bias Towards Owner Interests: News organizations within conglomerates are often criticized for being biased towards the political, economic, or social interests of their owners and the parent corporation.
7. Lack of Diversity in Ownership and Representation: The ownership of major media conglomerates remains concentrated among a small group, often white, middle-class men. This lack of diversity at the ownership level is reflected in a lack of ethnic and gender diversity in media content and staffing, potentially leading to the underrepresentation or misrepresentation of minority groups and women's perspectives.

Case Study: Minot, North Dakota

A widely cited example illustrating the potential dangers of media consolidation occurred in Minot, North Dakota, in 2002. When a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed late at night, exposing residents to toxic fumes, local police attempted to broadcast an emergency warning. However, because a single company, IHeartMedia, owned all the local radio stations and had centralized their operations (running on automation overnight without local staff), the emergency calls were routed to an automated message system. This incident starkly demonstrated how consolidated ownership and cost-saving measures could hinder critical public services like emergency communication.

Connecting to "The Dead Internet Files"

The concept of "The Dead Internet Files" posits that the internet is becoming or has already become dominated by automated content, bots, and algorithmically generated or amplified information, making genuine human activity and authentic content harder to find. How does the rise of powerful media conglomerates connect with this theory?

1. Concentrated Source Material: If a vast amount of online information originates from a small number of conglomerate sources (e.g., news websites, entertainment portals owned by the same few companies), this creates a homogeneity in the underlying data layer of the internet. Much of what algorithms process and bots might scrape, rephrase, or disseminate ultimately traces back to this limited set of producers.
2. Algorithmic Amplification Bias: Content produced by major conglomerates is often professionally created, optimized for search engines (SEO), and formatted in ways that algorithms favor. This makes it more likely to be picked up, ranked highly, and distributed widely by platforms driven by engagement metrics. This algorithmic preference for conglomerate content can drown out smaller, independent, or niche human voices.
3. Bots Disseminating and Interacting with Conglomerate Content:
   • Bots designed to spread news or information can easily scrape content from large, standardized news sites owned by conglomerates. They can then re-post, rephrase, or summarize this content across numerous platforms, creating a vast amount of derivative material that looks like diverse online activity but originates from a limited pool.
   • Bots designed for engagement might interact with conglomerate content – liking, sharing, commenting – artificially inflating its perceived popularity and contributing to the sense of online interactions being inauthentic or automated.
4. Standardization Facilitates Automation: The criticism that conglomerates standardize culture and content aligns with how algorithms and potentially bots process information. Standardized, predictable content is easier for automated systems to handle, categorize, and regenerate compared to highly diverse, idiosyncratic, or niche human expression. This could create a feedback loop where the internet landscape increasingly favors content types that are easily processed by machines.
5. Control of Narratives in an Automated Landscape: If a few powerful entities control the primary sources of information that algorithms amplify and bots might disseminate, they hold significant power to shape online narratives. This makes it harder for independent voices or alternative viewpoints to gain traction, contributing to the feeling that the online information space is curated or controlled rather than reflecting organic human discourse.
6. Artificial Engagement Metrics: The use of bots or automated systems (whether intentionally by conglomerates or by third parties interacting with their content) can create artificial engagement metrics (views, shares, likes). This makes it difficult to gauge genuine human interest and contributes to the feeling that online activity is synthetic or fake, a core tenet of "The Dead Internet Files."

From the perspective of "The Dead Internet Files," media conglomerates contribute to the perceived artificiality of the online world not necessarily by creating bots themselves (though this is not impossible), but by being centralized, powerful sources of content that are easily processed and amplified by the algorithms and automated systems that dominate the modern internet. Their concentration limits genuine source diversity, their content is algorithmically favored, and their output can be easily scraped and redistributed by bots, contributing to an online environment that feels less like a network of human interaction and more like a vast, automated information delivery system.

Examples of Major Media Conglomerates

While the specific rankings and holdings change over time due to mergers and acquisitions, some of the world's largest media conglomerates (as of recent data) include:

• Comcast: A global telecommunications and media giant (includes NBCUniversal).
• The Walt Disney Company: Renowned for its entertainment holdings (includes Disney+, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, ESPN, ABC).
• Warner Bros. Discovery: Formed by the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc. (includes HBO, CNN, Warner Bros. Pictures, Discovery Channel).
• Paramount Global: Formerly ViacomCBS (includes CBS, Showtime, Paramount Pictures, MTV, BET).

Many other significant media conglomerates exist globally, including Fujisankei Communications Group (Japan), Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings (Japan), Bertelsmann (Germany), Axel Springer (Germany), Mediaset (Italy), ITV (UK), China Central Television (China), Alibaba Group (China), Grupo Televisa (Mexico), and Grupo Globo (Brazil). Their structure and influence vary by country and regulatory environment, but the trend towards concentration is a global phenomenon.

Conclusion

Media conglomerates are dominant forces in shaping the information and cultural landscapes, both online and offline. Their historical development, marked by significant deregulation and rapid consolidation, has led to a concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few powerful entities. While proponents may point to efficiencies and synergistic opportunities, critics raise serious concerns about limited viewpoint diversity, suppressed information, sensationalism, cultural standardization, and potential bias.

When viewed through the lens of "The Dead Internet Files," the power of media conglomerates takes on another dimension. Their centralized production of algorithmically favored content provides fertile ground for the automated systems and bots that potentially make the internet feel less human. The homogeneity of sources, the ease with which their content can be processed and redistributed, and the potential for artificial amplification all contribute to the phenomena described in the theory. Understanding media conglomerates is therefore not just about traditional media power; it's also about recognizing a fundamental structural element of the internet that may be contributing to its increasingly synthetic nature.