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.

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 (Comcast) NBC is a close sixth.

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The press was bought by right wingers years ago. News papers AND TV stations.
Which is why I have mentioned several times here, that we need wealthy democrats and progressives, to aquire news media too, both TV statins (or better yet networks) and papers.

I agree the right wingers love to talk about the liberal media, there is so little liberal mainstream media left...I think most of the time they are just saying that because they dont like what someone said. The right wingers have high-jacked our media, so we cant get much straight forward news without the right leaning spin. Thats why so many Americans are duped into believing the GOP. Good little sheeple do what they are told.

Pack their thesaurus. and leave the back way.