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Dear Mr. Bagdikian,
Your ideas on big media have some merit. You have said in one of your columns that (using Disney as an example) that big corporation's "power is so concentrated, ubiquitous, and artful that, to a degree unmatched in former mixtures of entertainment, it dilutes influences from family, schooling, and other sources that are grounded in real-life experience, weakening their ability to guide growing generations." It appears to me that many companies have decided that they need to have all of my attention all of the time, and they have decided to change the way that they operate by trying to entertain rather than inform, even though the previous method has worked for so long. The news has even fallen prey to the new methods of reporting just so they can get the viewer at the expense of the quality of the reporting. I believe that the media outlets should take responsibility by trying to hook the viewer with the short attention span for the horrible reporting now.
I feel that in addition to select media outlets vying for all of my attention in it's various forms, some of these outlets have decided to go after one specific demographic and to only casually recognize any other ones. In my opinion, the only way that these outlets are successful is if they show people moving up in life so that those who aren’t well off know that they can make their lives better. Unfortunately, most of them don’t do that. I do agree with the point that having many media outlets is a good thing for a variation of media and to keep things competitive so that when one outlet tries to outdo the other with the net result is a better product, but having one of those outlets very nearly disregard the existence of a very large percentage of money holders is wrong.
And speaking of the many media outlets trying to outdo each other, the some of the media goes to extremely disgusting lengths to sensationalize and villanizes anything and everything they can and not report anything that would condemn them just so I can go to that particular outlet first. The lack of spreading different ideas is the cause of this in my opinion and I think that some of the beneficiaries of this are those that are supposed to speak for us on Capitol Hill. I believe that the main purpose in all media now is to grab the attention of all that it can. And when they do get my attention I tend to want to get their information much faster than the others. If there is anything good about merging, it's that information can be spread faster and some websites may be linked together on a common network. But when I get to a media website, it seems to me that the media company is much more interested in me rather than providing me information. Do you think that that is a result more of trying to compete with the major companies or the fact that there are so many different outlets for the media that they need all this information to better provide me with information?
Money rules everything today. The unfortunate thing is that the people with the money don’t care about the way it was acquired, just as it is acquired. That’s why there is so much trash in the media everywhere. Big media has become so big that there is nothing innovative on network television or corporate radio. When the ones in charge realize that there is more to running a media company than making money, big media can truly achieve the thing that they want: a total monopoly of a person’s time, like I have had with your time now. Thank you very much.
Sincerely