Customer Reviews

Conglomerates and the Media

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is difficult to read Conglomerates and not be alarmed at the growing media control by a few major companies. The book begins with an insightful introduction by noted scholar Todd Gitlin and includes essays from Mark Crispin Miller (Johns Hopkins scholar and author of Boxed In) and David Leiberman (USA Today), among other prominent writers. One discrepency occurs with Lieberman's piece: it is listed in the table of contents as "Conglomerates, News, and Children", but in the chapter it is referred to as "Conglomerates, News, and the Media," leaving the reader to decide the correct version. This book is a must have if you want to gain an understanding of what's happening with media monopolies; Bagdikian fans rejoice! However, it is not chalk full o' references, so students looking for cites to follow may be disappointed. In the introduction, Gitlin echos an earlier statement by Niel Postman (author of Amusing Ourselves to Death): "Big Brother isn't looming, Brave New World is."

This book is quite insightful, especially for a Southeast Asian media professional like myself. I recommend this book to everyone, even to those who work in the upper regions of the power sturcture of the media conglomerates critiqued in the collection.

For starters, it is a wonderful overview of how the media economy is shifting all over the world. The US market is saturated, as the book said, and the rest of the world is ripe for picking, especially my country, the Philippines.

This book is a tool to launch our own media analysis of what's happenning in our own countries. And from an analysis, we launch a critique, and from a critique, we launch steps to face the situation.

This book, published by New Media, is invaluable. I first read about it in an issue of Utne Reader. I took down the title and hunted it down in Amazon. I found it, bought it, and consumed it. I loved it because it gave me useful insights to work with.

This is a book I will dog-ear in my attempts to understand what to do in my field, and how to start my own media conglomerate from scratch. I already have my ideas, which I hope aren't just soundbites in my head.

This book consists of a set of lectures delivered at NYU. Although it is apparent that they must have been fascinating speeches, the transmission to the printed word does not remotely do them justice. The most obvious failure is the lack of an index, references, or figures is grating. The problem goes deeper than that as the book is simply not in the style of a written work.

There are many superior works on the subject available, some of them by the same authors who contributed the lecture notes (I hesitate to call them "chapters").