Conglomerates and the Media

Beginning of article

Conglomerates and the Media. Erik Barnouw, et al. Introduction by Todd Gitlin. New York: The New Press, 1997. 191 pp. $23.

The issues raised by the increasing conglomeratization of communications ownership are critical to understanding media, their behavior, and their effects, so this book could be expected to provide significant insight into those issues and problems. Unfortunately, it does not.

Based on a lecture series held at New York University in 1996, this book is a collection of separate presentations on conglomerates and media that are full of rhetoric but offer little except anecdotal evidence whose generalizability is questionable.

The authors, …