Books Briefly
THE MEDIA MONOPOLY by Ben H. Bagdikian Ofnly a handful of American journalists and scholars devote all or most of their time to close scrutiny of the mass media. Ben H. Bagdikian, a former...
...An excerpt dealing with The New Yorker appeared in the May issue of The Progressive...
...The other is the immense influence of advertising—not just in coloring the information we receive, but in determining the very nature of the media...
...Some twenty years ago, he began a study of ownership patterns in the American press, attentively observing the enormous changes occurring in the economic structure of the media...
...Since we are all media consumers, every American needs to ponder the information in this useful book...
...The fifty men and women who head these corporations would fit in a large room...
...Ben H. Bagdikian, a former newspaper reporter and editor who now teaches at the University of California-Berkeley, is perhaps the most perceptive and penetrating of these critics...
...They constitute a new Private Ministry of Information and Culture...
...As he points out in the opening pages of The Media Monopoly, which marks the culmination of his research, "Today, fifty corporations own most of the output of daily newspapers and most of the sales and audience in magazines, broadcasting, books, and the movies...
...THE MEDIA MONOPOLY by Ben H. Bagdikian Ofnly a handful of American journalists and scholars devote all or most of their time to close scrutiny of the mass media...
...How the Private Ministers shape and filter the news to suit their interests is one of the principal themes of The Media Monopoly...
Vol. 47 • September 1983 • No. 9
