All private tv news broadcasts are owned by five corporations and the internet is next

juan cole...

[A]ll private television news broadcasts are owned by only five corporations in the United States. Five is too little for healthy competition, and all five disallow centrist and leftist points of view as most people in the world would define them (i.e. the range of acceptable opinion on the US airwaves is from center-right to far right, as Europeans would define these things).

Those who argue that the Five Sisters' monopoly is not so bad, given that they don't control a lot of the major newspapers or wire services are ignoring a simple fact. Most Americans get their news from television, and newspapers' readership is rapidly falling. The monopoly is real, and it explains everything about why BushRove were able to propagandize us into the Iraq War.

The narrowing of the range of public views in the media is a direct result of the Five Sisters' Monopoly.

So how could they Corporatize the internet and exclude our voices? They could set it up so that, for instance, if you couldn't come up with $100,000 a year, they could arrange for it to take 5 minutes for your web site to load, while Corporate Monopoly web sites loaded immediately. (Studies show that readers are unwilling to wait more than a few seconds for sites to load, after which they move on.) That move would not only destroy the blogosphere, but it would get rid of YouTube and similar video-posting sites, as well.

Or, they might decline to carry the bigger video files by p2p (as with Comcast, which actually lied to its subscribers that the download was unavailable with a spoofed email purporting to come from the poster!). Comcast is the same corporation that shoves Fox Cable News down our throats but won't let us see the direct BBC feed as part of our basic package, much less Aljazeera English.

Save the Internet is a key site for organizing to stop the imposition of a Corporate Monopoly on the Internet.

Join the campaign to make sure Congress knows how we feel, and send them a message here.

if we lose the internet, we're as good as screwed...

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