This publication moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. Based on an extensive data collection effort from scholars around the world, it covers 13 media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, and wireless telecommunication, across a 10-25 year period in 30 countries.

This thorough update to Benjamin Compaine's original 1979 benchmark and 1982 revisit of media ownership tackles the question of media ownership, providing a detailed examination of the current state of the media industry. Retaining the wealth of data of the earlier volumes, Compaine and his co-author Douglas Gomery chronicle the myriad changes in the media industry and the factors contributing to these changes. They also examine how the media industry is being reshaped by technological forces in all segments, as well as by social and cultural reactions to these forces. This third edition of Who Owns the Media? has been reorganized and expanded, reflecting the evolution of the media industry structure. Looking beyond conventional wisdom and expectations, Compaine and Gomery examine the characteristics of competition in the media marketplace, present alternative positions on the meanings of concentration, and ultimately urge readers to draw their own conclusions on an issue that is neither black nor white. Appropriate for media practitioners and sociologists, historians, and economists studying mass media, this volume can also be used for advanced courses in broadcasting, journalism, mass communication, telecommunications, and media education. As a new benchmark for the current state of media ownership, it is invaluable to anyone needing to understand who controls the media and thus the information and entertainment messages received by media consumers.

This long-awaited third edition analyzes corporate ownership of major media, including television, film, on-line, and print, and includes primary influences, government's roles, and key criteria for evaluating the current state of media ownership.

Who controls the media today? There are many media systems across the globe that claim to be free yet whose independence has been eroded. As demagogues rise, independent voices have been squeezed out. Corporate-owned media companies that act in the service of power increasingly exercise soft censorship. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have dramatically changed how people access information, with consequences that are only beginning to be felt. This book features pathbreaking analysis from journalists and academics of the changing nature and peril of media capture—how formerly independent institutions fall under the sway of governments, plutocrats, and corporations. Contributors including Emily Bell, Felix Salmon, Joshua Marshall, Joel Simon, and Nikki Usher analyze diverse cases of media capture worldwide—from the United Kingdom to Turkey to India and beyond—many drawn from firsthand experience. They examine the role played by new media companies and funders, showing how the confluence of the growth of big tech and falling revenues for legacy media has led to new forms of control. Contributions also shed light on how the rise of right-wing populists has catalyzed the crisis of global media. They also chart a way forward, exploring the growing need for a policy response and sustainable models for public-interest investigative journalism. Providing valuable insight into today’s urgent threats to media independence, Media Capture is essential reading for anyone concerned with defending press freedom in the digital age.

If you want to understand how modern media has changed the world, this is the one book you must read. Rupert Murdoch is the man everyone talks about but no one knows. He’s everywhere, a larger-than-life media titan who has spent a lifetime building his company, News Corporation, from a small, struggling newspaper business in Australia into an international media powerhouse. Rupert Murdoch charts the real story behind the rise of News Corp and the Fox network: the secret debt crises and family deals, the huge cash flows through the offshore archipelagos, the New York party that saved his empire, the covert government inquiries, the tax investigations, and the bewildering duels with Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Gerry Levin, Ron Perelman, Newt Gingrich, cable king John Malone, Michael Eisner, Tony Blair, and televangelist-turned-diamond-miner Pat Robertson. Murdoch’s story, however, is more than just how one man built a global business. Rupert Murdoch is both a biography of Murdoch the man (including the divorce from his wife, Anna; his remarriage to a woman young enough to be his granddaughter; and the struggle between his two sons for eventual control of the family holdings) and a “follow the money” investigation that reveals how he has managed to have such a huge impact on the communications revolution that promises to utterly transform life in the twenty-first century. The investigation concentrates on Murdoch’s three great campaigns: in the 1980s, when his determination to launch an American television network overturned the media industries of three countries; in 1997, when Murdoch took on every broadcasting group in America; and the process of reinventing himself since then, culminating in his bid to win DirecTV from General Motors. This is the saga of the man who has stalked, infuriated, cajoled, threatened, and spooked the media industry for three decades, whose titanic gambles have shaped and reshaped the media landscape. Win or lose, Murdoch is the man who has changed everything. And Neil Chenoweth is the right person to tell the story: In 1990 he wrote a magazine article that prompted a secret Australian government inquiry into Rupert Murdoch’s family companies, and he’s been on the Murdoch case since then. Chenoweth reveals what no person ever has about the man (and the company) who is probably the most significant media player of them all.