Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read

By Michael Snyder

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States.  Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.  These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day.  They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest.  Most Americans don't really seem to care about who owns the media.  But they should.  The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media.  The average American watches 153 hours of television a month.  In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something.  Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.      

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal.  Together, the "big six" absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States.  But even those areas of the media that the "big six" do not completely control are becoming increasingly concentrated. For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States.  Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly dominating the Internet.

But it is the "big six" that are the biggest concerns.  When you control what Americans watch, hear and read you gain a great deal of control over what they think.  They don't call it "programming" for nothing. 

Back in 1983 it was bad enough that about 50 corporations dominated U.S. media.  But since that time, power over the media has rapidly become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people....

In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. … [I]n 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty-nine. … [I]n 1990, the twenty-nine had shrunk to twenty three. … [I]n 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever. … [In 2000] AOL Time Warner’s $350 billion merged corporation [was] more than 1,000 times larger [than the biggest deal of 1983].

--Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), pp. xx—xxi

Today, six colossal media giants tower over all the rest.  Much of the information in the chart below comes from mediaowners.com.  The chart below reveals only a small fraction of the media outlets that these six behemoths actually own....

Time Warner

Home Box Office (HBO)
Time Inc.
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
CW Network (partial ownership)
TMZ
New Line Cinema
Time Warner Cable
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
TBS
TNT
America Online
MapQuest
Moviefone
Castle Rock
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine

Walt Disney

ABC Television Network
Disney Publishing
ESPN Inc.
Disney Channel
SOAPnet
A&E
Lifetime
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Buena Vista Theatrical Productions
Buena Vista Records
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Buena Vista Games
Hyperion Books

Viacom

Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Comedy Central
Country Music Television (CMT)
Logo
MTV
MTV Canada
MTV2
Nick Magazine
Nick at Nite
Nick Jr.
Nickelodeon
Noggin
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land
VH1

News Corporation

Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Fox Television Stations
The New York Post
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Beliefnet
Fox Business Network
Fox Kids Europe
Fox News Channel
Fox Sports Net
Fox Television Network
FX
My Network TV
MySpace
News Limited News
Phoenix InfoNews Channel
Phoenix Movies Channel
Sky PerfecTV
Speed Channel
STAR TV India
STAR TV Taiwan
STAR World
Times Higher Education Supplement Magazine
Times Literary Supplement Magazine
Times of London
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
20th Century Fox International
20th Century Fox Studios
20th Century Fox Television
BSkyB
DIRECTV
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Interactive Media
FOXTEL
HarperCollins Publishers
The National Geographic Channel
National Rugby League
News Interactive
News Outdoor
Radio Veronica
ReganBooks
Sky Italia
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Sky Radio Netherlands
STAR
Zondervan

CBS Corporation

CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Network
CNET
Showtime
TV.com
CBS Radio Inc. (130 stations)
CBS Consumer Products
CBS Outdoor
CW Network (50% ownership)
Infinity Broadcasting
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books, Scribner)
Westwood One Radio Network

NBC Universal

Bravo
CNBC
NBC News
MSNBC
NBC Sports
NBC Television Network
Oxygen
SciFi Magazine
Syfy (Sci Fi Channel)
Telemundo
USA Network
Weather Channel
Focus Features
NBC Universal Television Distribution
NBC Universal Television Studio
Paxson Communications (partial ownership)
Trio
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Pictures
Universal Studio Home Video

These gigantic media corporations do not exist to objectively tell the truth to the American people.  Rather, the primary purpose of their existence is to make money.

These gigantic media corporations are not going to do anything to threaten their relationships with their biggest advertisers (such as the largest pharmaceutical companies that literally spend billions on advertising), and one way or another these gigantic media corporations are always going to express the ideological viewpoints of their owners.

Fortunately, an increasing number of Americans are starting to wake up and are realizing that the mainstream media should not be trusted.  According to a new poll just released by Gallup, the number of Americans that have little to no trust in the mainstream media (57%) is at an all-time high.

That is one reason why we have seen the alternative media experience such rapid growth over the past few years.  The mainstream media has been losing credibility at a staggering rate, and Americans are starting to look elsewhere for the truth about what is really going on.

Do you think that anyone in the mainstream news would actually tell you that the Federal Reserve is bad for America or that we are facing a horrific derivatives bubble that could destroy the entire world financial system?  Do you think that anyone in the mainstream media would actually tell you the truth about thedeindustrialization of America or the truth about the voracious greed of Goldman Sachs?

Sure there are a few courageous reporters in the mainstream media that manage to slip a few stories past their corporate bosses from time to time, but in general there is a very clear understanding that there are simply certain things that you just do not say in the mainstream news.

But Americans are becoming increasingly hungry for the truth, and they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the dumbed down pablum that is passing as "hard hitting news" these days.

So what do you think about the state of the mainstream media?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below....

SOURCE: The Economic Collapse

Little known search engine that refuses to store data on users doubles web traffic amid NSA tapping scandal

• DuckDuckGo, based in Pennsylvania, does not share user data with sites
• This means fewer advertisements and results that are not skewed for users
• Firm saw web traffic double in the wake of Snowden NSA tapping leak
• Pro-privacy search engine one of several companies growing in this arena

By HELEN COLLIS

Web-users who want to protect their privacy have been switching to a small unheard of search engine in the wake of the 'Prism' revelations.

DuckDuckGo, the little known U.S. company, sets itself aside from its giant competitors such as Google and Yahoo, by not sharing any of its clients' data with searched websites. This means no targeted advertising and no skewed search results.

Aside from the reduced ads, this unbiased and private approach to using the internet is appealing to users angered at the news that U.S. and UK governments (the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. and GCHQ in the UK), have direct access to the servers of big search engine companies, allowing them to 'watch' users.

Within just two weeks of the NSA's operations being leaked by former employee Edward Snowden, DuckDuckGo's traffic had doubled - from serving 1.7million searches a day, to 3million.

'We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press,' said Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO, speaking to The Guardian.

Entrepreneur Mr Weinberg had the idea for the company in 2006,  while taking time out to do a stained-glass making course. He had just sold successful start-up Opobox, similar to Friends Reunited, for $10million (£6.76million) to Classmates.com.

While on the course he realised that the teacher's 'useful web links' did not tally up with Google's search results, and realised the extent of the personalised skewing of results per user.

From there he had the idea to develop a 'better' search engine, that does not share any user information with any websites whatsoever.

Search data, he told the paper, 'is arguably the most personal data people are entering into anything. You're typing in your problems, your desires. It's not the same as things you post publicly on a social network.'

DuckDuckGo, named after an American children's tag game Duck Duck Goose (though not a metaphor), was solo-founded by Mr Weinberg in 2008, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

He self-funded it until 2011 when Union Square Ventures, which also backs Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Kickstarter, and a handful of angel investors, came on board.

The team  has expanded to a few full-time people, many part-time contributors and a bunch of open-source contributors.

'If you're wondering how you would turn that into a verb...Duck it!' he says on the company website.

The 33-year-old CEO, who lives in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia, PA, with his wife and two children, explains that when other search engines are used, your search terms are sent to that site you clicked on; this sharing of information is known as 'search leakage'.

'For example, when you search for something private, you are sharing that private search not only with your search engine, but also with all the sites that you clicked on (for that search),' he points out on his website.

'In addition, when you visit any site, your computer automatically sends information about it to that site (including your User agent and IP address). This information can often be used to identify you directly.

'So when you do that private search, not only can those other sites know your search terms, but they can also know that you searched it. It is this combination of available information about you that raises privacy concerns,' he says.

The company offers a search engine, like Google, but which does not traffic users, which has less spam and clutter, that showcases 'better instant answers', and that does not put users in a 'filter bubble' meaning results are biased towards particular users.

Currently, 50 per cent of DuckDuckGo's users are from the U.S., 45 per cent from Europe and the remaining 5 per cent from Asia-Pacific (APAC).

On June 3, the company reported it had more than 19million direct queries per month and the zero-click Info API gets over 9million queries per day.

It has partnerships with apps, browsers and distributions that include DuckDuckGo as a search option: Browsers, distributions, iOS, and Android. Companies can use DuckDuckGo for their site search, and the firm offers an open API for Instant Answers based on its open source DuckDuckHack platform.

Speaking on U.S. radio channel, American Public Media, Mr Weinberg said: 'Companies like DuckDuckGo have sprung in the last couple years to cater to the growing number of data dodgers.

'There’s pent up demand for companies that do not track you,' he says.

User feedback on the company website say the search engine reminds them of the early days of using Google; it's like an 'honorable search site to complement Wikipedia'; and other are 'amazed' that a search engine company is 'doing exactly the right thing'.

Critics of the company remain cautious of the sudden surge in success, however, pointing out that 3million searches per day is just a 'drop in the ocean' compared with the 13billion searches Google does every day.

Writing on his website, Danny Sullivan, who runs the Search Engine Land site and analyses the industry, said big companies like Ask.com and Yahoo had tried pro-privacy pushes before and failed to generate huge interest.

Other companies have had more success, however, and Duck Duck Go is not the first search engine firm to tap into the pro-privacy market.

Competitors include Ixquick, a Dutch meta-search engine firm, based in the Netherlands and New York. It returns private meta-search results from other providers.

From mid 2006, the company opted not to include the private details of its users, and in 2009 it launched Startpage.com, a similar service taking top Google search results without saving users' IP addresses or giving personal user data to Google. Together, the company's search engines serve 4.4 million daily searches.

YaCy is another free search engine that is fully decentralized. It prides itself on making all users of its search engine network as equal, not storing user search requests and doesn't censor content. 

Perhaps in the wake of the NSA and GCHQ revelations, internet users may think twice about their search engine provider.

SOURCE:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2360059/DuckDuckGo-little-known-search-engine-refuses-store-data-users-doubles-web-traffic-amid-NSA-tapping-scandal.html

Obamacare train wreck will kill far more people than the disastrous crash in Spain

by Mike Adams

When 80 people die in dramatic fashion, it's the kind of tragedy that grabs global headlines. "Driver in custody after 80 killed in Spain train crash," declares Reuters in the aftermath of that devastating event. Sadly, there's something frighteningly macabre about 80 people dying all at once in a caught-on-video crash that demands global attention.

But when millions of people die slow, painful deaths in the privacy of their own homes, it gets zero media coverage. That's exactly what's happening today under the drugs-and-surgery "sick care" system that intentionally keeps patients sick and diseased while denying the scientifically-proven health benefits of nutrients, supplements and trace minerals.

Today we have a medical system steeped in practices that directly cause the death of millions of people around the world each year. In the United States alone, 783,000 Americans are killed each year by doctors, hospitals and drugs. FDA-approved prescription pharmaceuticals alone kill roughly 100,000 Americans each year, even when taken as prescribed.

These numbers dwarf the 80 whose lives were tragically ended by this week's train crash in Spain, where the drivers ran the train at double the safe speed around a sharp bend, causing the laws of physics to take over and throw the train off the tracks. It just goes to show you that whoever is piloting the train has the potential to either save -- or destroy -- a lot of lives. And when it comes to health care in America right now, Obama is running the health care train at full speed right into a concrete wall.

Obamacare expands deadly medical monopolies

So why does Obamacare really kill more people each year than an actual train wreck? First, because it expands the monopoly of Big Pharma, an industry steeped in criminality, fraudulent science, medical experimentation on children and monopolistic prices for drugs.

Obamacare is, at its core, anti-free-trade and monopolistic because it forces all Americans to buy a product that is only offered by a cabal of medical monopolists who prioritize profits over people. In no other industry is everyone required to buy a product that may not even want. Not even car insurance is forced onto people in this way. With car insurance, you can always choose not to drive a car. But with Obamacare, you'd have to literally kill yourself to be considered exempt from its mandates.

Secondly, Obamacare is causing health insurance prices to skyrocket nationwide, with 200% - 400% price increases being routinely reported. Insurance rates are slated to double or triple for healthy eaters, while single women in California will soon be paying double what they used to pay for health insurance.

Costs are so high that many employers are cutting full-time jobs, causing a nationwide shift to a "part-time society" in which the workers don't qualify for health care coverage.

According to the IRS, which is set to enforce Obamacare with the help of AR-15 rifles that the agency is now deploying, openly admits that the cheapest family health insurance policy will soon cost $20,000 a year.

Such exploding costs will cause fewer and fewer Americans to be able to obtain even basic health care services such as routine checkups and early detection tests. As a result, more Americans will die prematurely from diseases or conditions that could have been caught early on if affordable health care were a reality. I'm not saying that drugs and surgery prevent disease, mind you. I'm saying that doctors can help diagnose people with conditions like diabetes, thereby alerting those people to go home and start juicing in order to save their lives and reverse the diabetes. (Yes, type-2 diabetes is easily reversed with simple changes in diet.)

The number of Americans affected by this lack of basic health care services -- and potentially killed by it -- will soon number in the tens of millions, dwarfing the number of passengers who regrettably died in the catastrophic train wreck in Spain.

Finally, Obamacare does nothing to provide for real disease prevention via nutrition or holistic strategies that stave off long-term disease treatment costs by investing in near-term prevention strategies. Instead of looking ahead and asking how we can reduce long-term disease management costs by investing in commonsense nutrition education and nationwide supplementation programs, Obamacare continues to pretend nutrition has no role in health while pushing the now-obsolete false paradigm of "drugs and surgery."

As a result, Obamacare only traps Americans in a spiral of never-ending sickness and medical dependence that just happens to financially benefit the powerful drug lobby as well as hospitals.

That's a train wreck. And it's actually killing more Americans every single day than the number who died in the actual train crash in Spain.

Fact: The actual number of Americans killed EVERY DAY by modern medicine (medications, doctors, hospitals, surgeries, etc.) is 2,145.

Train wreck might be too mild a term. It's more like a holocaust.

SOURCE: http://www.naturalnews.com/041348_train_wreck_Obamacare_fatalities.html#ixzz2aAseViSp

Top Children’s Vitamins Full of Aspartame, GMOs & Harmful Chemicals

by Arjun Walia

How often are parents aware of the ingredients contained in the multivitamin that they feed their children? We often believe what we hear without ever questioning what mass marketing and media has to say about a product. In this case they have led thousands of parents to purchase multivitamins because they believe it has significant nutritional value. But do these vitamins truly provide nutritional benefit? If so, at what cost?  

If we look at the Flintstones vitamin, (one of the top multivitamins in the United States) it contains a number of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), aspartame, aluminum, petroleum-derived artificial colours and more. All of these ingredients are not optimal for health and can be very toxic. You can view the entire list of ingredients here.

Lets take a closer look at some of these ingredients.

Aspartame

Aspartame is known to damage the brain at any dose by leaving traces of Methanol in the blood. It makes you wonder why Aspartame has been approved as “safe” and is found in thousands of food products; not to mention children’s vitamins. It’s also linked toLymphoma and Leukaemia. You can read more about that here and here (sources provided at the bottom). It’s basically a synthetic combination of the amino acids aspartic acid and I-phenylalanine. It’s known to convert into toxic methanol and formaldehyde in the body.  Hopefully this motivates you to further your research. If you are looking for specific studies, you can check out these ones published in the US National Library of Medicine:

Consumption of artificial sweetener and risk of lymphoma and leukaemia

Effect of chronic exposure to aspartame

Long-term consumption of aspartame and brain antioxidant defense status

Aspartame-induces impairment of spatial cognition and insulin sensitivity

Synergistic interactions between food additives in a developmental neurotoxicity test

Multipotential carcinogenic effects of aspartame

Sorbitol

Sorbitol is a synthetic sugar substitute which is classified as a sugar alcohol. The ingestion of higher amounts have been linked to gastrointestinal disturbances fromabdominal pain to more serious conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome. You can view some studies related to Sorbitol below:

Sorbitol intolerance in adults

Sorbitol intolerance: an unappreciated cause of functional gastrointestinal complaints

Sorbitol used as an osmotic cathartic has caused severe hypernatremia (elevation of sodium in the blood) in children

Hydrogenated Soybean Oil

Anything marketed to children that contains hydrogenated soybean oil is irresponsible. They are semi-synthetic fatty acids that incorporate themselves into our tissues. They’ve been linked to dozens of harmful health effects, from coronary artery disease to cancer and fatty liver disease. You can view a number of links to studies conducted here.

Ferrous Fumarate

This is quite remarkable that Ferrous Fumarate is an ingredient here. There is a clear warning on the Flintstone’s web site concerning this chemical. It’s used as an iron supplement. When consuming iron that comes naturally in food, it’s impossible to inject toxic amounts that can cause death. But when taking Ferrous Fumarate, fatal levels of toxicity can be reached.

Accidental overdose of iron-containing products is a leading cause of fatal poisoning in children under 6. Keep this product out of reach of children. In case of accidental overdose, call a doctor or poison control centre immediately (1)

Studies have been conducted that show ferrous fumarate doesn’t even affect iron status in children, you can read that study here. Below are links to a few more studies, out of many:

Ferrous fumarate increases clinical disease activity in inflammatory bowel disease patients

Ferrous fumarate deteriorated plasma antioxidant status in patients with Crohn disease

Ferrous fumarate has been demonstrated to be toxic to newborn foals

Cupric Oxide

According the European Union’s Dangerous Substance Directive, Cupric Oxide is listed as a hazardous substance. It’s classified as both harmful and dangerous to the environment. It is used as a pigment in ceramics and as a chemical in the production of rayon fabric and dry cell batteries. It is indeed a mineral, but should this really be a nutrient in a children’s vitamin?

Brief Summary of Bayer Pharmaceuticals

Most pharmaceutical companies, like Bayer, the developer of the Flintstones vitamins, do not have the best track record. Bayer is a German chemical and pharmaceutical company founded in 1863.  In 1925, it became part of IG Farben, a German chemical industry conglomerate. This chemical company had board members that were responsible for the creation of the Federal Reserve, like Paul Warburg (2), who sat on the board of the Federal Reserve as well as I.G Farben. It was a corporation well connected with the Rockefeller’s, and the second largest shareholder in Standard Oil. The investment was part of a pattern of reciprocal investments between the U.S. and Germany during the Nazi years (3). It’s well known that IG Farben was closely connected with the Nazi’s. They held the patent for the pesticide Zyklon B, the chemical used in gas chambers. Some of IG Farben’s directors were accused as war criminals, while others continued on with the agenda we see taking form today. We can see a conflict of interest through the companies shareholders when it comes to the creation of pharmaceutical products.

I think it’s time for us to examine what we choose to feed our children. All it takes is a little investigation and stepping into our own awareness of what is going on around us. Many of us live a robotic life style, we are all here doing the same thing. We’ve been programmed to grow up, work and spend most of our hours doing just that. While we participate in a  9-5, eat sleep watch TV, participate in a number of activities for entrainment purposes type of reality, there are those working behind the scenes manipulating the consciousness of the human race. All we have to do is notice, after that we can begin making better choices in our own lives. The world is indeed waking up, something new is desired, the current Earth paradigm is one many people don’t resonate with any more. A lot of us feel that it’s time to move on, grow and explore our infinite potentiality.

Sources (Links to research and studies conducted are listed throughout the article)

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/top-us-brand-childrens-vitamins-contains-aspartame-gmos-other-hazardous-chemicals

(1) http://labeling.bayercare.com/omr/online/flintstones-complete.pdf

(2)http://www.federalreserve.gov/bios/boardmembership.htm

(3)http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v13/3/oil.html

http://www.flintstonesvitamins.com/en/products/complete-chewable-vitamins/

SOURCE:  http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/07/18/top-childrens-vitamins-full-of-aspartame-gmos-harmful-chemicals/#_