Who Owns the Media

Isaac Oliver
Miss Beno-zellio
English 11

The media is not owned or controlled by a single person, entity or organization; rather, the media is an ever-changing multifaceted entity, a collaboration of many different factors and distributing techniques combined. It is possible to pinpoint the owners of certain types of media, but with others it is impossible to locate the original distributer. While no single person owns the media, the closest thing to ownership is control so who controls the media? I believe that the main factor in deciding what will be displayed in the media is the audience watching, an audience which has many different morals, views and perspectives on world issues. News programs like BBC and Al Jazeera all aim to please their audience, and give different and sometimes contradicting perspectives on news stories because their audiences have different views and expectations. So while a majority of the media is essentially owned and controlled by a few multi-billion dollar companies, for example Viacom, AOL/Time Warner, AT&T, ect, the decider of what media will be presented is the public watching. This also applies for advertising, with ads being placed in specific places designed to pique the observers’ interests, depending on a number of factors like age and culture, and the chance that the specific media will influence what they will purchase next. In this sense, the public controls where and when advertisement media is displayed, without knowing it, and may not even notice if they absorb the media which is being presented to them. An example of this is coke cola. The likely target audience for this is teenagers, who have money to burn and enjoy having a good time. To reach this audience, the company might choose to place an advertisement at the beginning of a new, popular teenager movie, hoping that teenagers will purchase their product sometime in the near future. The add would probably give of a vibe on happiness and fun, and just like that, teenagers have inadvertently chosen the time, placement and theme of the advertisement. Another example of media is video of events that would usually be taboo for filming, for example clashes between the government and the people of China. A gateway to this now comes in the form of camera phones, allowing ordinary citizens to take footage that the press wouldn’t be able to acquire. People will upload this footage to the Internet, because they know other people will want to see it, for various reasons and motives, but there is an audience non the less. I believe that where, when and how media is produced is all dependent on the audience, and if the audience ceased to pay attention to the media, consciously and sub-consciously, then the media would cease to exist.