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The New Media Monopoly | 
 enlarge | Author: Ben H. Bagdikian
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 89318
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0807061875
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.47302230973
UPC: 046442061872
EAN: 9780807061879
ASIN: 0807061875
Publication Date: May 15, 2004
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Condition: This is a used item.
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Product Description
"Ben Bagdikian has written the first great media book of the twenty-first century. The New Media Monopoly will provide a roadmap to understanding how we got here and where we need to go to make matters better." ?Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy
"No book on the media has proved as influential to our understanding of the dangers of corporate consolidation to democracy and the marketplace of ideas; this new edition builds on those works and surpasses them." ?Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?
Praise for the First Edition of The Media Monopoly:
"A groundbreaking work that charts a historical shift in the orientation of the majority of America's communications media?further away from the needs of the individual and closer to those of big business." ?Bruce Manuel, Christian Science Monitor
When the first edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 1983, critics called Ben Bagdikian's warnings about the chilling effects of corporate ownership and mass advertising on the nation's news "alarmist." Since then, the number of corporations controlling most of America's daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies has dwindled from fifty to ten to five.
The most respected critique of modern mass media ever issued is now published in a completely updated and revised twentieth anniversary edition.
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| Customer Reviews:
 MUST READ! January 23, 2008
One of the most insightful books written on the pervasive and almost criminal nature of mass media in todays world. A must read for anyone that wants to become more informed.
Excellent and Informative January 13, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
With "The New Media Monopoly", Ben Bagdikian delivers one of the best books on the modern state of the media ever written. He describes in fascinating detail the events that have surrounded the growth in the concentration of media ownership. Unlike some other texts covering the same topic, Bagdikian's writing is very readable and captivating. However, he does seem to provide more anecdotal evidence to support his observations than hard numbers. I would highly recommend accompanying this book with Robert McChesney's "The Global Media", which covers basically the same trends, but provides more hard data. McChesney also focuses more on the larger business dealings of media corporations that have lead to their consolidation rather than Bagdikian's typically smaller examples.
 Mass Media for Dummies January 5, 2007
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
WARNING: THIS BOOK IS NOT TO BE READ AS A LEISURE OR PLEASURABLE PASSTIME ACTIVITY. THIS PRODUCT IS MEANT ONLY AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION. ANY USE OTHER THAN THAT RECOMMENDED MAY RESULT IN PERMANENT LOSS OF PERSONALITY.
While he does present well researched and wholly coherent arguments, author Ben H. Bagdikian falls short of allowing any sense of enjoyment to permeate the reading of his revised edition of The New Media Monopoly. The writing style comes off as rather rigid for much of the book, completely neglecting any fluidity or flair you may expect from a Pulitzer-winning writer. Furthermore, much of the content seems to pander to a lowest common denominator including, what appears to be, entire chapters of common knowledge for nearly any educated American. The end result is something a bit too dense for the common reader but still too simple to be much use to a journalist or media aficionado. In short, it's a paperback textbook.
The first three chapters are essentially an introduction to American media. A fairly leftist introduction. Essentially, the reader is presented with an extended rant on the evils of Murdoch-dom and the rest of the Big Five (Bagdikian's favorite term for the five conglomerates that own the majority of the world's media), followed by a full chapter explaining what the internet is. Not so much on how it works or how it affects the world, mostly what it literally is. Admittedly the content does pickup towards the middle. Being the revised version, there are extensive sections on the media failings concerning the war in Iraq but any promise of maintaining interest is quickly dashed by relapse into "the sky is blue, the world is corrupt."
It is necessary to mention, however, that even the less obvious points Bagdikian makes are hard to dispute. The man has done more than sufficient research to support his arguments. His credibility is raised even further when one considers that during the writing of the first edition of this book, there were fifty major media conglomerates. Years after his warnings of further consolidation, there are now five. This revision comes at a time when information is at a crucial premium. Media technology is constantly evolving at even faster rates with no indication of recession or slowing. The country if not the world may be at its last opportunity to demand reform on the way information is handled and distributed. In the wake of 9/11 and all that it's meant to world politics, The Bill of Rights is being abused like never before. No man's life is private any longer and no house is a castle. Bagdikian's warnings apply not only to mass media as an industry but to information use and misuse as a whole.
Be this as it may, the majority of the writing is still an atrocity. Much of the book's partitioned subsections read as though Bagdikian stepped into a high school freshman English class, handed each student a sheet of facts and citations, and proceeded to demand a five page essay by the following day. Parts of the writing seem almost entirely devoid of personality or creativity while most of it follows a painfully rigid, almost juvenile structure: 1) a light segue followed by 2) introduction of argument 3) support of argument and finally 4) restatement of argument. The overly-structured style might even be negligible if it weren't for the painful redundancy. Nearly identical statements are often used in both the first and last paragraphs of nearly every section. The man needs to pump-up his creative juices on this one. Is a little variety too much to expect? He won a damn Pulitzer!
In all honesty, this book is a recommended read. The information and arguments presented could prove invaluable in the very near future. This is a staggering case of learning the past so as not to repeat it. Though dismantling the corporate media machines at this point is nearly out of the question, consumers do have the choice to turn to alternative and independent media sources. Current technology allows nearly every American access to countless opinions and insights into the significant events of their world and community. Future journalists and media professionals would be wise to not bend to corporate pressures and censorships. Even the average media consumer can find useful information within these pages and would be wise to learn to judge the information fed to them with a critical palette. Though most definitely, Ben H. Bagdikian might be wise to hire a ghost writer for the next edition.
Critical but Uneven Manifesto on the Corporate Media July 9, 2004
49 out of 55 found this review helpful
This is the newly updated version of Bagdikian's classic tome *The Media Monopoly* which first appeared in 1983 and was prescient enough to reach six editions by 2000. While dismissed as alarmism, with each edition of the book the problem of corporate media consolidation became worse, and now we are down to just five mega-conglomerates controlling almost all media content, and subsequently most political and social thought among the American public. Bagdikian is an expert commentator on the effects this has on popular democracy and social justice, and the problem has become so bad that it became necessary to create a completely revised text, rather than just a "new" edition of the old book with some tacked-on updates.This powerful manifesto by Bagdikian sometimes suffers from a lack of focus. One frequent weakness is his tendency to opinionate on the social issues he uses as examples of poor mainstream media coverage. Examples include homelessness and smoking, in which Bagdikian forgets his analysis of media control issues and embarks on long expostulations of his own personal politics. A more general issue is his tendency to drift into political science as applied to modern corporate conservatism and crony capitalism. These are subjects in which Bagdikian is certainly proficient, and they are the root causes of the horrific state of American media. However, Bagdikian frequently drifts from useful media analysis to occasionally cranky political tirades that detract from the focus and power of the book's main points. And even though this is a completely new edition, much of the text has still been copied verbatim from the old versions of the original book, leading to odd appearances of stories and examples from the 1960s and 70s, some of which have little modern relevance. The new chapter on the internet gives the impression that Bagdikian is barely familiar with that realm, as he gives remedial introductions to concepts that most of us are long familiar with. Other writers and analysts have now taken the issue of corporate media control and produced outstanding treatises that surpass Bagdikian's groundbreaking work (I especially recommend Robert W. McChesney). However, Bagdikian is still the originator and when he's focused, his insights into the social and political damage wrought by our corporate media are still powerful and prescient. [~doomsdayer520~]
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