Recently, both Google and Facebook have been engaged in talks with Twitter about buying the company for between $8 billion and $10 billion. These talks are the most recent example of a growing trend of media industry mergers which could drastically impact content, quality and variety of media we consume.
The risks of a potential merger are greater than ads popping up alongside Twoogle conversations or âÄúlikesâÄù and applications cluttering Facetwit news feeds. If social networking sites follow the recent media concentration trend, most of the industry will be concentrated in the hands of few âÄî or even one âÄî companies.
The eyebrows of media watchdog groups were already raised when Comcast âÄî the largest cable and broadband company in the nation âÄî merged with NBC to form a media titan with the power to both produce popular entertainment and control viewersâÄô access to it.
There have been many other mergers or purchases between media companies recently: Newsweek and the Daily Beast; the Economist and Congressional Quarterly; AOL and the Huffington Post; and Bloomberg and Business Week have all joined forces.
So long as antitrust laws fail to be enforced, we can expect this conglomeration trend to continue: All varieties of media production companies will keep clumping into a massive mainstream oligopoly.
This will mean decreased competition, higher prices for consumers and suppression of certain news content and minority viewpoints in favor of corporate or special interests. It is imperative that authorities and regulators start acting to preserve the integrity of our mainstream news and entertainment.