For another side of the media monopoly debate, here's an interesting article from Reason magazine I had bookmarked years ago:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29001.html

This article from the Center for Digital Democracy cites the 'cabal theory' Juan and I were referring to:

For all of the clamor over the Internet and various other digital technologies, the old media--print publications, recordings, broadcasting, and film--still have their virtues. They're readily available, easy to use, and generally affordable. It's not without reason that we use such terms as mass media and popular culture, after all: these are the sources of news and entertainment that most people want, most of the time, and they're firmly embedded in a $450 billion industry.[1]

What the old media are not, however, is participatory. We may read newspapers and magazines, listen to radio and recordings, or watch film and television, but the odds of any of us actually contributing to the mass media (beyond forking over $25 for a book, $18 for a CD, or $8 for a movie ticket, that is) are small. The mass media industries tend to be closed systems, dominated by a relative handful of interlocking giants, with room at the margins for alternative expression, perhaps, but with the vast majority of writers, recording artists, and other independent voices all but excluded from the critical advantage of mainstream distribution.

Ben Bagdikian has been chronicling the diminishing number and growing power of media conglomerates for years, declaring most recently that the 50 companies that dominated the mass media in 1983 had been reduced, through mergers and acquisitions, to a mere 5 two decades later: Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation, Disney, and Bertelsmann. While Bagdikian's free-market critics complain that the Big Five's holdings (which include four major movie studios, some 60 cable channels, five broadcast TV networks, a satellite TV operation, a thousand or so radio and TV stations, and an enormous portion of the publishing industry) fall far short of a genuine "media monopoly," they conveniently overlook the rampant consolidation that afflicts all forms of media: 5 record labels control 75 percent of all recordings sold; 6 cable companies control 85 percent of the cable TV market; and the four major TV networks own 90 percent of the top 50 cable channels. And while it's true that there is "something for everyone" in the media marketplace today, homogeneity is the rule rather than the exception (which explains why public radio and television, as well as classical and jazz recordings, are all relegated to the far margins of the mainstream media, with ratings and sales that hover around 3 percent each).
http://www.democraticmedia.org/ddc/nms.php

__________________
JV

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know...it's what we know for sure that just ain't so