11.16.09
Reader’s Article: Corporate Media Ownership Shifts
Summary: Media channels that Microsoft is associated with to get acquired by Microsoft’s partner, Comcast
Quoting from The New York Times, Groklaw shows that “Comcast’s plan to gain control of NBC Universal, which is expected to be announced in the weeks ahead, barring any unforeseen developments, is likely to be the first major test of the Obama administration’s media regulators. Given its scope, analysts and public interest groups anticipate that the deal will undergo intense government scrutiny.“
Most such deals eventually receive the green light, given enough “lobbying”, which is a euphemism for political corruption or legalised bribery.
One of our readers wrote about the above as follows:
Some big shake up is happening at NBC that reflects the overall health of US industry. NBC is being purchased by Comcast, a move that signals the decline of both broadcast and the original US manufacturing and telco parents GE and Bell. Cable and Internet have largely taken the audience from broadcast. US manufacturing has been offshored almost as entirely. The old broadcast model for pushing goods and opinions is broken and gone, despite the nearly universal consolidation of radio, newspaper and TV by equally consolidated manufacturing interests. Little is left of those interests but spectral logos and ancient slogans like, “More Colorful”.
“Little is left of those interests but spectral logos and ancient slogans like, “More Colorful”.”It is difficult to tell where Microsoft fits into the new ownership picture. They are in decline as much as their old industry partners but have a better foothold than most in the future of espionage and steering US consumers to brands of Chinese goods. Spectacular failures like Zune, Xbox and Vista demonstrate the difficulty of pushing garbage and digital restrictions. Microsoft’s massive PR army is having trouble keeping Windows itself alive. Windows is a key component of police state wiretapping that controlling interests won’t give up so the situation is unstable and unpredictable. If efforts at quantum decryption are successful, Microsoft is doomed. If not, or to preserve the appearance of privacy, Microsoft may be bailed out. Either way, communications moves from regulated telco to unregulated cable and Internet strips away the last pretensions of privacy in the US.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Msnbc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_electricIt will be interesting to see what you and your contacts dig up about this if you have the time. My view is that GE’s manufacturing interests were gutted to the point where they can hardly manufacture turbines. They could not, for example, replace the turbine at [a] plant. [...] Siemens got the parts from Japan. The Wikipedia article on GE is a depressing list of sell offs. Jack Welch was praised for making GE some kind of a merchant bank but the fact that half of GE’s revenues came from loans is due more to the decline of manufacturing. It is interesting that Microsoft has net income almost as large as GE. I shudder to think what GE’s financial industry holdings look like after the recent market collapse. In a way Microsoft has already gotten a big bailout because shoring up AIG probably backstopped GE’s collapse and kept NBC alive long enough for sale to a cable company with more reliable income. No one really knows where AIG money went.
Microsoft’s relationship with MSNBC is worth mentioning [1, 2]. █
