Media trading cards

On April 8th the New York Times reported that there are three potential buyers for Miramax, a film company owned by Disney. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/business/media/09miramax.html?ref=media) The first bid came from three brothers. Tom, Alec, and Sam Gores. All three of these brothers are rich business men with media related companies. Tom has just recently bought the San Diego Union-Tribune, Alec owns Westwood One media, and Sam owns Paradigm, a casting agency that works for actors such as Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Another bid came from Ronald W. Burkle and Bob and Harvey Weinstein. The Weinsteins actually started Miramax and sold it to Disney in 1993. They are owners of the Weinstein company, another media company. The last bid came from David Bergstein, who owns Pangea Media Group.

What we are seeing here is concentration of media at work. Even though Miramax is being sold by the biggest media company in the world, it is being bought by other large media companies and their tycoon owners. The main reason being that they are the only ones that know how to run a media company and are some of the few that can afford it. Now there are some regulations in place but these companies are experts at getting around them. It is technically not legal for a film company like Miramax to hire actors from a casting agency like Paradigm if owned by the same people. Clearly this does not concern the Gores brothers or they would not want to buy Miramax.

So is this concentration of media good? Is it alright to have our media all produced from the same people and have media companies traded around like cheap baseball cards by the rich and powerful? This is not what I would want to see but we live in a capitalist society so things like concentration of media sometimes result. I feel that in the age of the internet the concentration of media will be less important. We live in an era now where people can get famous from their home video on Youtube, and people can get rich by starting their own website. Now anyone can broadcast media and this will keep the big media businesses in check.
Jason