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Breaking the Giants
Five corporations control most of what America watches. Two companies capture 60% of digital ad spending. This chapter names names.
From Idea to Action
The chapter traces how media ownership went from genuinely local and diverse to concentrated in a handful of giants — and makes the case for using existing antitrust law, not new legislation, to break it back up.
The Scale of Consolidation, With Real Numbers
Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) grew from 40 radio stations to over 1,200 in just a few years after the 1996 Telecommunications Act removed ownership caps. Today, five corporations control most TV networks, film studios, and streaming platforms; three control most commercial radio. Google and Facebook alone captured roughly 60% of all U.S. digital ad spending by 2021.
What Disappears When Local News Does
More than 2,500 newspapers have closed since 2004. Over 200 U.S. counties now have zero local news outlet — genuine “news deserts.” Real research links this to lower voter turnout, more government corruption, and higher public borrowing costs. One Stanford researcher’s estimate: every dollar spent on investigative reporting can generate hundreds of dollars in public benefit through exposed corruption alone.
When Centralization Gets Visible: Sinclair, 2018
Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns nearly 200 local TV stations, required its local anchors nationwide to read an identical script criticizing “fake news” — dozens of supposedly independent local news personalities speaking in unison, word for word.
The Proposed Fix Isn't New Law — It's Old Law, Enforced
The chapter’s case leans on tools that already exist: the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Act, the FTC Act. These laws already broke up media concentration before — the Supreme Court forced movie studios to divest theater chains in 1945, and the FCC broke up newspaper-broadcast combinations in 1978.