In this arrangement, the elite set themselves head over heels to control this critical instrument of commerce and social engineering. As Charles Wright Mills crisply observed in his 1956 seminal work, The Power Elite, that the elite have the penchant to control media, better still own it. Chomsky would later corroborate this observation: “It is difficult for a journalist to stray from the consensus because the journalist will get “flak”. When a story does not align with the narrative of a power, the power will try discrediting sources, trashing stories, and trying to distract readers.”

Of course, it is Italian philosopher, Louis Althusser, who aptly classified the media as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). If you tie Althusser’s postulations to that of Mills’, you can now understand why essentially anyone should be worried when too much media is in too few hands.

This is why: whoever owns the narrative controls the mind. Thus, media owners, or those who arm-twist the media, are manipulating and spectacularly controlling our lifestyles.  For, folks, media constructs psycho-socio-cultural perspectives that shape societal thinking and actions – over time, the media influences perceptions, values, identities and beliefs.

It would not have been an issue were it that those few hands controlling the media were infallible and altruistic. Yet, the history of the businessman has been the history of the pursuit of self-interest and self-preservation more than a history of public good.

It is clear, therefore, that the ideological perspective of the owners of these few media houses are dominantly fed to an unsuspecting audience.

Of course, cross-media ownership, a beloved of the big media houses, makes business sense but threatens deliberative debates. Conglomerates are powerful and lethal. Divergent opinion, inconsistent with the beliefs of the owner, are crushed like crisp autumn leaves.

A controlled public sphere, where only a privileged few can participate in discourse, is a threat to democracy and the whole important watchdog ideal. Instead, commodification of media products is in vogue.

Media is a special product in our society that heavily influences the very act of societal being. Since media survival is dependent on advertisers, ours will be a realm heavily warped to the benefit of the advertiser and heavily skewed toward the ideologies of the handful of owners.