whether concentration of ownership in mass media is a problem depends on how you frame the question.
one problem with the op is that it doesnt actually take ownership into account at all. it's as if you are standing in front of a potato chip rack in a supermarket and you see all these brightly colored bags of chips with lots of brand names on them and say my my what a lovely and diverse market this chip industry is. the fact that frito lay owns the rack and all the brands displayed on it never enters your mind.
and since in amurica information is a commodity in the same way as potato chips are, where is the problem?
this is a little pdf that tracks the process of ownership consoldation over the past 25 years or so.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feat...were_eight.pdf
so the factual basis for the op is a little curious, but no matter.
where is the problem?
depends on the question, doesnt it.
if you are imagining the range of surface features in the american media market, you can think about it the way you thought about potato chips. and since most media outlets in the states are advertising delivery systems above and beyond anything else, you'd be right. but if you do that, then your reliance on much in the way of mass media outlets for information might wobble a bit. there are obviously trade-offs involved with the subordination of information to advertising delivery functions and the resulting infotainments. you see them all the time. think about the if it bleeds it leads orientation of local tv news coverage. the teasers. what really matters is that you see the toothpaste adverts between those depressing film clips about iraq (properly sanitized by the pentagon's informational washing machine) or some new arbitrary tv example of "urban chaos"....
but at this level, the problem is less about concentration of ownership than it is about the commerical orientation of the american press. and that, apparently, is not an issue that is on the table.
but if you consider, say, the question of local control of media outlets as over against that of conglomerates.
or if you think that political views and modes of processing information which are not within the framework of a pro-corporate ideology are as important as those which operate within a pro-corporate ideology
you might have trouble with this.
one of the main concerns about concentration of ownership follows from concerns over the imposition of ideological positions that are matters of consensus in some sectors--neo-liberalism is a good example--to the exclusion of serious dissent, to the exclusion of questions and critiques.
what is neo-liberalism?
it is the dominant economic ideology within the united states.
i think of it as a type of gas.
it has a name, this ideology, just not in the states.
why is that?
another way:
if you think about radio and the implications of clear channel, you might have problems with this.
clear channel is a life-sucking void.
but hey, its only rock and roll.
but that's the problem: its ONLY rock and roll.
but i like it.
then you might find everything hunky dory and wonder why anyone would refer to clear channel as a life-sucking void.
but this is not so easy a question, really. many mergers are characterised by relatively little in the way of surface change in the company that was purchased. you sometimes only really see the change in modifications of cash flows and in redundancies. and does the consolidation of ownership necessarily result in ideological uniformity? well, it depends. that's why the concern above was directed at ideological premises (base-line arguments on which others are built)...
so the clearest conflict, and political flashpoint, over this has to do with the meaning of public ownership of the airwaves. conflicts over control of the frequency spectrum are conflicts of the meaning of the public and of public control or ownership.
as for net infotainment---i think that the modes of attention paid to internet infotainment is different from other types--just as reading something floating in your monitor is not the same kind of reading as reading a book. sometimes i think this follows from the lighting, sometimes i think it follows from the page-length orientation of computer presentation of information. the advantage of computers as information sources could be their ability to exploit simultaneous streams--but that hasnt happened yet--so far, almost all net information simply copies print forms and so is somehow less than print forms. habit mostly. and people are reluctant to break with established forms. that is a feature that explains much boring cultural production (but that's another matter)...so i am not sure that the availability of infotainment on the web counters the concerns raised by consolidation of ownership in broadcast and print infotainment media.
second, as elph noted above, netmedia is even easier than tv or print in terms of excluding dissonant infotainment. maybe it's because everything is dematerialized. maybe its that habit=>boring reproductions of what you already know thing.
someone i read somewhere compared broadcast radio to "narrowcast" netradio. i like that. i think it obtains for the net in general. not as such, but in the pathways that folk make for themselves through it. with a riot of possibilities, you rely on handy dandy search engines, for example, which generate these quaint linear hierarchies for you which you scroll down at your leisure. these quaint linear hierarchies stream your thinking. they are unnecessary and backward, but they exist and we use them. and that's just one way in which the diversity of net infotainment is reduced to repetitions of the same.
i dont buy the idea that the net frees us from anything, except perhaps from things we need to do but dont feel like doing, which explains why i am writing this post.