Rupert Murdoch's News Empire Consists Of News Corp, British Sky Broadcasting,

Rupert Murdoch's news empire consists of News Corp, British Sky Broadcasting, Star TV and DirecTV which is owned by Hughes Electronics whose assets are also managed by Mr. Murdoch. Because of the shared management, News Corp has an increasing influence over programming in Latin America due to the fact that DirecTV is dominant in Central and South America. After the mergers, the top ten media companies in the world today consist of AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media. CNN international is viewed in 212 countries with a daily audience numbering about a billion. Despite the public concerns about bias, it must be said that the giant media multinationals have done a lot of good when they expended their operations into many nations served by corrupt and crony media. The global mass audience is now not only better informed and capable of appreciating or gauging diverse points of view, but there is a move towards a global culture and outlook. Hence, despite the fears of power becoming concentrated in a few hands, the existence of a muted marketplace, journalistic and content control as well as the influence of the media bosses, there appears to be a need for the kind of media giants which are to be seen in existence today because of their ability to link the world like it has never been linked before. Without the large media organizations, the choices that are available to the mass audience in regard to the variety of content may not have been possible.
Media interests argue that any attempt to restrict media ownership is tantamount to denying freedom of speech to the media organizations. It is further argued that the giant media organisations are better equipped to serve the local communities then a large number of small media organisations. It has also been suggested that through corporate control, media groups are better able to provide diversity and better quality local journalism that is backed up by inputs from other regions and the distributed resources of a mega-media organization. Perhaps, the evolution of the large media groups occurred as a result of the process of natural selection and was inevitable. In 2001, the United States Federal Communications Commission FCC moved to eliminate rules which restricted cable and newspaper / broadcasting cross - ownership. It seems that the United States government had decided in favour of the right to freedom of commerce and the right of the mass audience to decide whose messages they wanted to listen to along with the right of the advertisers to present their advertising budgets to whosoever they wanted to. Thus, the United States FCC let the decision about the success of media organizations rest with the market and the audience, without unduly hindering well managed organizations or their owners.