WHO'S HANDS ARE IN WHAT POCKETS: If you've ever wondered which media conglomerates own which companies, The Nation provides this flash thingie. I love having this kind of information --it makes for great conspiracy theories-- but dang if The Nation didn't use the tiniest font ever in coming up with this thing, I guess so they could flashify it. "People won't read this stuff on their own. They like bells and whistles. Hey --let's use FLASH! Then they'll read it! Then they'll KNOW!"

The Mark Crispin Miller article that accompanies it is sure to boil the blood of some, I reckon. My beef with it is that he seems to confuse web services with web content, as if who owned as ISP is the same as who uses an ISP. Actually, he doesn't have much to say about the Internet at all.

This paragraph is annoying me:

Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that old problem has become considerably larger--and that great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes. For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the sort of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly, to startle and revivify the culture--the genuine independents among record labels, radio stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers and so on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture, endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as "the news" or "entertainment."

This monoculture thing --I'm not seeing it.

UPDATE: Here's a better who-owns-what from the Columbia Journalism Review. I spot one factual inaccuracy right away: The New England Sea Wolves are now the Toronto Phantoms, and owned by local Toronto businessmen and not Cablevision.