Media Hegemonies

Cultural hegemonies can have very big chunks of control over our lives such as healthcare and education. When you have that much power and own that many other companies, it gets scary and overwhelming, overwhelming enough that they can have so much money that even the government doesn’t want to have to deal with them (eg. Tobacco). So I chose to talk about Time Warner, it’s referred to as "the world's first fully integrated media and communications company". At first I thought of doing AOL, HBO or Warner Brothers but I found out that even though the actual name “Time Warner” may not be as heard of as much as those ones, it still owns all of those plus Time-Life International Books, InStyle, Weight Watchers magazine, Cinemax, sports illustrated, TBS Superstation, time magazine, Cartoon Network, people magazine, Warner Books and Warner Brothers Records, which are all much more popular but I couldn’t do one of the little guys, I had to talk about the big one that owns them all. 

Time Warner owns such a vast array of different companies that it has control over all different parts of the world. This cross media ownership is kind of scary because when a company like this owns all these other companies that alone are quite big, they are likely to bring in at least 30 billion dollars a year and have power over a lot of things. Things that are in our lives everyday and that affect us greatly like music, television and what we eat and read. I though the whole point of different companies was because they were different, that had different views and ideas of how to sell and what to do but when a company like Time Warner is so huge and owns so much (I just scratched the surface in what they own), it can get out of hand. Especially when they have certain thoughts and ways of doing things that all the companies they own have to have too. Where is the individuality and freedom in that? Why should one company have the right to be so powerful?