Media Hegemonies

Media Hegemonies/Mapping Who Owns What


It’s both surprising and shocking to know that the bulk of our media and everyday news is owned by major companies. Rogers to this date owns businesses in several different branches of medium its biggest being television and telephone. However, Rogers is also the rightful owner of other mediums that millions of us had never even heard or known about. Commonly we only associate Rogers as being a television, internet and phone service provider but the bizarre truth is that Rogers has ownership in dozens of other forms of media all throughout the country.

Rogers is a huge media capitalist owning radio stations, television stations, magazines and publications all over the nation. Practically any medium in Canada is dominated by Rogers whether it’s the telephone, the television, magazines or radio, even internet. Before discovering this in our Mass Communications, I was a naive eighteen year old who had total faith in our media and had the impression that our everyday news and broadcast were the only safe grounds that private sectors did have control of.

Picture this, in a given day you wake up to the clock radio of CHFI-FM, a radio station Rogers owns, you go on the internet and check some emails, the wireless internet that Rogers owns. You get a text message on your friend’s cell phone regarding school on the Rogers Wireless network. Then you flip through the pages of McLean’s magazine, all of these mediums are owned by Rogers. What does this insinuate? Well it means that what many of us thought were safe grounds for the media aren’t anymore. We know longer have such sanctuary in newspapers, publications or television where journalists and editors try to be as objective as possible; the corporation is now the news. This billion dollar corporation Rogers, that I used isn’t just the only corporation that has ties into a variety of media sectors there’s also : New York Times, Time Warner and even Disney. These media capitalists have practically authority over any given source of information that gives off a very pessimistic outlook on the accuracy and truth of what we read in an everyday paper, watch on a news station or listen to on a car radio. A.J Liebling a very well known and highly regarded media critic gave his own expression of how he viewed the media in his work. When giving his opinion on communications and journalism he expressed this. “Communication means simply getting any idea across and has no intrinsic relation to truth. It is neutral. It can be a peddler’s tool, or the weapon of a political knave, or the medium of a new religion.”(Reeves 4). Liebling’s view on communication and the media was very ahead of its time and gave a clear implication that communication and truth did not correspond with one another. His ideas were groundbreaking and still to this day we regard him as one of the most notable faces in media for his interesting reflections and critical thinking.

I’ve come to terms that this is part of the reason why we are doing this course work for Mass Communications in blogs and not news or magazine articles. Cause it is a part of the Internet that the public still has faith in. When we put a blog post up it is completely non doctored or manipulated by corporations, or people and is a small component of a vast pool of media that still exists as a component that an individual does “by the people for the people”.

Works Cited


-"Who Owns What." Columbia Journalism Review. 2008. Columbia Jouralism Review, Web. 22 Nov 2009

- Reeves, Richard. What The People Know. 2nd ed. United States : Harvard College, 1998. (4). Print.