Giant corporations keep a constant eye on the bottom lines of all their subsidiaries. This pressure to turn a profit leads to staff cuts that force smaller numbers of people to produce larger amounts of work in a lesser amount of time. This constant pressure to perform leads to sloppy journalism and cookie-cutter media recipes that have been used over and over in the past but have been proven money. Giant media conglomerations contribute to the blandness and ordinariness that is so prevalent in the mass media today. .
There is so much that is the same in the media that it is hard to point out what is different. "Reality" television spilled over to the broadcast networks with such shows as Survivor, Big Brother, and Fox's Fear Factor. Decorating shows inspired TLC to create Trading Spaces, While You Were Out, and the Discovery Channel's Surprise By Design. There also is no end to dating game shows, such as Change of Heart, or ElimiDATE, to be seen.
Why is there so much sameness in the media? The sameness stems from the convergence of media ownership. AOL TimeWarner is not likely to branch out beyond what has been proven to produce profits in the past. Media conglomerate parent companies are not as interested in producing fine media products as producing what they know will sell and will inflate the bottom line figure.
Giant media corporations are counterproductive to excellence in journalism. One of the major media functions is the watchdog function. When a self-serving media conglomerate owns a news outlet, that news outlet is not likely to serve as a consumer watchdog against its parent company or it's subsidiaries. To do so would not only harm the subsidiary and the parent company, but in the long run, the news outlet itself.
Media conglomerates also harm good journalism through their perpetual focus on the bottom line. This makes it easier for human errors, which would have been caught in earlier times, to slip through the editing process and end up on the front page of next week's newspaper.
