Worried about media consolidation? There's still hope! Clear Channel only owns 66 radio stations in California, and that can't be all of them. Numbers can be dazzling -- especially where media ownership is concerned. The Columbia Journalism Review web site offers a searchable list of media properties, timelines for six major media conglomerates, and links to nearly six years of the Review's articles about media ownership in its Who Owns What section.

The media ownership list, maintained by media/publishing writer and Ithaca College professor Aaron Moore, gives internet surfers the ability to search through the corporate family trees of 47 international conglomerates, the total of which may own almost every media related firm -- big and small -- that the average American has ever heard of. Random House Publishing? The German giant Bertelsmann owns it and its more than 60 subsidiaries. MTV? Viacom owns it and 14 other cable networks, plus broadcast television stations, publisher Simon & Schuster, and more radio stations than any normal net surfer has time to count.

The site has timelines for six conglomerates, including Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, and News Corp., the latter of which tells the fascinating story of the Fox media machine from William Fox's 1915 legal battle against Thomas Edison to Rupert Murdoch's duopolies in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington D.C., Houston, Chicago and Orlando in 2001-2002. A short summary of News Corp. at the top of the chronology offers the disturbing revelation that Fox News Network now has more viewers than CNN.

But perhaps the most entertaining part of the Columbia Journalism Review's Who Owns What page is the archive of articles on media ownership. Alison Gregor reports on what happened when the Spanish-language television broadcaster Univision wanted to buy the Spanish-language radio network Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation: it would have meant control of 70% of the ad dollars for Spanish-language media in America. And what is 'canned news?' CJR staff report on NewsProNet, a company that creates television news stories devoid of any reference to locality so that they may be broadcast by any local station around the country. Gal Beckerman writes about FCC chairman Michael Powell's visit from fifteen women in pink angel outfits with a scroll demanding the repeal of the new FCC rules -- a fitting response to his statement five years before that 'a visit from the angel of the public interest ... did not come.'
-- Harry Sheff