With American media moguls AOL Time Warner, Disney ABC, AT&T and Microsoft making the transition into the global media market in the past two decades, foreign conglomerates like Telefonica, MediaCorp-Fox, and Sony are following suit. In expanding their reach around the globe and in making globalization their main focus, these foreign companies have slowly been buying up major American media companies. Chapter 15 discusses the "Globalization of Communications media and its organizations that distribute and regulate it.
While American television and other American made media are still very appealing to the international market, the influence it once had is supposdly not as overbearing as it was. More countries today are putting out products that compete in the market than ever before. This emergence of local, regional, national, and global communication industries, audiences, and regulatory bodies, has provided the market with a plethora of "ideas, genres, and agendas.".
The globalization of media is most visible at the organizational and creative levels of the industry. As the world converges into a market based on the ideals of capitalistic economics there is a great deal of pressure forcing competing nations to make their media more commercial with advertising aimed at specific viewers, and also forces countries to privatize their once government owned telecommunications industry. .
The global media, unfortunately, is primarily controlled by a handful of powerful manipulative firms. The six biggest include AOL Time Warner(U.S.), Disney/ABC(U.S.), Vivendi-Universal(French), Bertlessman(German), Viacom(U.S.), and the Australian media giant Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. To give you an idea of how much further these companies are expanding around the globe, since 1990, both Time Warner and Disney have raised their foreign mad income from 15% by and additional 30-35% in the year 2000.