I wish I'd found this, but
Suburban Guerrilla deserves the credit. Quoting her post
That Whacky Corporate Media:
This really is the root of much political evil: A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests...
...
(Source: Suburban Guerrilla post That Whacky Corporate Media, June 27, 2005)
The full article (Peter Phillips,
CommonDreams.org Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America, June 24, 2005) takes one back to the days of "yellow journalism." One thing you can say about Ronald Reagan's destruction of the "fairness doctrine" - it sure was far-sighted.