 "Photo: Lucio Villa/Poly Post")
At Thursday's "Who Controls The Media?" event, I was granted one of six spots on a roundtable of dignified professionals and students, including Ralph Nader's vice presidential running mate.
After overcoming some initial nervousness, I was able to hold my ground in a lively discussion.
While everyone at the table was passionate about the media topics at hand, I know that a lot of students are blissfully unaware of things that are influencing their daily lives.
Two politicians, a public radio programming director and three students quarreled over media control, corporate giants, product placement and net neutrality in a two-hour talk where I was either itching to talk, or shutting my mouth.
National statistics, age and experience all overshadowed my familiarity, which first developed in a communication class. However, my opinion on who's controlling what the public blindly accepts is definite.
Corporate power in the world we live in has amassed to an extreme level; a global level.
Seven corporations - Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Bertelsmann, Sony, Vivendi Universal and News Corp - rule the media.
It's been like this for over a decade now, as large corporations have eaten up small businesses, and more and more companies merge together to increase profits, creating biased media behemoths and far too much control over what we see, hear and know.
And the average citizen probably has little idea to the extremity of this media conglomeration.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, for example, owns The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, TV Guide and MySpace Records.
Another giant, Viacom, has a significant chunk of the airwaves. Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Blockbuster Video, CBS, MTV, VH1, BET, Comedy Central and Spike TV are all assets under this conglomerate.
"Whoever controls the media, controls the peoples' minds," conspiracists often say.
When such a small number is controlling such a large amount of media organizations, the messages we see as the public and the advertising that infiltrates our lives is utterly unfair and puts independent media at a disadvantage.
While I went up against my fellow panelists arguing for more media fairness and diversity, the overwhelming theme for a solution in my mind came from, of all things, a made-up word.
See-throughness.
Look it up on UrbanDictionary.com, where you can define your own world with the words that usually don't make it into the real dictionary.
I look at the problem realistically, knowing that whatever the Federal Communications Commission does, the giants will not be drastically broken down anytime soon. So why not make sure everyone knows what they are getting into?
While it is blatantly ironic to create more law for more freedom, that is how we've been preserving our liberties since the Constitution.
Sure, we see our favorite stars sipping Coke cans and smoking Kool cigarettes onscreen, but it takes a fair amount of digging to find out who paid whom to get that advertisement incorporated into the entertainment.
Beyond that, much of the time we see name brand products being advertised within a broadcast, it's often being produced by the same umbrella company.
It's called synergy, and that one is in the real dictionary.
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